All posts by Raza Jaffri

Starved for love

Children and Youth, Development and Poverty, Social Issues

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn


AJAT Shah is 13. He sells sherbet he prepares by the roadside in Majeed Colony, Landhi. Shah has a dream. He wants to study — but cannot. The government school in his neighbourhood is not functioning. He cannot afford private schooling. Besides, he has to earn a living.

Sohail (16) drives a rickshaw and earns enough to pay his father Rs400 a day. He doesn’t have a dream. He probably finds it futile to dream as his life has nothing to offer. For him, graduating from rag-picking to driving a rickshaw is progress enough.
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Language can unite

Culture and the Arts, Foreign Policy of Pakistan, Language

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

MORE than six decades after Partition, India and Pakistan continue to be locked in disputes which even take them to the brink of war.

It is difficult to believe that people who had lived side by side for centuries now refuse to recognise the commonalities in their culture and languages. Against this backdrop comes a breath of fresh air in the form of a new book that focuses on social harmony rather than cultural discord.
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Crushing the working class

Defence and Disarmament, Economy, Labour,

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

THE power crisis in Karachi has now begun to paralyse life in this metropolis. The immediate factor responsible is the KESC management’s failure — or is it unwillingness? — to negotiate an agreement with its workers.

I will not go into the details — 4,500 workers were recently put in the surplus pool while 6,000 untrained men were reportedly recruited on contract. KESC’s troubles are symptomatic of the bleak state of the labour sector in the country. With the national economy in the doldrums (having recorded a growth of less than three per cent this year) expectations are not high. We know who is being hit by this economic catastrophe.
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Education facing ‘tyranny of language’

Books by ZM

By Imtiaz Ali
Source: The News

Karachi
‘Be not the slave of words’ was the advice given by Scottish literary Thomas Carlyle over a century ago, and can be applied to Pakistan today with respect to language in education. Be not the slave of language or rather, be not under the tyranny of language, was the topic of discussion at Saturday’s launch of Zubeida Mustafa’s latest book “Tyranny of language in education, the problem and its solution”, at the Karachi Press Club.

During the event, speakers critiqued the dominance of the English language in Pakistan’s prevailing education system.

Senior journalist and writer Zubeida said that education essentially played the role of equaliser in terms of opportunities, but in Pakistan it was reinforcing the division of society.
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