The Next Salahuddin, a children’s film about a Gazan boy who dreams of conquering Jerusalem, has been picked up by HUM TV for a future release, the channel announced on Friday. The film had a limited theatrical run earlier this year across nine Pakistani cities.

Created by Jinn TV, the film follows Yousuf, whose childhood is taken away from him by a — presumably Israeli — airstrike that kills his family members and leaves him buried under the rubble of his home.

The boy then works towards his goal of uniting Muslims around the world to avenge his people and raise the Palestinian flag over the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, shadowing the achievements of Salahuddin Ayubi — the Muslim general who captured the city during the Crusades.

The film was conceptualised by Ustadh Asim Ismail and brought to life by Farhan Siddiqui, who wrote and created it using AI. A Malaysian non-profit organisation, Cinta Gaza Malaysia, was also involved in the film’s development.

In the announcement’s comment section, the mood was less jovial than expected and people wondered if this was really the right way to go about making a film on such an important topic.

Netizens questioned if HUM TV, part of one of the largest media companies in Pakistan, lacked the resources to make a film on the Palestinian struggle without using AI.

Some users pointed out the controversies surrounding the use of AI itself, like its wasteful use of clean water and the fact it has been called out for enabling the exploitation of artists and writers.

Others made their point very clear: AI is not art. They also called on people to boycott generative AI.

HUM TV has not given a release date for the film yet and it remains to be seen how the film will be received by audiences when it does air.

While one can occasionally need social and material support from those around them, the gendered aspect of this equation is rather unsavoury, especially when the one being served is a man, and the women are the obligatory givers. Women chronically break their backs to provide for the men around them and Kafeel takes us through the tipping point of this cultural crisis.

Typically, women work overtime caring for the home, the kids and the elderly. Add a man to this mix of caregiving and homes topple. The premise of this drama is the call-out that any marriage will break apart when a man doesn’t provide financially, emotionally and psychologically.

The reason this drama is fresh is that the falling apart is not depicted as the woman’s fault, in fact, what makes Kafeel rare is that it does not even entertain the notion of whether it might be. A blameless woman is refreshingly close to the human condition and reminds me of the Haseena Moin and Noorul Huda Shah era of Pakistani dramas. It reminds me of the point Hum Gunahgar Aurtain was making when Kishwar Naheed wrote the poem about almost everything being a woman’s fault.

It takes two to bhangra

Perhaps some feminists would call this a very archaic take on gender roles — the assumption that a man brings home the nihari and the woman provides homely dhobi services — but the point I’d like to make is that men have so much privilege in society, the least they can do is the job that gains them all that privilege in the first place.

You must have heard the trite bicycle-wheel analogy — that a marriage can only work if both wheels are working. Sadly, in Pakistani contexts, this lame analogy is only used if a woman doesn’t perform her role well, hardly ever is a man held accountable for a lifetime of freeloading off women’s invisible labour.

The other injustice rests in the fact that we do need these gender norms to prevail in earnest because the economy is so archaic. Especially during child-rearing years, men need to bring in the food because women, though capable, are stretched thin. Pakistan, for all practical purposes, is stuck in a pre-industrial time — agrarian for the most part — where only 23 per cent of women enter the workforce, mainly in menial or care jobs. Only a negligible portion of women have more than a $1,000 in their bank accounts. So, there is no way that traditional gender roles don’t rule this world.

After Rafia Zakaria’s takedowns of white feminism, it becomes imperative to understand that being more modern does not necessitate being more liberated for women in this non-white context. I believe that working women in Pakistan got the short end of the stick because they entered the workforce and ended up doing three jobs for low pay. They do these three jobs — home, work and caregiving — while their spouses sometimes have merely one job, or in the case of Kafeel, no job at all.

Earning money does not always earn women dignity. In fact, they may even be looked down upon, resulting in lower status.

The value of a woman’s work

The rupee must be valued, because any disposable income a woman has in this society is going to be spent on her family. Yet, the economics of empowerment dictate that you are only as powerful as your disposable income. So, working women are no more and no less than indentured servants, blocked within the framework of the traditional wife and daughter-in-law, with only a paycheque to show for their aspirational freedom.

But aspirational freedom is not real freedom.

A paycheque earned by a middle-class woman goes mostly toward paying for the rising cost of diapers, milk, salt, school fees, bus fees and bitter gourds. There is nothing left for her own protection.

This is the world Sanam Saeed’s character Zeba inhabits as she runs on the hamster wheel of providing for her four children. And this is precisely what Kafeel understands that almost no Pakistani drama before it has bothered to — that the system failing Zeba is not abstract. It has a face. It is her husband, Jami’s face.

The drama does not examine the economy nor the patriarchy — it locates the rot in one man’s refusal to be accountable, and it does not flinch from that.

Until Kafeel came along, no one tackled the anthropological disaster that is the modern Pakistani working woman stuck with a man who loves glory more than his children. No one depicted, with all its ugliness, how gross it is to see a mother burn the candle at both ends. No one had chronicled how unsavoury it is when a perfectly intelligent woman abandons herself for the sake of societal acceptance.

A believable drama with extraordinary performances

Saeed has been a spectacular show of force in her performance especially for the believability with which she dramatises the mayhem of walking the world of marriage alone, with only responsibility as her life force. Her performance has been on point.

No one says she should not be Sisyphus, pushing a boulder uphill with her mere nail. We women have been doing the boulder-pushing for eons, proving that if only we gave a few more drops of blood to domesticity, the bicycle would be a bicycle. But sometimes a spanner is just a spanner. Relationships are saved by more than one person.

