Category: Columns

(Acknowledgment: Mr. Mirza Hamid Baig) Shabnam Minarvi, whose real name was Malik Muhammad Hussain, is counted among those Urdu poets who managed to bring together literature and professional responsibility at different stages of their lives. On one hand, he held a respected position in the field of engineering; on the other, he is remembered in...

The escalation in South Asia’s hydro-politics has reached a fever pitch, signaling a shift that could fundamentally alter the region’s stability. When New Delhi issued a formal notice to modify the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) earlier this year, the diplomatic alarms rang loudest in Islamabad and Lahore. The ensuing discourse has predictably centered on the...

On Friday, October 17, 2025, between ten and eleven in the morning, my office welcomed two dear, worthy, and diligent students of the Class, Bint e Shafique and Bint e Faiz. They came with questions related to the lesson, thoughtful ones, the kind that show a student is not only listening but living with what...

I began writing and speaking publicly about dowry-related violence at a time when it was still dismissed as a private family issue or an unfortunate cultural excess. Over more than three decades of sustained advocacy, policy engagement, and public writing, my position has remained consistent: dowry is not tradition, generosity, or celebration. It is a...

I begin with a simple but uncomfortable truth: poverty has never been eradicated. Not by revolutions, not by religions, and not by economic systems. It has survived monarchies and republics, capitalism and socialism, colonialism and independence. It has changed its appearance and its victims, but it has remained present. This persistence itself proves that poverty...

Rawalpindi has always been a city of literature, thought, and living dialogue. Its streets and neighborhoods have long borne witness to gatherings where words were not merely spoken but deeply felt, and ideas did not remain abstract thoughts but shaped attitudes and ways of life. Within this tradition, one gentle yet firm voice is that...

Reproducing Dr Rakhshinda Perveen’s think piece originally Published in Daily Times, December 4th 2017. “Thousands of families of ill-fated Muslims, many of them refugees from Bihar, who chose Pakistan at the time of the partition riots in 1947, were mercilessly wiped out. Women were raped, or had their breasts torn out with specially-fashioned knives. Children...

In the grand theater of international relations, the curtain is falling on the Atlantic era. For decades, the geopolitical identity of the “West” was predicated on a singular, unshakable axis: the convergence of American military might and European diplomatic morality. It was a partnership assumed to be eternal, codified in the G7 and enshrined in...

On an early March afternoon near the tail of a distributary in Lower Chenab, the rotation chart on the patwari’s wall still shows that water is due. The wheat crop requires its final irrigation before harvest. On the ground, there is only a thin brown trickle that dies in the channel before reaching the final...