View from my window

Since I got pregnant with my son, I have not watched a movie in a cinema theater. During pregnancy I did not want to expose the fetus to loud sound and after he was born there is not enough time, given how limited leisure time one gets with baby, home and work. Plus one of us has to babysit and watching a movie alone in a theater is really not too much fun.   This, however, does not mean that I do not watch movies. I watch an occasional Hollywood or Bollywood movie on Netflix or Amazon Prime Video. In recent months, finding a Bollywood movie on these platforms has been a little difficult. On 10 th January 2019, ‘young Bollywood actors,’ (as conscientious-less media declared, although I have more appropriate labels for them, and what qualifies as ‘young’?), met Prime Minister elect, Narender Modi in Delhi. The selfie that did the rounds afterwards was a fantastic record of who all was at that meeting. I am grateful to worldwide web that in seconds it reached far and wide and s...

I have often heard from non-Pakistanis about what Pakistanis are like, ‘You know, you are not like that and I have seen that Pakistanis, individually, are very nice people, some of my very good friends are Pakistanis but collectively they are/have...’ And then they proceed to tell me what ‘these Pakistanis’ are like and these vary of course, depending on the nature of their encounter but invariably a distinction is made between Pakistanis ‘individually’ and ‘collectively’. And, yes, this description is quite insulting and presents a stereotypical image. So I tried to remember from the almost three decades of living in Pakistan to see if I could locate this collective that behaves in this identical manner but I could not place them and that’s when I realized that maybe things have changed in the decade that I have been living outside so every time I visit Pakistan (which is every year, without fail) I try to look for this ‘collective’ that would represent the now almost 210M Pakistan...

It is sad that I have to start by talking about my own experience of being a woman in a male-centric society. Sad, because we should've been able to move beyond this by 2017. But we haven't and it is not just true for a hypocritical and conservative society like Pakistan's but around the world even USA is stuck in an era where the burden of the proof still lies with a woman if she addresses any kind of unwanted advances by her male coworkers, class fellows or even complete strangers! Having breathed, studied and worked with men all of my educational and working life, i know the pressure of living with 'respectability'. Because after all, it is absolutely true, that 'only respectable women get respect'. And you have to, at all times, conform to what all that entails. For a free spirit like me, it has been crushing! But maintain it, i have! That also means that you are working at half the power and ability if you have to keep tabs on not letting slip that clo...