You strip a woman of all power, yet when it comes to saving the home, she is paradoxically held as the most powerful. Women stay in such situations predominantly due to a poverty of time — time to think, plan and strategise an exit.

When a woman is exhausted, no one is surprised. It is the most normal thing for a star-crossed woman to chaotically run from one end to another, doing something lifesaving.

But seeing a woman in control, poised, with enough money to throw at several problems until she has no problem left, is a sight no one has seen. I am willing to bet our mothers’ generation has never been caught enjoying their lives, merely chilling out. Yet what is it that we see men doing? Their life is a proverbial golf course, a proverbial charpoy, a proverbial pulpit, a proverbial couch or keyboard.

The contrast is so stark between Zeba, and Jami, that you want to reach out across the screen and shake him out of his moronic life goals — which include eating chicken patties, cribbing and complaining, and insisting that Zeba has raised the kids ‘wrong’.

The fact that he is painfully good looking is not helpful at all. But then again, most narcissists are. If they aren’t, they have so much charm that they make up for it. Highly toxic and severely emotionally challenged, Jami’s character is loathsome without being melodramatic. An evil character portrayed especially well. 

Come back in a coffin and other wedding gifts

Zeba and Jami are a household phenomenon.

The girl is wed, she is told to never return to her family home except in a coffin. Soon after, tiny pieces of her are shipped back to what was once her home in tinier coffins. In return, she receives handouts from her family, because the man she married refused to get a job, insisting that he came from privilege and maintaining a false sense of aristocracy.

Typically, what happens in a Zeba-Jami mess is that society looks the other way forever. Jami would refuse to be held accountable, and get more set in his ways. Zeba would decide to redouble her efforts, assuming she needed to prove herself. Typically, it is always a win-win for Jami.

Instead, Kafeel refuses to be a ‘typical’ drama. It does not deal in the usual Pakistani drama bargain where the woman’s suffering is redeemed by her patience. It demands that the man answer for himself. In Pakistani television, that is close to revolutionary.

Kafeel is a spiritual drama. It insists that there is more to marriage than a transfer of power. It insists, in the form of Zeba’s wizened father, that a marriage is a contract. One party not pulling their weight in life will cause a fissure, then a gaping hole, and eventually there will be a legal breach of contract. No matter how much one acts like Zeba.

I know no elder who has been that wise.

Elders become wise like this after the woman leaves, not before she leaves and certainly not during. Elders these days are all about the convenience of optics — how it looks to everyone. Elders are — and almost always have been — addicted to a woman who is muzzled or silenced at all costs and makes very little fuss.

Elders insist that once a mistake has been made and a match is not a good fit, that the mistake must be converted into a life sentence. Some call it sabar-shukar. Kafeel calls it peace at the cost of justice.

Zeba’s father is the real hero

In the drama, there is such immense clarity from Zeba’s father when he says that the role of the man is to instil peace with justice. It may be a role for a woman too, but first, a man must be a protector. With the GDP per capita ratio being what it is in Pakistan, it is important that that provision means money.

Zeba’s father does not shy away from talking money.

Often, when the broader relative cabal wants the woman to not make a peep, they usually do so because they are uncomfortable about speaking about the role money has in the breakdown of a marriage. But money is ubiquitous. Money is everything. It is hair on a good hair day, it is a breeze after a 10k hike, it is a shawl at the beginning of winter, and it certainly pays those relative’s food bills.

Yet, there is so much aversion to honest money-talk. There is so much distaste for talking about this one thing that fuels your life.

Jami can’t work, won’t work

Jami is a sick man. My thesis is that men who are kept, and then willingly stay within the confines of false status are removed from the blessings of good old fashioned hard work. They find hustle beneath their glory and would rather the women slog at work just like they do at home.

The truth of the economy evades them and the truth of the household economy definitely evades them. They have no clue what proportion and measure go into running a household — the cost of the UPS, plumbing repairs and the rising price of LNG and gasoline, or even the mounting health costs of a dysfunctional household.

Pakistan makes no sense sometimes, making weddings a million-dollar industry but making marriages a woman-only problem. Zeba is a special breed because she thinks: no, thank you.

There is always a point in a woman’s life where something gives way. For Zeba, it was getting shoved against the wall and having her mouth twisted. She spoke up with that same mouth when she asked for her right to a safe environment.

Every time a woman snaps in two, an angel somewhere sings.

The Jamis of the world are just people, not deities we are made to worship and bow down to thanks to male privilege. Male privilege in moderate quantities is a slow poison for women, but in excess, it snaps a woman in two.

Kafeel beautifully portrays how this poison can become an impetus through which a woman can rise from the ashes. But first, she has to use her feet.

Actors and models tasked their good friend Chat GPT to get them ready for the biggest night in global fashion and the results were… something.

Azfar Rehman — The one who followed the dress code

Let’s start with one of the better ones. Azfar Rehman’s “Met Gala look” was a suit and cape inspired by Barcelona’s iconic La Pedrera — a heritage building from the early 20th-century designed by Antoni Gaudi. It was perhaps the only look that kept to the Gala’s theme of ‘Fashion is Art’.

On the flip side, Mehwish Hayat called the outfit “very holesome” and we’re kinda mad we didn’t come up with that one.

Tooba Siddiqui — Mad Max: GT Road

Tooba Siddiqui kept things desi and likely used “goth truck art” — three words that have probably never been uttered together before –– in the prompt she used for her dress.

