politicians are nice

So I Want to be a Politician

  What? Why are you smiling? I’m serious. What other profession or career choice gives you the opportunity to make boatloads of money help people? If you think politicians are greedy people whose only motivation in life is money, well then, you’re wrong. No, I mean it. What’s your motivation in life? Paradise? 72 virgins? I see that sparkle in your eyes, don’t try to…

stop violence against women pakistan

Harassed Online and Nowhere to Go

  Farzana* was checking her Facebook, as usual, from the school’s computer lab and noticed she had a friend request from one of her female colleagues, Daniya Habib*. She accepted the request and went on to check out her friend’s profile. A few moments later, she ran off to find Daniya. The profile contained embarrassing fictitious information about Daniya’s private life, intimate pictures of her…

A Peace of Your Mind

“Is it for faith to deliver peace, when on all sides inequity thrives for it shall indeed thrive, when the blessed walk past blissfully blind, content in their own moral purity, in the peace filling their souls? Oh, you might then reach out a hand to the wretched by the roadside, offering them your own footprints, and you may see the blessed burgeon in number,…

state of rain in islamabad

What’s a Capital Without the Capital?

“I was stranded on the IJP road and then later at the I-8 for hours on end with the roads all practically flooded. We were literally two people driving the car: one mistimed gear shift and we would have been stranded in the rain on the road for the next 6 hours.” This was Shaukat’s – then a private chauffeur in a local household – story…