Khuda kay Liye and Ramchand Pakistani: A Comparison

By Zia Ahmad
 
Ramchand Pakistani has come and gone and has made another addition to the slowly and lets hope surely upward struggle for the revival of Pakistani cinema. With the lack of any other appropriate banner for these films to be categorized under, no room for “New Pakistani Cinema” or “Reasonable/Sensible Pakistani Cinema”, “Revival of [...]

Looking for history in all the wrong places

By Zia Ahmad
Notable scholar Frederic Jameson famously put forward the idea of the disappearance of a sense of history in his indictment of postmodernism, fitfully titled Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). The idea briefly referred to the way in which the entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity [...]

Myths about the Taliban

By Raza Rumi
The Pakistani state policy of nurturing jihad factories over the decades is staring back at its architects, supporters and sponsors. Zafar Hilaly, a close aide of the late Benazir Bhutto, recently divulged in his memoirs that BB had confessed how the support to the Taliban was perhaps her most regrettable mistake. She could [...]

Casualty of War

By ARYN BAKER
A few weeks ago a group of Pakistani journalists and foreign correspondents based in Pakistan gathered to meet visiting representatives of the Washington-based think tank Center for American Progress. Its members were “on a listening tour,” they said, and wanted to hear the journalists’ perspectives on the U.S. and Pakistan. The response was [...]

America Creating ‘Talibanization’ in Pakistan, Say Arab Media

New America Media, News Analysis, Jalal Ghazi
 Editor’s Note: Arab media are disappointed with Pres. Barack Obama’s Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy. The U.S. focus on the Taliban’s assault on women’s rights ignores the fact that the military attacks are actually helping to unite Pashtun tribal groups under the Taliban banner, says NAM contributor Jalal Ghazi.
The specter of a [...]

Pakistani media continues to glorify Islamo-fascism

by Abbas Zaidi
On 17 April the entire electronic media brought Abdul Aziz to every household of Pakistan. He was shown coming from an inner room of the notorious Lal Mosque into the prayer hall where he led the Friday prayer as he used to do till he was arrested on terrorism charges in 2007. He [...]

Pakistan isn’t falling: CNN Commentary

By Peter Bergen
CNN National Security Analyst
(CNN) — In the past few weeks as the Pakistani Taliban have marched ever closer to the capital, Islamabad, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has sounded the alarm about the threat posed by the militants, who she said in congressional testimony pose “a mortal threat to the security and safety [...]

The Shanaakht Fiasco

CROSSPOST

 
{I started writing this post before the [heart]Breaking News of the cancellation of the festival hit me. Despite my criticism of some of it’s flaws, I think that nurturing it would, over time, have had it evolve into something more sensible and sensitive. The closing down bodes badly for art and many other activities … [...]

Pakistani media: power sans responsibility

[TFT] A partisan media is biting the hand of democracy that feeds it, says Raza Rumi

It was hoped by many that the electronic media following its exponential growth during the last few years would take stock of its roles and responsibilities. However, the years 2007 and 2008 were not the best of times [...]

Zia’s revenge

By Irfan Husain (DAWN)

ON my all-too-brief visit back to Pakistan, I have been flipping local channels to catch up on events. I have found new ones to watch, although not necessarily for any length of time, given the generally low quality of the fare on offer.
The other evening, I caught a panel discussion featuring a [...]

Saving Pakistan from conspiracy theorists and hate mongers

Bilal Qureshi
The terrorist attack on Police Academy in Lahore must have been a wake up call for those who have been arguing that ‘war on terror’ is America’s war. On the contrary, it is a war that is being fought in Pakistan and for a majority of Pakistan, it is heart sinking to realize that [...]

Pakistan today: taking responsibility for our own mistakes

Bilal Qureshi has written this post for Pak Tea House. Insightful and provocative. ed. PTH
During my travel in Pakistan, once again, I had the opportunity to meet and listen to people from all walks of life and I am terribly sad to the see that people in Pakistan have increasingly become negative and cynical about [...]

Pakistan – Terrorists Aim for Destabilisation, Media Attention

by Beena Sarwar
(IPS) – South Asia seems to be caught in a vortex of violence as the countries that form this region – from Sri Lanka at the southern-most tip, Bangladesh to the east, Nepal crowning the north, Pakistan along the west and India in the middle – deal with internal nightmares that their governments [...]