What came out can only be described as “truck art if the truck driver was also a pirate”. There’s very little colour, there are skulls, everything is black. It looks like something a toxic ex would wear to your wedding.

Srha Asgr — Fashion is the art gallery

In a leap of logic only AI is capable of, Srha Asgr’s look said, “Fashion is art, art is found in galleries, therefore fashion is the gallery.”

Her gown was covered from neck to toe in — empty — picture frames, making us wonder whether she was sending a message about the new-age obsession with everything picture-perfect, or if she just called it a day after a couple of messages with her chatbot.

Hina Altaf — Dressed for the wrong year

Hina Altaf had her look generated for a Met Gala, just not the one in 2026. Her look, a form-fitting tunic with a mandarin collar and gold embroidery would have worked for past events which focused on history — maybe 1979, when the theme was the Hapsburg-era fashion.

Still, if she’d get something similar made by real people and wear it to a real event, we think it could work.

Ahmed Ali Butt — Solar Superman

Okay, Ahmed Ali Butt’s creation was definitely unfit for this year’s Met Gala. He knows it, we know it, everyone knows it.

Still, the actor did send a message about renewable energy with the wings embedded with solar panels and a gas cylinder with “no gas” printed on it. We’re not sure we get the Jordans though.

Jokes aside, it’s odd to see so many artists resort to AI for costume inspiration at a time when Pakistani fashion can be said to be experiencing a golden age both at home and abroad.

Pakistan’s art scene would perhaps be better served if these celebrities worked with their friends and colleagues in the fashion industry to host an actual themed gala to benefit our own museums.

When the world is turning to Pakistani brands like Warp and Rastah for fashion, why are our own celebrities going to half-baked robots to dress them up anyway?

The movie starts off with Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), who is finally the investigative journalist she dreamed of becoming. She’s about to accept a journalism award when she, along with her entire team, gets fired. Andy proceeds to deliver a speech about the importance of journalism and how the story matters more than the money.

Her speech is a testament to the current state of the media. It’s no longer the over-beautified and glorified early 2000s. Rom-coms from that era sold us a false dream of girlhood and making it as a successful writer. It was simply a tried-and-tested trope that worked at the time.

With the new movie, it’s clear that the trope looks quite different now. The Devil Wears Prada 2 was, on a whole, good. It was fun, nostalgic and exciting to revisit characters and spaces we cherished years ago. Meryl Streep stuns, as always, as Miranda Priestly, although I do think her character was much softer in this film and that she initially seemed to accept her fate in the downfall of Runway.

Stanley Tucci as Nigel is as witty and classy as ever. The movie touched upon the fashion, the conglomerates and the chaos of the industry but still somehow fell short because a sequel is never as good as the original. The plot looks different now and I think the best thing the movie did was comment on the dying media landscape. It hit all the right notes with the fashion, the art, the office space and the cameos, although the score could have been better.

Storytellers versus systems

Whether it was Runway, Poise Magazine (13 Going on 30), Composure (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or Scarlet (The Bold Type), the early 2000s emerged as the girl boss, glossy magazine era. Today, the media industry (even in rom-coms) looks different.

The Devil Wears Prada built a brand that relied on the expression of bold fashion and luxury, as well as the rise of print media. But now, with part two, there are some realities fiction cannot hide from. Print media has died, leaving editors to create reels and polls, and writers to rely on clicks for their voices to mean something.

In the film, Runway has been digitised and the people behind the magazine are scrambling to hold it together. Finance bros like BJ Novak are now making big decisions for things they don’t know anything about. As Miranda asked in one of my favourite scenes from the movie, what about artistry?

The value society places on storytelling and good journalism has been dying for a while, but beyond that, the movie shows how power has shifted. Even Miranda, someone who has been in the field for years, has a lingering fear of being let go. And that is a clear reflection of the industry today. The stakeholders are different now and the power no longer lies with cultural producers — it lies with corporations.

As Kriti Gupta writes for Refinery29, “The ‘devil’ isn’t Miranda Priestly. It’s the room she’s standing in.”

We ask ourselves now, 20 years after the release of The Devil Wears Prada, how does the world look different? In an age of AI, clickbait journalism, doomscrolling and bed-rotting, people are not reading enough. Listicles rake in the numbers and long-form pieces are left in the dust.

When Andy publishes her first piece as features editor of Runway, she gets some solid feedback from others but Miranda asks a pressing question: “But did people read it?” And that was, in fact, what mattered to her. Even a journalist like Andy, who initially wanted to chase the great American story, began spending her time analysing metrics.

The collapse of feminist media spaces

So many women-run media companies have shut down over the past three years — Gal-dem, Bitch Media, Self Magazine. Refinery29 has been downsizing. Teen Vogue no longer exists. There’s a clear pattern here — feminist publications have been shutting down and shrinking and I don’t think it’s because people don’t read them.

In the age of AI and the finance bro, there seems to be a lack of value people place on publications like these, leading to a loss of independent female voices. I worked at an all-women-run digital media company for years and we housed voices from across the globe, told stories that mattered, but we shut down too. It isn’t that the media industry is dying — it’s that there has been a global shift from community-run spaces to corporate control.

An entire ecosystem is burning to the ground, and we can’t do anything about it because of ‘evolution’ and the patriarchy and the loss of individualism in this age.

