May 15, 2026
𝘔𝘢𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘗𝘶𝘯𝘫𝘢𝘣 is not only about preserving the past, but about imagining a future through the past, and will determine who the cultural future of the province belongs to
May 07, 2026
Badly enacted and unbelievably hopeful, can the Pakistani courtroom drama go beyond spectacle?
May 07, 2026
Pakistan’s economic challenge is not a shortage of labour. It is a shortage of productivity. While the country remains demographically expansionary, the slowly declining fertility rate means that the current youth bulge represents a narrowing window. In this piece, Ahmed Khan and Shahira Khan from the Punjab Skills Development Fund opine on a path forward.
Apr 30, 2026
To understand our cultural attitudes around sexual intimacy, one need only look at contemporaryPakistani dramas, and how they push the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable
Apr 13, 2026
As the US contends with its crumbling imperialism, is Hollywood incurring one political debt after another?
Apr 09, 2026
In a declining playback economy, what does the show offer to participants beyond the potential for virality?
Apr 07, 2026
In an era when urban life is increasingly defined by impersonality and transactional relationships, Quetta hotels offer something many people unconsciously seek: genuine human connection.
Apr 03, 2026
Peshawari Ice Cream, nestled in Karachi’s Saddar, is not just any ice cream parlour, it is a litmus test of belonging, especially with many copycat branches spread across the city. Sobh Saeed Rid, who moved to Karachi four years ago, explores the nostalgia of flavour and how an ice cream parlour founded in 1948 continues to foster community.
Mar 30, 2026
In a society where desire of any kind is heavily policed, a show exclusively centred on finding your own partner while the country watches held potential - but did end up living up to that potential?
Mar 30, 2026
From the hauntings of The Cow to the neurosis of Hamoon, Dariush Mehrjui’s oeuvre offers a fragile terrain of possibility
Mar 26, 2026
Niilofur Farrukh, former CEO and Managing Trustee of Karachi Biennale Trust, reflects on how the organisation has sustained itself for the last ten years, despite overwhelming obstacles, from hosting biennales in a city on the brink of infrastructural collapse to funding precarity.
Mar 25, 2026
From rishta aunties to matchmaking apps, Pakistan’s youth are caught between tradition and technology, rejecting old formulas yet discovering that swipes and algorithms don’t always deliver love either.
Mar 10, 2026
The security protocols of banks in Pakistan may or may not protect us from outside fraud, but certainly seem designed to protect us from ourselves
Mar 06, 2026
Family and community is broken. Can it be fixed?
Feb 26, 2026
A close reading of the judgement raises grave concerns about the current state of civil rights in Pakistan
Feb 18, 2026
The 10th Faiz Festival took place in Lahore from 13–15 February, featuring an array of writers, poets, artists and intellectuals. Rana Saadullah Khan found that the festival was a triumphant celebration of Urdu literature.
Feb 13, 2026
The 14th edition of the Lahore Literary Festival took place from February 6th to 8th, 2026 at the Alhamra Arts Council where writers and artists gathered to explore ideas of cultural and heritage preservation.
Feb 12, 2026
The 14th iteration of the LLF returned with a focus on celebrating the region’s cultural heritage.
Feb 11, 2026
As the 17th Karachi Literature Festival unfolded against the backdrop of a ‘fragile world’, the focus was towards the powerful intersections of migration, media and memory. This year, the festival highlighted a unique cultural phenomenon: the rise of Gulf–South Asian narratives that challenge post-colonial boundaries. Through the lens of filmmakers, journalists and historians, KLF 2026 explored how the shared histories of the outside world and Pakistan are being reimagined for a new generation of readers and thinkers.
Feb 06, 2026
The most highly anticipated event of the year — Basant — has kicked off in Lahore. Rooftops are booked and set up, the kite trade is booming and you can feel the city pulsating with excitement. But are we chasing a nostalgic dream? Or will Basant be the same vibrant, communal activity most remember? Aiman Tahir Khan looks at the history of Basant, as the colourful kite-flying festival returns to Lahore after almost two decades.
Jan 30, 2026
Maheen Azmat looks at the traditional South Asian aangan as a laboratory where competing visions of South Asian womanhood were actively produced in response to colonialism and nationalism.
Jan 29, 2026
Ayza Khan explores the undercurrents of literary and cultural resistance at the ninth iteration of Afkar e Taza ThinkFest held in Lahore.
