Nowhere Else to Go
Ask any one of those thousands in Sialkot why he had come, and I suspect you would have got a shrug, a laugh, or a single sentence. A…
The Public Purview
Sheikh Abdul Rashid
Nawab Sir Fazal Ali and the Price of the Gate
Every morning, students stream through the Khurshid Gate of Zamindar College in Gujrat, Punjab, and pass a grave. It lies just inside, in front…
The Ones Who Spoke Up Got a File. The Rest of Us Got Tea.
A question for the conscience of university faculty The staff room door opens and the conversation stops. Cups halt halfway to lips. Someone becomes…
The Nabobs of Academia and the Reign of Institutional Tyranny
Across the civilized world, a university represents a sanctuary of uninhibited thought—a sacred space where critical inquiry, scholarly skepticism, and the relentless pursuit of…
Nobody Ordered This Thesis
Our universities inspect research with great care. They rarely ask who is waiting for it. Ask final-semester MPhil students who will read their theses,…
University Visiting Faculty: Most Essential, Least Valued
In the true lexicon of academia, the word “visiting” was once a mark of distinct honor. A visiting lecturer was invited precisely because their…
History That Can Still Answer Back
On Zain Saleem’s “Gujrat Ke Darakhshan Sitare” Local history usually arrives in one of two forms. The first is built on the dead: every…
The Price of Standing in Line
Picture a railway booking window an hour before a holiday rush. Forty people stand in a line that has not moved in twenty minutes.…
A Pulse Is Not a Life
Every six months, the state asks a retired clerk to prove that he is alive. It does not mean this unkindly. Somewhere in Islamabad…
After My Mother, My Teacher
By Sheikh Abdul Rashid It is November 1957, and Albert Camus has just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The announcement is a month…