The advertising economy

Magazines used to be filled with pages of luxury ads. Advertisers relied heavily on these publications to get word of their products out there. Brands now no longer need to rely on a “middleman” — they run their own ads on social media. Now, we rely on algorithms and there is no longer someone filtering the content we receive. The audience, the readers, never went anywhere, but the power has definitely shifted.

Journalist Harry Cheadle writes, “Digital media companies were attracting their audiences in large part through social media apps and search engines — that audience wasn’t ‘ours’ in any meaningful sense. These platforms gradually realised they wanted to keep people on Instagram or Facebook or the Google results page rather than sending the traffic to publishers.”

In the age of Substack, where Cheadle wrote his essay on the death of the digital media, writers are seeking out spaces to actively put their work out there. Some of that work may have initially existed within publications that have now shut down.

People are still searching for that community that was once created through this fantasy of magazines. But community looks different now. And while the end of The Devil Wears Prada 2 gave us hope, with Miranda still helming Runway, the message about the transformation of the media industry is clear.

The movie isn’t a serious retelling of the industry nor is it supposed to be. It’s just a reminder that we are now living in a solo creator economy. Every industry is shaped by the new generation and maybe it’s time to let go of the fantasy and ground ourselves in reality.

The media industry isn’t really dying, it’s just restructuring.

The activists, including Sheema Kermani and Karachi City Council member Shahzadi Rai, were released later in the day on the orders of Sindh Home Minister Ziaul Hasan Lanjar, but not before public outcry began on X over what some netizens called a sign of “shrinking” civil liberties.

Others called the display “shameful”. They questioned why the right to peaceful assembly was being infringed upon and whether it was even upheld anymore, especially when it came to Aurat March.

People, including activist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr, were especially outraged at clips of Kermani being manhandled by police personnel and being pushed into the back of a police car.

People wondered if this is how members of the province’s ruling party are treated — Rai is a member of the PPP — how would the police deal with non-members. Her arrest was also condemned by netizens as “unacceptable”.

Another video of an activist being carried into a police van was labelled a “disgrace”.

As the date of their annual protest approaches, Aurat March organisers have said they “will not back down” from their demand to hold the protest in Karachi and will continue to seek the necessary clearance.

They called the police action a “scare tactic” and demanded an explanation from the government on why their activists were arrested and why the NOC is being delayed.

This underage casting trend recalibrates how Pakistani audiences view girlhood and its possibilities. Girls are being written into marriages and emotionally difficult relationships in unequal dynamics. Many TV series depict young girls playing adult roles; instead of casting them as adolescents navigating education, identity, or friendships, these series show girls as marriageable adults, romantic interests, wives, and emotional anchors. They compress, accelerate, and ultimately erase girlhood, both narratively and socially.

At first glance, this trend is just an extension of long-standing tropes and casting trends. It’s no surprise that young women have always been sexualised, commodified, and cast opposite much older men. Audiences have been conditioned to like young female actors. Pakistani TV has also historically relied on narratives of young, naïve, pliable girls paired with older, ‘more mature’ men.

These dramas frequently position the teenage heroine as both childlike and romantically desirable, or childlike hence desirable. However, what makes this recent trend more problematic is not simply the age gap — it’s the narrative insistence that these girls are ready for adulthood, that they can and should seamlessly transition into marriage and motherhood. This girl, this heroine is simultaneously someone to be dismissed, guided, disciplined, and ultimately possessed.

This trend is particularly concerning in a country where public discourse around women’s right to education, work, access to public spaces, and choosing a life partner is already very contentious.

Amid the ongoing debates over gender-based rights and responsibilities in Pakistan, this trend both normalises the adultification of girls, ie the premature attribution of adult roles and responsibilities to young girls, and also conditions the audience to accept it.

This adultification operates alongside implicit sexualisation of girls. Girls are not only expected to behave like grown women but are also consistently framed as desirable and thereby marriageable within adult romantic economies. It is critical to remember that violence against women in Pakistan often occurs because men believe that women should be available to them romantically, or because men insist that women should be available for marriage, or because men expect that women should unconditionally perform their gendered responsibilities as assigned to them by the patriarchy.

What happens when men watch the romanticised reassurances of the same beliefs and expectations on their TV screens? What happens when young girls watch romanticised versions of these patriarchal beliefs and fantasies portrayed as girls’ success on their TVs?

Meem Se Mohabbat, P Se Problem

Let’s look at Meem Se Mohabbat, starring Dananeer Mobeen and Ahad Raza Mir. Roshi is introduced as a chulbuli, clumsy girl who, in the first episode, fails her Bachelors of Engineering admission test. Based on this, she is presumably 17 to 19 years old. Yet, by the last episode, the same teenager is married to her boss, who is a successful businessman and a divorced father of a five to six-year-old son with a speaking disability. During her journey from an intern to boss’s wife, the story problematises this age gap.

At one point, the boss’s girlfriend accuses Roshi and says, “Tum apni kam-umri ka faida utha ker Talha Ahmed ko hasil kernay ko koshish ker rahi ho (you are trying to use your youth to get Talha Ahmed).” The boss, Talha, describes her as a “gher zimadar, immature, aur kam-umer larki (irresponsible, immature and underage girl).” On the surface, this attention to their age gap highlights that the relationship is inappropriate.

However, the narrative also uses it to infantilise Roshi, to show that she needs a caretaker. The drama ultimately resolves this tension of their age gap — not by challenging or undoing the romantic relationship — but by romanticising it.