Jan 16, 2026
Millennial women, especially those wanting to be mothers, were once promised they could have it all: a solid career, a perfect family and enough time to spare to work on their own selves. So why is it that millennial women, especially mothers, are constantly exhausted and burnt out?
Jan 09, 2026
Nikkay Kay Paye, said to have been established in 1826 in Peshawar, is a favourite haunt for citizens in the colder months. Furqan Ali goes on his annual paye adventure and reflects on the city of Peshawar.
Jan 07, 2026
Faisal Kapadia’s post-Strings journey shows that evolution does not require erasure. It can be quiet, thoughtful and still powerful. This was evidenced at Phir Milenge, a recent musical tour.
Dec 27, 2025
In Pakistan, as in many parts of the globe, patriarchy has made the experience of being a woman a taxing and lonely one. In an age of cyber harassment and continued gender-based violence in the online and offline world, one writer finds solace in the uplifting work of other women.
Dec 19, 2025
There are multiple obstacles to transforming public libraries in Pakistan into spaces that can foster a sustainable literary ecosystem. The tragedy unfolds on many levels, ranging from the economic to socio-behavioural aspects. Reinvigorating this crucial public institution requires thoughtful reimagining that puts libraries at the centre of a community.
Dec 19, 2025
The Sunday Book Bazaar in Lahore, located along the footpaths on the corner of the historic Anarkali and Mall Road, provides a distinctive lens into how reading culture and knowledge access are shaped by urban informality, economic stratification and spatial politics.
Dec 17, 2025
From at least the early 19th century, South Asian ayahs (nurses and ladies’ maids) were hired to accompany British families on ocean journeys between India and Britain. The essay focuses on the travelling ayahs and the racist attitudes experienced by them, especially on board seafaring vessels.
Dec 16, 2025
The exponential rise of humans delegating some of the most basic tasks to Artificial Intelligence has worried some, while others have welcomed it warmly. However, does having platforms such as ChatGPT resolve our friends’ problems, be our therapists and matchmakers taking away our humanity?
Dec 09, 2025
A couple of weeks ago, Lahoris woke up to disturbing news — Nasir Bagh was being turned into a (underground) parking plaza. Protests erupted and confusion, naturally, reigned supreme. Urban design practitioner Bisma Ahmad recounts her experience of witnessing the ‘development’ and subsequent assessment of the Lahore Authority for Heritage Revival’s (LAHR) latest project.
Nov 28, 2025
Who is the ideal citizen in Pakistan today? Activists, academics, artists and attorneys endevaoured to answer this at the People’s Assembly for Political Rights, organised by the Progressive Student’s Collective.
Nov 28, 2025
The latest fashion revolution in Pakistan (and abroad) is the style influencer-turned-creative entrepreneur pipeline. What does it mean for the Pakistani fashion landscape? Are influencers and creatives more in tune with what the people want? Does visibility always mean viability? Aamir Ali Shah explores the recent rise of the creator-led brands.
Nov 28, 2025
Mobile phones now serve as a primary point of access to the internet (and thereby to a global community) across many regions. However, women in low and middle income countries continue to face substantial barriers in gaining this access. Closing the gender gap in mobile and internet access for women in Pakistan can be a boon for the economy.
Nov 28, 2025
The proverbial ‘smog season’ is in full swing across Punjab, affecting the lives of millions of people. Anti-smog guns, vehicle emissions certifications and new mapping technologies are the provincial government’s latest interventions. But are they simply shiny, new gimmicks?
Nov 17, 2025
Can Pakistan find a way out of its persistent growth trap? Haroon Sethi, chair of the Roundtable ‘What Is Pakistan’s Way Out Of Its Growth Trap?’ held at the Indus Conclave 2025, reflects on the discussion.
Nov 13, 2025
The announcement of Lahore’s Yellow Metro Line project was met with government enthusiasm and civil society disapproval. Months later, what is the status of the project and why the secrecy regarding its execution?
Nov 05, 2025
One month ago Lahore played host to the Indus Conclave 2025, where artists, writers and intellectuals gathered to rethink balance, belonging, ideas of progress and what it means to build the Global South. Misha Anwar looks back.
Nov 01, 2025
A craft essay about making bolognese and how friendship is indispensable to the work of writers.
Oct 29, 2025
The 6th edition of the Gandhara Independent Film Festival recently took place at NAPA, Karachi. With films from over 10 countries and a sizable local contingent, the festival continued to provide a platform for independent voices in cinema.
