Every few years, Pakistan finds itself at a familiar crossroads. Faced with mounting debt, shrinking foreign exchange reserves, and widening fiscal deficits, the country turns once again to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for assistance. The cycle has become so routine that it scarcely surprises anyone anymore. Governments change, finance ministers come and go, but […]
Spending Two Days, Three Nights in the ICU
There are moments in life that divide time into two parts, before and after. For me, one such moment was sitting beside my mother’s bed in the Intensive Care Unit, watching machines breathe, monitors blink, and bags of crimson blood slowly drip into her fragile body. Those three days and two nights felt like an […]
Limits of American Imperial Power
There is a particular kind of clarity that comes from watching a superpower bluster. From where we stand in Pakistan, a nation that has lived under the long, unpredictable shadow of American foreign policy for decades, the current confrontation between Washington and Tehran carries a familiar and deeply instructive weight. We have seen this script […]
Your Name Is Enough — Giorgia Meloni
In October 2022, a woman stood on the steps of the Quirinal Palace in Rome and was sworn in as Italy’s Prime Minister. In doing so, she shattered a ceiling that had held firm for over 75 years of Italy’s republican history. Her name was Giorgia Meloni, and for women across the world who had […]
The Earth is not asking for Heroes. Just You
Every year, as April ripens into warmth and the trees shake off the last hesitation of winter, the world pauses, briefly, imperfectly, to remember something it too often forgets. Earth Day, observed on April 22, is not a celebration in the traditional sense. It is more like a moment of reckoning, a quiet knock on […]
Living With an Untimely Hysterectomy
There are mornings when I wake up and the first thing, I feel is an absence. Not pain, not sadness exactly, but a hollow awareness of something that once was and no longer is a part of me, removed not by choice in the way one might choose a haircut or a change of lifestyle, […]
Bombs Over Diplomacy
History will remember February 28, 2026 not only as the day the bombs fell on Iran, but as the day diplomacy was finally, deliberately set aside. Less than 48 hours before U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran began, U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Geneva […]
Upskilling: The Need of the Hour
In an era defined by relentless technological advancement, shifting economic landscapes, and the ever-evolving demands of the modern workplace, one truth has become impossible to ignore, the skills that got us here will not necessarily take us where we need to go. Upskilling, the deliberate process of learning new competencies and deepening existing ones has […]
23 March: A Day We Must Remember
Every year on the 23rd of March, Pakistan dresses itself in green and white. Flags flutter from rooftops, schoolchildren rehearse anthems, and television screens fill with military parades and patriotic songs. Amidst all this colour and ceremony, a quiet and unsettling question lingers: do we truly know what we are celebrating? Do our young men […]
The Cage Without Locks
There is a photograph on my phone that I have never been able to delete. In it, my mother is standing in the kitchen, her dupatta slightly askew, her hands dusted with flour. She is not looking at the camera. She is looking at something just outside the frame, something I could never quite see, […]