Not only does the series romanticise and neutralise their age gap, but it also declares Roshi responsible for this romantic resolution. In the last episode, she incredulously says to the boss, “aap ne mujhse kahan shadi kerni thi (since when did you want to marry me)?” and he responds “tumahri zidd aur mohabbat jeet gai (your stubbornness and love won).”

The series shows that the boss married the intern only because of her persistence, ignoring that he makes Roshi’s fiancé disappear on their wedding day to ‘save’ her and marries her himself. Young Roshi’s zidd or stubbornness is framed as triumphant, while the man’s hesitation due to the age gap is recast as his moral conscientiousness.

Focus on her triumphant zidd creates the illusion of Roshi’s agency, and it absolves the boss of any wrongdoing. The drama rewards the young intern by endowing both wifehood and motherhood on her. This pairing of a young girl with an older man reinforces a model of heterosexual desire, one that privileges male authority and female youth. The drama becomes a reassurance of this male desire because it first problematises, then normalises, and eventually romanticises this desire for the audience.

Meem Se Mohabbat also maternalises the young girl. It links her desirability to her capacity for care, her potential for motherhood. Many of the romantic moments between the couple occur when Roshi interacts with her boss’s son. Instead of showing her as an adult with the child, due to Roshi’s childlikeness and her age, they appear to be children of different ages. And somehow, many of these scenes are followed by the boss romantically gazing at her.

The boss also goes on to threaten Roshi that if something were to happen to his son, he would hold her responsible. Mind you, the girl couldn’t even take care of herself at the start of the series. He himself appears to be failing at taking care of his child. But he shifts his own failure as a father onto the girl before they are even married.

Kafeel’s entirely too quiet feminism

Let’s also look at Kafeel, starring Sanam Saeed and Emmad Irfani, which is a women’s rights-oriented drama. Zeba’s parents suspect she is having an affair, so they quickly marry her off to the first available man, Jami. She is not allowed to even complete her education. After she’s married, she learns that her husband is unemployed, irresponsible, and disloyal to her.

Her father encourages her to get a divorce, but other women, including her mother and grandmother, push against it. Zeba becomes the sole bread earner in her household and raises her three daughters and a son without any financial or emotional support from her husband.

But Zeba, seemingly, does not learn much from her own experience as a woman in a financially and emotionally abusive marriage. Instead of teaching her daughters the importance of financial autonomy, she hopes that they will marry up. The sole aspiration she shares for her eldest daughter is a good husband, big kitchen, and a big house after marriage.

Zeba’s sister is a successful architect and lives in a palatial house that she designed with her husband. But instead of actively modelling her to highlight the possibility of financial autonomy along with a successful marriage, the drama reduces her to a minor character.

Many episodes focus on the eldest daughter Javeria’s marriage and use it as a tool to highlight the problems they face due to their father. Zeba’s daughters’ friend, Daneen’s whole character is based on her desire to marry Zeba’s son, Subuk. Daneen is a school-going girl and is shown wearing a school (or perhaps a college) uniform in the drama. Even inside the school, the topic of conversation is her marriage with Subuk. We never learn much about these girls beyond their own or their mothers’ desires about their marriages.

We never learn what any of these girls study, what their interests are, or what their career aspirations are. Though both their mother and aunt are working women, instead of learning about the importance of financial autonomy, the daughters are shown to hope for a more responsible husband for their chances at a life better than their mother’s. It reduces young girls to dependents awaiting marriage, without ever assigning them complete personhood.

Within the plot, there is an internal contradiction: the series that aims to highlight women’s rights ends up centring teenage girls in marriage plots, making its own message ambiguous. It feeds into the widely-believed idea of daughter as a liability, a responsibility, a burden. The series gestures toward themes of women’s empowerment — showing, for instance, a mother who gains independence through employment and secures a khula. Yet this lesson is not extended to the daughters.

This reflects a broader pattern of feminist façade in television, where dramas flippantly acknowledge feminist ideas but rarely integrate them into their storylines. They create the appearance of feminist engagement without a substantive shift in narrative priorities.

By framing early marriage as romantic or inevitable, these dramas also make limited access to education, economic dependency, gender-based violence, and legal vulnerabilities seem inescapable. By collapsing adolescence into adulthood, these TV series actively reshape the boundaries of girlhood.

Many of these female actors presumably come from the upper-middle class, and are academically and professionally ambitious, as any young girls should be. But, ironically, their work provides the Pakistani public reassurances of regressive patriarchal beliefs. At a time when feminists are challenging early marriages, advocating for women’s education, and demanding greater autonomy for women in Pakistan, the persistent portrayal of teenage girls as wives and mothers strengthens the barriers keeping women down.

This trend suggests that, despite the changing discourse, the fundamental expectations placed on girls remain the same.

These series also shape the aesthetic orientations of the audience as they get used to seeing girls in adult roles, and thereby age out senior female actors. Female actors have always faced this gendered ageism and often share how their professional prospects dwindle or become limited while their male counterparts continue to play heroes.

Comments on female actors’ social media posts are often ageist. Recently, in an interview, Firdous Jamal defined a heroine as a “15 to 16-year-old, or at maximum 18 to 20-year-old girl” who is “chulbuli”, “chanchal”, “innocent” and “excites the audience”.

Unsurprisingly, the actor playing the eldest daughter in Kafeel, Nooray Zeeshan, is 16 years old. She shared that she was offered multiple roles because she looks ‘innocent’. This casting practice eliminates or limits the possibility of work for female actors after a certain age. Patriarchies have always prized women’s innocence and naiveté and underage casting exacerbates this. Teenagers are the desired target of both patriarchy and capitalism: young enough to be moulded, old enough to be sexualised and commodified.