Oct 24, 2025
As Pakistan confronts urgent development imperatives, the fiscal burden of debt servicing leaves little space for action. Can debt swaps provide a path forward to transform crisis into opportunity?
Oct 24, 2025
The Indus Conclave 2025 gathered writers, artists, intellectuals and activists from the Global South and beyond in Lahore to discuss the most pressing issues of our times.
Oct 20, 2025
Manahil Tahira explores how Pakistani cinema’s quintessential comedian traded timing and set up for embodiment and sheer unpredictability
Oct 20, 2025
In the heart of Bahadurabad, Kokan Family Park stands as a beacon of hope, where public parks are increasingly endangered by urban development and government neglect. Managed by a dedicated neighbourhood committee, the park is more than a patch of green—it is a crucial part of a community’s day.
Sep 12, 2025
A green, public space off the Islamabad Expressway in the leftover land between a highway, a looping exit ramp and an underpass, technically known as a ‘cloverleaf island’, has become a makeshift park for hundreds of people who frequent it. Marium Naveed wonders what this makeshift park tells us about the city the public wants and needs.
Sep 10, 2025
In the race to package and promote South Asian fashion to the world, India is sprinting ahead, often with items that have roots on both sides of the border. These crafts were never confined by the Radcliffe Line, but their identity politics now are. Aamir Ali Shah explores the fight for claiming textile heritage and the role of GI tags.
Sep 01, 2025
An anthropologist’s fieldwork takes her to Peshawar, where she becomes an unwitting observer of her own life—and the dynamics of inhabiting a new city—as she dines solo. What was once taken as granted or a vessel to romanticise her own life becomes a negotiation to (re)claim space and a sense of self.
Sep 01, 2025
Publisher, Pushcart nominated poet and erstwhile editor of prominent lifestyle magazines in Pakistan, Mehvash Amin shares her journey as a woman in Pakistan’s publishing sphere—a personal account of navigating the obstacle course laid out for her as she publishes 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘦𝘱𝘩 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸, as well as highlighting her work with PAWPE.
Aug 28, 2025
With the first meeting of the 11th National Finance Commission scheduled for 29th August, 2025, and three previous Awards being inconclusive, Furqan Ali wonders if the upcoming 11th Award will break the curse.
Aug 25, 2025
The people of Pakistan may have won freedom from the yoke of British rule, but did they ever really gain independence from colonialism?
Aug 12, 2025
Where politics build walls, art builds bridges. Sara Danial speaks with Mauj., a Karachi-based theatre collective behind the recent production of Ramayana that has had social media buzzing on both sides of the Pak-India border.
Aug 12, 2025
Following the passing of her maternal grandmother, Dur e Aziz Amna reflects on grief, love and rituals of mourning in this heartfelt elegy.
Aug 04, 2025
The trio of friends behind the short film Karmash speak to us about dropping out of film school, premiering at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes and their creative process.
Jul 31, 2025
With the new financial year underway in Pakistan, we break down the Budget for FY25/26 in order to explain how the year ahead will be.
Jul 21, 2025
Government officials in Pakistan put great faith in IT oriented solutions for every problem, from seeking justice to simply obtaining character certificates. But, is this faith justified? Can embracing IT work as a panacea for governance failures?
Jul 18, 2025
Despite decades of reform efforts and investment in the FBR’s systems, resources and processes, the government is nowhere close to achieving its desired levels of tax collection. It is not the implementation that is wrong, but the strategy.
Jul 07, 2025
A childhood favorite Punjabi film offers unexpected insights into contemporary Punjabi society
Jun 24, 2025
Even as the local economy has come to rely on tourism, Gilgit-Baltistan faces grave ecological, cultural and social challenges as a result of the recent surge
Jun 23, 2025
Kafka's In the Penal Colony provides an insight into the psychology of power at play in the violence that has been inflicted on the Palestinians. What does it mean for writers to refuse to be "tourists" to this spectacle of suffering?
Jun 20, 2025
For too long Pakistan’s economic policymakers have blamed taxpayers for not shouldering the country’s fiscal burdens. But this deflects from the state’s culture of profligacy, which is at the root of the country's debt crisis.
Jun 05, 2025
Under colonial influence, the visual grammar of our past—soft silhouettes, draped fabrics, floral motifs, jewelry worn by men with ease—was stripped away. What remains is a masculine rigidity suspicious of any sartorial playfulness
Jun 05, 2025
Pakistan's myopic focus on raising tax-to-GDP ratios rests on flawed assumptions and distracts from real fiscal reforms.
