By: Atle Hetland
I like to make films that are controversial,” Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy said at a large panel discussion organised by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) on Tuesday this week. She was honoured for her Oscar-winning film, Saving Face, by the research and intellectual community gathered in the elegant auditorium at HEC in Islamabad. Continue reading
Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
Mohammad Malick
As a people, we are used to living under one form of emergency or another. Heck, now we have even been reduced to spending the greater part of our cheap lives in the shadows of the even cheaper Chinese ‘emergency’ lights.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
By Anjum Altaf and Samia Altaf
IT is our claim that the debates on poverty and aid have gone off the rails. On poverty, it is too narrow, quibbling about a few percentage points above or below some historical number.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
Shamshad Ahmad
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Oscar-winning documentary ‘Saving Face’ has rightly brought laurels to her and to her teammates for highlighting globally an issue that had hitherto remained unnoticed and unreported even in Pakistan. The 40-minute documentary focusing on acid attacks against women in our country is indeed a bold attempt to change lives but more than that, it unveils the true face of a society, the bulk of which is still living in medieval times.
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By Roshaneh Zafar
I was recently visiting New York, and came across a very interesting statistic in the New York Times. Nordstrom, which is a well known American retail group gives out university scholarships every year — well this year 71 per cent of the merit-based scholarships were won by girls.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
Sanaullah Baloch
Despite women’s crucial participation in political movements, their role occupancy in crucial areas of decision-making, regarding war and peace, has been neglected institutionally and by their male counterparts in many countries, and particularly in Pakistan.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
By Rabail Baig
On the intersection of Dr. Ziauddin Ahmed Road and Club Road — one of the busiest traffic lights in Karachi housing two high-end five-star hotels and the head office of the biggest English newspaper in the country — I often ran into a beggar woman who almost no one looked directly in the eyes.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Abroad, Social Issues
By Tazeen Javed
How many of us have seen children trying to clean our car’s windshield at every other signal. Or seen our maid’s child playing in our garage, eating dirt, while she is attending to us and our children. These pale, skinny, listless children are all around us and they are the malnourished children of our world.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
Adiah Afraz
Two days ago I found out that one of my relatives was ill, courtesy the PIC drug fiasco. Continue reading
Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
Jamil Nasir
“Poverty is not only about having enough money. It is also about exploitation and oppression. Poverty is about politics, and the need is to devise political solutions to its underlying causes, which involves more than providing money”, wrote Erik Solheim, Norway’s minister for development and environment in his article titled “Why Development Aid is not enough”.
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Posted in Articles, Opinions from Pakistan, Social Issues