In centring teenage girls in adult roles on screen, these dramas offer both a reassurance and a continued fantasy to their male audience, of a world where young girls remain available to older men, where girls remain financially and emotionally dependent, hence exploitable.

For the female audience, these dramas romanticise the misconception that their value lies in their youth, their innocence, and their marriageability. But this reassurance and romanticisation comes at a cost that girls and women continue to pay for everyone’s entertainment.

In a story on Instagram, she reacted to a video about the incident, asking why it wasn’t being reported on and what was being done to rescue them.

Anjum was also worried about the crew, especially one member he said “is like a brother to me”. He claimed the government “has taken no action” in a series of stories posted on his Instagram account.

He said he was “ashamed” as a Pakistani at the government’s “non seriousness” and “under the rug policy” when it came to its citizens trapped abroad. He pleaded for authorities to “wake up and bring them home”.

Farooq expressed disbelief at the incident, asking who people should go to for justice in a crisis like this.

The vessel “Owner 25” was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden last week and its crew — which includes the Indonesian captain alongside Pakistani sailors — has been held hostage ever since.

The foreign ministry is in contact with the government of Somalia about the incident and is taking part in a collaborative effort with the Ministry of Maritime Affairs, the Pakistan Navy and other stakeholders to secure the release of the Pakistani citizens.

Sindh Governor Syed Muhammad Nehal Hashmi met family members of the Pakistani hostages on Monday and assured them both the provincial and federal governments stood with them in this trying time.

He said communication with the kidnapped Pakistanis remained intact and efforts for their safe recovery were ongoing at all levels.

In a vlog posted on Sunday, the actor made her distaste for Jamal’s comments clear and told him they were inappropriate and out of line.

Ansari said it was her firm belief that it was “difficult to find a mediocre actor” in Pakistan’s entertainment industry, but she wouldn’t announce it to the world even if she did find one.

She said the job of correcting actors and telling them how to perform fell on their directors and “insulting your colleagues on their craft, that too on social media, is highly inappropriate”.

Without taking his name and referring to him as “an accomplished actor”, Ansari said Jamal calling other senior actors “selfish”, “showpiece” and “mediocre” did not suit him and she would never make similar comments about his own work — even if it wasn’t up to par.

The Dekh Zara Pyar Se star said it was common courtesy not to speak ill of the dead. “That applies to all people, but to berate an artist after he has left the mortal realm? Someone saying something I can’t even repeat about Talat Hussain; or saying Abid [Ali] was selfish; or that Shafi [Muhammad] was of little use; or that Khayyam Sarhadi couldn’t speak well; that Rahat Kazmi, may God keep him safe, was a showpiece, this is very bad.”

She asked Jamal to be careful what example he is setting for the next generation. “This is the height of bad manners and it’s what you’re passing down to the next generation. When you pass away, or I do, the kids will dig up our corpses and insult us, saying, ‘What did these fossils know, they acted so high and mighty when they were alive. They only knew to act in one tone.’ Who knows what people will say, don’t encourage such things.”

Ansari said the actor was a better than she was, but he didn’t seem to be doing alright. “I don’t think he’s okay. He’s been through cancer, may God give him health, but I feel like his medications have made him forget how be respectful.”

She asked him to consider the impact his words have on people, “Think of how Abid Ali’s daughters feel and his wife. Think of Talat Hussain… his children must be feeling terrible. Shafi’s son… think of how he feels. You spoke about Rahat Kazmi, think about how his son feels. What are you saying… Get a hold of yourself, please, get some rest.”

Ansari also had something to say about podcasts and how everyone seems to have one nowadays. She said she had only ever appeared on one — and only because it was hosted by Ahmed Ali Butt and she was friends with his grandmother — but she knew a thing or two about interviews from her own time in the field.

She said people had forgotten how to be respectful on podcasts and interviewers back in her day like Khushbakht Shujaat, Obaidullah Baig, Mehtab Rashdi and Tariq Aziz had class and respect for their guests.

Jamal was a guest on The Yazziastic Show on April 20, when he made the disparaging comments about his contemporaries and colleagues. He said Ali was a “type actor” and “selfish”, while calling Hussain “monotonous” and reliant on “cheap theatricalities”. Sarhadi, he said, was “difficult to understand” and lacked the finesse of a trained artist.

He had praise for Qavi Khan, but that was about it. He said Kazmi was more of a “showpiece” than an actor. He called Shujaat Hashmi “self centred” and said Muhammad lacked in craft.

This not the first time the senior actor has gotten into trouble for his public comments. His comments about Mahira Khan in 2019 caused an uproar in the industry and were condemned by all quarters as ageist and sexist.

The matter reached an unprecedented height when Momina Duraid announced her production company MD Productions “will not work with him again in any capacity because of his sexist, regressive and discriminatory attitude”.

While people are urged to exercise austerity in their fuel consumption in light of supply instability, markets have been told to close early and many offices are asking employees to work from home, we know everyone needs to step out of the house sometimes.

So, for anyone who can’t stay at home pretending we’re back in a lockdown but also can’t afford to fill up their gas tanks, here are eight ways to get around without a car.

Walking

Starting off simple, this is probably the easiest and healthiest way to go places, just get up and start walking.

Pros:

• It’s free and you don’t need any equipment — except maybe a comfortable pair of shoes.
• It’s healthy too, you can meet your daily step goals every day.