May 31, 2025
While most citizens of Karachi do not have access to cultural spaces, the well-heeled enjoy the vast expanses of country clubs, spaces reminiscent of the colonial era that function as a soft mechanism of exclusions, making it clear who is deemed to deserve leisure and comfort in the city.
May 24, 2025
The country benefits far more from decent facilities everywhere, than world-class facilities in small pockets. Infrastructure development should take into consideration the needs of everyone, not just a segment of the population.
Apr 29, 2025
From the ban on X (formerly known as Twitter) to the arrests of activists over speech, PECA has allowed the state to exercise the most arbitrary set of controls over Pakistani citizens’ use of the vast playground of the internet
Apr 22, 2025
The government’s project to ostensibly revitalise the river and “develop” its surrounding areas has drawn sharp criticism from local residents and activists
Mar 27, 2025
Given that a vast majority of women in Pakistan already wear long tunics, full sleeves, and dupattas, is modest fashion just a repackaging of what already exists?
Mar 10, 2025
Cricket in Pakistan may be a deeply political project, but our attachment to the sport - the heady highs and the dismal lows - make it so much more
Mar 06, 2025
Pakistan is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change in the world, and agricultural and fishing communities of Sindh are paying the price with their lives uprooted and livelihoods decimated
Feb 24, 2025
This year’s edition of the Lahore Literary Festival may not have lived up to the hype and star power of LLFs past, but it still remains a crucial and thriving space for cultural dialogue
Feb 10, 2025
Any attempt at adapting a literary giant’s work for the screen - especially one as stylistically and visually experimental as Marquez - is going to be a lofty mission
Feb 04, 2025
Pakistani brides increasingly opt for the luxe aesthetic without the price tag, but not without judgment
Feb 04, 2025
Pakistan is experiencing an exodus of our young. How does losing almost an entire generation of students with advanced degrees and ambitious dreams change us and them?
Jan 21, 2025
The institution of marriage is an ideal in Pakistani society, the only acceptable and moral way to live, and when you choose to not enrol in the great program, a lot is assumed about you and a lot is said about you
Jan 21, 2025
Across five venues, KB24 stirred Karachiites out of complacency with art that implicated its audience in the climate crisis we face today
Jan 21, 2025
This Islamic cultural figure from 13th century India took liberties with language that have turned into the conventions of our present
Jan 21, 2025
Calls for a boycott for this year’s season bring us back to the question of the very legitimacy of Coke Studio as a platform for Pakistani music
Jan 21, 2025
Dharti Dhar Dhar Dharke Gi: Artist As Witness, COMO Museum’s show curated by Salima Hashmi, is a searing homage to the artist’s testimony of a world rife with systemic violence
Jan 21, 2025
A self-avowed devotee and admirer of Nusrat’s artistry remains largely unmoved by his posthumous album ‘Chain of Light’
Jan 21, 2025
Heera Mandi might have been famous for the singing and dancing women, but in the midst of all this, it was also home to the tradition of classical music - a tradition that is now dying
Jan 21, 2025
The burgeoning perfume industry in Pakistan is largely a copycat factory, dominated by clones of internationally well-known designer fragrances. Will we see a turn towards innovation soon?
Jan 21, 2025
How did a humble spice, used in home kitchens and ayurvedic medicine mostly in South Asia for centuries, suddenly become a global super food?
Jan 21, 2025
Watching the Israeli genocide in Gaza unfold as a parent has been heart wrenching, an uncanny double life, watching children torn apart on our phones while holding our sleeping babies
Jan 20, 2025
An explainer on Pakistan’s electricity shortfall
Jan 20, 2025
Beauty workers in large Pakistani urban centres face a distinctive set of struggles with little recourse
Jan 20, 2025
Decisive and effective policies to address the existential threat of rapidly deteriorating air quality is long overdue
Jan 20, 2025
A meditation on the duties and efficacy of artists in times of oppression and injustice
Jan 10, 2025
While the pandemic thrust many Pakistani fashion brands into e-commerce, a deeper look reveals that the foundations of this industry—logistics, customer support, and post-sale service—remain alarmingly shaky
Dec 04, 2024
Sadia Khatri reimagines the private and public in rural Sindh
Nov 15, 2024
Climate activist and expert Dawar Butt speaks about the underlying causes and potential solutions to the cataclysmic air pollution in Pakistan