Herald: Highlights of the May 2012 issue

Our case against Manto

Congratulations on your 100^th… anniversary. “What is there to celebrate,” you ask. “I am dead. And why are you, the judges of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, my eternal tormentors, celebrating my birthday?” We

Herald: Highlights of the April 2012 issue

Held to ransom

Throughout Pakistan, kidnappings for ransom are on the rise. But as the number of victims snatched for ransom is increasing, the number of registered cases declines: the victims’ families are more scared than ever before…

Herald: Highlights of the March 2012 issue

General Justice

Brigadier Ali Khan’s trial that started in Sialkot last month is far from being ordinary — and not just because of the nature of allegations against him. He was arrested nine months ago when he…

Poetics of storytelling

Manto’s singular courage lies in his daring to use the ordinary language he knew, and which was spoken generally among people, as a vehicle for his writing. Despite this, Ismat Chughtai calls him a coward. Not without reason.

New perspectives, newer possibilities

Chinese artist Zhou Bin executed a performance that questioned the blanket accusation of ‘terrorist’ faced by Pakistani citizens from the rest of the world.

Saving Face

When Zakia, one of the focal characters in the film, tries to divorce her husband, a drug addict and alcoholic, he douses her in battery acid outside the courthouse.

“Kill me, but don’t marry me off”

Gul was regularly beaten, dragged by her brown hair, and strangled at night by her husband and his brothers. At twenty, Gul from Peshawar has been married for two years to Dad Mohammad, a fifty-year old suffering from severe mental illness.

The subcontinental middle class

I think nobody should deny the Pakistani state the right to carry out propaganda against India. However the problem with this kind of propaganda is that at the end of the day, we are the only victims of this propaganda.

Beyond ‘hearing’ range

If the United States is genuinely interested in advancing an agenda that would improve the appalling human rights situation for a wide swathe of residents of Balochistan or elsewhere, a hearing and a resolution are not the most efficacious ways to proceed.