Cons:

• There is a very high chance of falling into a ditch, or a manhole, or a puddle that’s deeper than you expected.
• You might be a little late to that wedding.

Bicycles

This is pretty simple too, you can’t forget once you’ve learnt.

Pros:

• Really healthy, especially if you want toned legs.
• Significantly faster than walking.

Cons:

• You’re still the slowest thing on the road.
• Not great when dealing with potholes in Karachi.

Horses

This how people used to get around in the ‘good old days’ when nobody worried about petrol prices.

Pros:

• It’s basically a self-driving car, so there’s not a lot you need to do.
• You now have a new friend to keep you company on your journeys.

Cons:

• Your new friend can deliver a mean kick with its hind legs.
• Horses are actually really expensive to buy and keep, so it might just be cheaper to drive…

Electric vehicles

It’s all the fun of driving with none of the fuel cost.

Pros:

• A lot cheaper to run than petrol-driven cars and bikes.
• They’re eco-friendly too!

Cons:

• You’re stuck if the battery dies.
• Would be great if we didn’t have constant power outages and soaring electricity prices.

Skateboards

Definitely the coolest idea on the list — maybe you can throw on a backwards cap and shades to complete the look.

Pros:

• Looks super cool.
• Costs nothing to run.

Cons

• Not as easy as it looks.
• You’ll never be as cool as that cat.

Carpooling

If you know a bunch of people going to and from the same general area, this can cut costs significantly.

Pros:

• Driving is not nearly as unaffordable if multiple people are paying for it.
• It can be nice if the other people are fun to talk to or if your music tastes align.

Cons:

• What if they’re boring, or they listen to Chahat Fateh Ali Khan…?!
• You might have to carpool with and talk to the office weirdo (you know who we’re talking about).

Teleportation

Imagine leaving for somewhere five minutes before you need to be there and somehow still getting there on time.

Pros:

• It’s super fast.
• It’s probably safer than driving in Karachi.
• You don’t need to park.

Cons:

• You’re gonna have to invent a teleportation machine.

Magic carpet

The best option if you want to see the world — shining, shimmering and splendid.

Pros:

• Super comfortable, especially if you shell out for the extra fuzzy one.
• Can be kept inside when not in use.

Cons:

• Do you have any idea how tedious it is to file a flight plan and get it approved?
• Air pollution means your laundry bill is probably going to be higher than your fuel bill if you drove places.

Okay, all options considered, we think we’re just going to stay home for a little while. Maybe what we really need is convenient, efficient and affordable public transport…

I say this because even the great Indian film legend, Dilip Kumar, once remarked that ‘Moin Akhtar’s great artistry is worth copying.’

But Moin Akhtar was a lot more than just a comic. Beginning his long career as an impersonator, he went on to become a much appreciated stand-up comedian, TV, film and stage actor, talk-show host and then ultimately, going back to doing impersonations.

Surprisingly, not much is available on the man’s life in terms of a biography or a detailed study of this prolific artiste, even though he remained to be the country’s leading comic talent ever since the 1970s.

But Moin Akhtar’s gradual ascend towards stardom and legendary status was also wrought with some devastating failures that took a toll on the man’s health.

He arrived onto the scene at a time when Pakistan, like the rest of the world, too was about to enter a period in the 1960s when urban youth had begun to question the materialism and conservative politics of their parents and were demanding more breathing space to practice their new artistic and political ideas.

Moin Akhtar’s rise was not rapid. His fame grew through word-of-mouth, especially on his home turf in Karachi.

He had been impersonating his teachers and famous Pakistani film actors in school when all of a sudden he was called up by the organisers of a Pakistan Day event at a club in Karachi in 1966. He was just 16 years old.

When his turn came to perform on stage, he did what he was already doing in school. But this time, he added a new act to his impersonation repertoire — that of the famous Pakistani film actor, Mohammad Ali.

Ali had been popular for his loud emotional scenes and a booming voice, and when Moin Akhtar impersonated and mimicked all this to perfection (also adding his own twists and bits), the crowd at the event is said to have erupted in laughter. They had never seen or heard anything like this.

Word about Moin Akhtar’s antics spread and he soon became a popular draw at ‘variety shows’ at universities, colleges and parties.

It is also interesting to note that even though Pakistan’s campuses in the late 1960s had begun to vibrate with fiery uprisings against the Ayub Khan dictatorship, Moin Akhtar mostly kept his act apolitical, concentrating on mimicking and revolving his skits around famous film personalities.

Although he managed to make a modest living doing such shows, his first big break came when in 1970, a 20-year-old Moin Akhtar was invited to perform at the time’s most popular primetime stage show on Pakistan Television (PTV).

Called the Zia Mohyeddin Show and hosted by the now famous intellectual Zia Mohyeddin, Moin Akhtar left the audience in stitches when he mimicked the voices of those who had presented PTV’s special transmission during the country’s first democratic elections in 1970.

This was also one of the first few occasions he had come face-to-face with Anwar Maqsood.

Anwar Maqsood had been working as a scriptwriter for the show, but would go on to became a famous satirist and struck a celebrated abiding partnership with the comic genius.

But all this would shape up a decade later. After his successful stint on the Zia Mohyeddin Show, Moin Akhtar became a permanent fixture on PTV, even going on to host his own show called Monday Kay Monday.

