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Street fighting days

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

[Published in DAWN, Monday, June 16th, 2008 - Editorial Section] http://www.dawn.com/2008/06/16/ed.htm]

By Ghazala Rahman Rafiq

WHO in Pakistan believes elections mean democracy? Iraqis learned beheading Saddam heralded neither freedom nor democracy.

Even many Americans discovered they went to war ‘not in our name’ since WMD never turned up in Iraq. Worldwide it is possible to participate in seemingly free and fair elections, vote for a party and then face a government that doesn’t represent you.

However, despite its systemic historic/current flaws, Americans continue their engagement with democracy in numerous painstaking and persistent ways. One shining example is that 45 years after Dr King’s “I have a Dream” speech, America finally produced African American Barack Obama, (middle name Hussain) as their democratic nominee.

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The Writing Tribe of Sindh

Monday, December 24, 2007

Original version below: 

Edited version printed in DAWN on Tuesday, December, 25, 2007
http://dawn.com/2007/12/25/op.htm#2

Perhaps the largest literary association in Asia, with a membership knitted only by the Sindhi ukhur, and woven throughout Sindh’s cities, towns and villages, the Sindhi Adabi Sangat, despite a recent structural and ideological controversy within its ranks, continues to crackle. It does so because of an innate academic and artistic dynamism that has sustained it for over 50 years. Its chapters, extending to remote Sindhi hamlets, give it an atypical range in variability and imbue its collective mind with an equal passion for both Sindhi canonical and modern literature.

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