By Zubeida Mustafa
A 
YOUNG mother recounted to me her harrowing experience of her daughter’s schooling in Lahore. The child was asked by her teacher to report on her classmates who spoke a language other than English in school.
When I heard this I was saddened but not shocked. Many parents have had a similar experience. Worse still, many believe that this is the only way to learn English. Continue reading Why English?
By Zeenat Hisam
29 July 2016: Today is my first day of exploring New York. It rained last night. And the morning is bright, the air crispy, the weather pleasant. The heat has subsided. Manhattan is 30-minute subway train ride away from the place in Brooklyn we are staying in. Well, not a bad bargain for a low-budget traveller.
All the way from Stony Brook to New York I saw America shining and prospering: well-maintained infrastructure looking almost new; a lot of construction/repair work in progress; highways filled with big, gleaming cars. In New York the subway stations and the carriages all looked new. So far I have not detected anything that looked dilapidated, worn out or shabby. Continue reading Exploring New York 31 years on
By Zubeida Mustafa
WE seem to be living in an age when countries are constantly being measured, classified and ranked. The trend was set by the United Nations Development Programme 25 years ago when the Human Development Index was introduced. Many others followed suit as new technologies were developed for gathering and collating data from diverse sources that made the compilation of such indices feasible.
Today, virtually no area of national life has been left without being probed. We have international rankings on education, disease, poverty, corruption, press freedom, gender empowerment, religious freedom, and even happiness. Only recently, the Global Peace Index 2016 (GPI) — a relatively new area to be measured — was released which warns us how wars are taking us down the path of self-destruction. Continue reading Measuring peace
By Zubeida Mustafa
QANDEEL Baloch’s horrific murder in the name of ‘honour’ is testimony to the failure of the women’s movement to overturn patriarchy in Pakistan. Against the backdrop of the spate of anti-women violence, comes a report by Dr Rubina Saigol written for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German foundation. Titled Feminism and the Women’s Movement in Pakistan: Actors, Debates and Strategies, this excellent document should provide much food for thought.
The author, an eminent sociologist, touches the heart of the issue — especially in cases like Qandeel’s — when she points out that there are “silences” (neglected subjects) that surround questions of family and sexuality, the mainstay of patriarchy and women’s subjugation. These have generally not been addressed by the women’s movement and she recommends that they should be. Continue reading Why we failed
By Badri Raina
Dear Soul, you left your body
with no thought for your pain;
your last word was for the last man,
and food for our fallen brain.