Who will win the game?

Raza Rumi
Published in the NEWS
I have been amazed at the reaction that my little piece, “Policy shifts not war” published on these pages on Dec 4 has generated especially from the other side of the border. My email inbox was inundated with a wide variety of views and comments, some of which were quite unsavoury [...]

Media falls in the old trap

By Beena Sarwar
THE Mumbai nightmare has plunged the media in India and Pakistan into
the dangerous, old trap in which nationalism trumps responsible
reporting. This is not a new phenomenon, nor is it restricted to
India and Pakistan.
American journalists fell into this trap after the attack on the Twin
Towers in New York on Sept 11, 2001. They were [...]

Zafarul Islam Khan on Indian Muslims, Media and Terrorism

Dr. Zafarul Islam Khan is the President of the All-India Muslim Majlis-e Mushawarat, a platform of several influential Indian Muslim organizations. He is also the editor of the New Delhi-based fortnightly Milli Gazette, one of the few English-language Muslim news magazines in India. In this interview with Yoginder Sikand he talks about terrorism in India, [...]

Lal Masjid of Bradistan

by Dilnawaz
This Lal Masjid (Red mosque), actually a converted old Victorian church, built (originally) in Yorkshire stone is just like the inconspicuous buildings lining the Leeds road Bradford moor, an area famous for posh Asian restaurants competing with wimslow road Manchester for the title of curry capital of the north.
But I am talking about this [...]

Everyone is an economist

By S. Akbar Zaidi
(The DAWN): PAKISTAN’S economic crisis and confusion, exacerbated primarily on account of unforgivable delayed responses by the incumbent government, has also revealed the rather sad state of Pakistan’s media and of its economists.
The huge media explosion, particularly in the electronic media but also the English newspapers, has revealed how bare Pakistan’s scholarly [...]

Confronting militancy in Pakistan

Raza Rumi
The unedited version of my op-ed published in the NEWS today:

It is time that the vocabulary introduced by the global imperial projects is changed in Pakistan. The infamous and rotten coinage – war on terror – needs to be trashed. It was constructed by an imbecile global leader, whose vision defies basic standards of [...]

The Zardari conundrum

by Raza Rumi ( published in the NEWS)
By all statistical estimates and anecdotal evidence, Pakistan’s middleclass has grown during the last decade. The visible manifestation of this historically significant trend was the spontaneous outrage at the dismissal of the chief justice in 2007 and the robust movement that followed. However, the other side of this [...]

Breaking the taboo, Indian op-eds suggest Kashmir plebiscite

The captioned post on Reuters’ blog examines at how decades-old taboos are being broken by the mainstream Indian media:
“If the experience of the last two decades has taught us anything, it is that the situation never really returns to normal. Even when we see the outward symptoms of peace, we miss the alienation and resentment within.  [...]

Invasion of the sound byte snatchers

Khalid Hasan writing for the Friday Times
Pakistan’s politicians, sportsmen, actors, VIPs – in short anyone who is anyone, or is likely to be anyone in the coming days – are under attack from a new breed of guerrillas, armed not with automatics but with microphones in various colours and sizes that they use as weapons [...]

جیو ٹی وی ؟ کڑوا سچ GEO TV: the bitter truth

This is a rather strongly worded piece authored by a concerned Pakistani based abroad. Whilst I do not agree with all the contents of this article, it surely is ‘another’ view of the ongoing GEO TV saga! In light of Pak Tea House’s efforts to promote debate and air unfashionable views, we are posting this [...]

Long March

Pak Tea House’s poet in residence, Kashkin, muses on the long march to Islamabad, they say…. (Raza Rumi)
“Dedicated to all who have contributed in this struggle”
Arrival of a dawn of this new beginning
As the nation march, with prayers and hope
In preparation, the state and its machines
In preparation, the nation and its voice
Brings them together, the [...]

On Democracy: Choices we have to make

Who said politics is a noble profession. I don’t think it was mentioned for us as a nation or as a society as it clearly dictates in our attitudes and behavior that we are not politically matured and secondly no notion of integrity and honesty in what we do and how we do it. Every [...]