Advocating a sex-positive culture is a chore. It’s been over four decades since the Sexual Revolution and its embrace of sensuality and freedom. Yet, despite this opening, sexuality has not been fully emancipated. On the contrary, it has all too often been a tool of the market, and of misogyny. (More…)
Abdul Ghaffar Khan is a forgotten hero. This is to Pakistan’s detriment, as its perspective is saturated with praises of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, but scarcely pays respect to Khan, and the frontier political movements he helped create. Of course, the anti-colonialist’s absence from the historical record is purposeful. (More…)
September 13th, 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the now-infamous Oslo Accords. Friday the 13th seems all too appropriate a date for that landmark. What better a marker for an agreement that started with good intentions, but was doomed by its inherent flaws and malicious politics. (More…)
Today my foot is mostly bruise-colored. I dislocated a toe last week training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I pointed out its new weird angle, and we all laughed. One of my training partners snapped it back so quickly that I barely had time to chomp the lapel of my gi. (More…)
I find Sayeeda Warsi curious. Despite our political differences, it is hard not to find some kinship in her stories of Paki-bashing, while being raised by a working-class Pakistani textile worker. It’s similarly difficult not to be impressed by her marital history, as she broke up her first arranged marriage in favor of another. Although this is hardly a revolutionary act, I recognize it as remarkable in its own way in our deeply sexist community. (More…)
Attacking Syria gets more surreal every day. The abstract nature of that debate, in the United States, as if somehow real lives, Syrian lives, were not hanging in the balance is appalling. And what is most starkly absent from the discussion is any apparent concern over a civil war that has already caused over 100,000 deaths, created some six million refugees and internally displaced persons and promises that the worst is yet to come. (More…)
I am a “Third Culture Kid” (TCK) who attempts to push existing definitions of what that means. The term was originally coined by sociologist and anthropologist Ruth Hill Useem, based on her experiences with American expatriates in India during the early 1950s. It was meant to refer to expat children who accompany their parents into a new society, and thus must adjust their identities to reflect that. (More…)
For many outside her blessed shores, Britain is a cold, little enigma where some muddied twist of history has permitted a hereditary monarchy to continue existing alongside the Internet. If the British Isles were the USS Enterprise, someone would have declared we had been drawn into a tear in the space-time continuum decades ago. (More…)
On Monday, it will be Labor Day, a major holiday in the United States. Except for a few pithy Facebook posts or bumper stickers, I don’t expect to see an actual celebration of labor, much less the labor movement, which is edging closer every day to extinction. And yet, in 2013, the economic condition of American workers is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. (More…)
The Lollywood drama Bol (“Speak Out”) was released in Pakistan in 2011. Written, directed, and produced by industry veteran Shoiab Mansoor, the film would go on to be the highest-grossing domestic production. This isn’t surprising, as it uses the trials of a Pakistani family to explore many issues of relevance to the country’s Muslim community. (More…)
UN inspectors are going to investigate allegations of a major chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians by the regime. It’s largely an exercise. The United States has already decided that the red line Obama drew many months ago has been crossed. That line is worth questioning. (More…)
We now know that it will be Chelsea, not Bradley, Manning who will be serving a 35-year sentence in military prison for daring to expose US war crimes in Iraq. That revelation has brought Manning back into the headlines, and overall, one has to be pleased with the reception. (More…)