Category Archives: Guest Contributor

Construct/Deconstruct

Guest Contributor, History, Politics, Social Issues

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

Devising and furthering ‘suitable’ national narratives is a much recommended culturally and intellectually highbrow activity for the awed and awesome amongst us.

Speaking as one at the receiving end of proliferating narratives I cannot but feel that, important as constructing an appropriate narrative may be, it is even more important to deconstruct some existing ones. The more so when they crystallise as one-liners, slogans that are accepted unthinkingly and allowed to be unquestionable. Take just one to begin with: Pakistan was founded as a Muslim homeland. Continue reading Construct/Deconstruct →

Ebbing or incoming?

Guest Contributor, Politics

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

THE PTI tsunami epithet is becoming woefully apt. Not in terms of the overwhelming sweeping force of Imran Khan’s political victory – that may be understood as less of a natural occurrence than a technical one – but in terms of the aftermath of the victory: Tsunamis sweep things away and the new government has debuted in tandem with a demolition process: What we have around us is debris. Literally, figuratively and politically. Nature hates a vacuum but we don’t see the space vacated by outcast governments being filled with the kind of tabdeeli we thought was voted in. Administratively we have a case of posttraumatic stress disorder – bewilderingly manifest in paralysis and shrill hyperactivity and declarations that go around in well-meaning circles of clarifying retractions and reiterations so that even U-turns cannot be relied on as lasting second thoughts. Continue reading Ebbing or incoming? →

The ways of media

Guest Contributor, Media

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

 The media derives value and purpose from its audience: If no one is listening it does not matter what is being said; and if no one reads or sees it, well, for one thing, we wouldn’t need censorship! So what sort of audience do the media in Pakistan have? And then what does the media seek to do and proffer – consciously or unconsciously; voluntarily and perforce? Continue reading The ways of media →

Education brings 180 degree change in lives

Children and Youth, Education, Guest Contributor

By Fatima Sheikh |16 May 2018

KARACHI: The occasion was the golden jubilee of the Montessori Teachers Training Diploma course in Pakistan. Sixty excited and smiling fresh graduates stepped on the stage to place tapers in a neat row, as a female voice introduced them as “the bearers of the flame of education” that have guided children through the ages.

This course is conducted in Pakistan by the Montessori Teachers’ Training Centre (MTTC), Karachi, The MTTC trains teachers to work with children aged between two-and-a-half to six years. It is the only training centre in Pakistan recognized by and affiliated with AMI, Amsterdam. The MTTC was established in 1999 and is governed by a Board of Governors. It is registered with the Government of Sindh under Section 42 of the Companies Ordinance. Continue reading Education brings 180 degree change in lives →

Playing with hellfire

Guest Contributor, Islamisation, Politics
TLYRA dharna

By Rifaat Hamid Ghani

MUCH significance is being attached to the rise of the TLYRA (Tehreek-e- Labaik Ya Rasool Allah) and its political face TLP (Tehreek-e-Labaik Pakistan) ; and the MWM (Majlis Wahdat-e-Muslimeen). There must be finer points of differentiation in party postures but the new bodies seem a Maulana TQ’s PAT derivative in terms of political leverage (intent is a matter of speculative personal opinion). But the future may be fraught with menacing linkages.

In 2012 Maulana TQ baulked from venturing to show how his national electoral vote-bank matched the heft of his staunch foot soldiers in road-camps. Awesomely righteous he remains; but a comparatively familiar game changer does not occasion the anxiety the undefined goals of these fresh but by-electorally promising moral stalwarts do – or, perhaps even more pertinently, could be projected as embodying. They are not waving the Daesh flag (anyone can chalk walls or paste posters of any sort) but they have made their debut  customized to the current international perception of militant Muslim obscurantism. Their apparent success and the government’s apparently craven surrender enables international global-jihadism terrorist-risk-perception tanked up thinkers to move Pakistan a notch higher on the flashpoint watch-list of alarmingly unstable, no matter how wistfully democratic, extremism prone Muslim countries. Continue reading Playing with hellfire →