Surprisingly, not many acting offers came his way from either TV or film. He continued working as a mimic and impersonator but got a career boost when in 1973, he pulled off a hugely successful show at Karachi’s famous Beach Luxury Hotel where apart from exhibiting his highly improvised impersonation of the time’s famous film stars, he also began impersonating the cultural idiosyncrasies of the many different ethnicities that resided in Pakistan.

It is said that he was one of the first Pakistani comics to do so, an act that would successfully be carried forward by the likes of famous PTV comics, Majid Jehangir, Ismail Tara, Umar Sharif and Liaquat Soldier.

As Moin Akhtar maintained his presence in the public eye as a young comic through various shows on PTV, his main income came from doing private shows for multinationals and colleges.

However, though still ignored by PTV for his acting potential, in 1975 Moin Akhtar finally got an offer to work in a film.

By the mid-1970s the Pakistan film industry had begun to hit a peak, producing an average of 200 films a year (mostly in Urdu, but also in Punjabi, Gujrati, Sindhi and Pashtu).

The film that Moin Akhtar appeared in was called Tajdar, and his role of a typical Lollywood maskhara (jester), could not save the film from being a flop. But the failure didn’t stop Moin Akhtar’s ascendancy to stardom.

During the lack of acting offers from TV and film, Moin Akhtar continued to brush up and fatten his mimicry and hosting skills, and he continued to be a popular draw at private events and club shows, also doing his bit on various PTV shows.

He had also been working in commercial theatre. This form of theatre, over which men like Umar Sharif would rule, was still in its infancy.

Luck seemed to have bypassed him again when in 1978 young director Shoaib Mansoor (who would go on to become a prominent TV and film director), began casting actors for a comedy skit show on PTV.

Moin Akhtar should have been an automatic choice, but Mansoor and the show’s scriptwriter, Anwar Maqsood, instead went for relatively unknown stage actors from Karachi, such as Majid Jehangir, Ismail Tara and Zeba Shahnaz. Some like Sakhi Kamal were studying at the University of Karachi and were also politically active there.

Nevertheless, the show, Fifty-Fifty was an instant hit. Inspired by the more sophisticated satire show, Shoaib Hashmi’s Such Gup (1973-76) – that had been banned by the new military dictatorship in 1977 – Fifty-Fifty mixed sophisticated wit with populist humour, parodying the bureaucracy, ethnic idiosyncrasies, the declining standards of  the film industry and PTV itself. It ran from 1978 until 1984.

It succeeded in swimming through even the most repressive censorship laws imposed by the Zia dictatorship.

Moin Akhtar’s destiny could have turned out to be quite different had Anwar Maqsood not quit the Fifty-Fifty team after experiencing a fall-out with its director and actors in 1981.

As Ismail Tara and Majid Jehangir took over the writing duties of Fifty-Fifty, Anwar Maqsood went on to script and appeared on a series of his own shows (also on PTV) such as Show Time, Shoshah, Silver Jubilee, etc.

For these he chose two central comedians, Moin Akhtar and Bushra Ansari. It was during these shows that Moin Akhtar really blossomed into a diversified comic.

The duo played a number of fictitious characters, mouthing witty scripts jotted down by Anwar Maqsood, who too became famous for successfully dodging the censors with tongue-in-cheek remarks that were actually taunts aimed at the Zia regime and its overbearing moralities.

This was also the first time Moin Akhtar saw himself doing socio-political scripts. Slowly but surely, he was finally emerging from his status as a cult favorite and onto the mainstream as a versatile comic.

The 1980s had been rather fruitful. Moin Akhtar had risen from being a cult star and master mimic to becoming a regular skit actor on various successful Anwar Maqsood projects.

And even though he still did not manage to get regular work as an actor, he had begun to venture into the lucrative comedy theatre scene that had begun to grow in Karachi and Lahore.

Nevertheless, after the demise of the Ziaul Haq dictatorship and the return of democracy in Pakistan in 1988, three performances by Moin Akhtar (between 1988 and 1993) finally handed him the stardom his talents had always promised and deserved.

First, it was his role in a wonderfully done comedy play on PTV called, Eid Train. Aired on the night of the first day of Eid in 1989, it captured Moin Akhtar playing his now trademark character of a loudmouthed, straight-talking (but skinny) Karachiite. The play was a huge hit.

Then there was his laudable performance as an aged writer in a long-play (for PTV), penned by Anwar Maqsood called Half-Plate, in which Moin Akhtar plays an old writer who is suffering from a financial crises but refuses to take up his ancestral profession of a kabaabchi (cook).

Starring alongside Moin Akhtar in the play was the great actress, late Khalida Riyasat and the fidgety late Jamshed Ansari. Incidentally, the fourth main actor of the play, the versatile Latif Kapadia, too is no more in this world.

But perhaps the most well-known acting performance from Moin Akhtar was a 1993 play on PTV called Rozy.

Moin Akhtar was now dishing out a series of great acting performances, as if making up for the all those times his acting skills were ignored. His performance in Rozy in this respect saw him hit a peak.

Written by playwright and journalist Imran Aslam, Rozy was an ambitious adaptation of Dustin Hoffman’s famous Hollywood hit, Tootsie.

Tootsie shows a struggling actor dressing up as a woman to get a part in a soap opera.

Aslam took the plot of Tootsie and wittily turned it into a statement against the kind of harassment women face in the workplace.

Moin Akhtar intensely played the role of the struggling angry-young-actor who dons make-up and women’s attire to land a part in a TV serial.

Moin Akthar had finally mushroomed into a star performer. The only other Pakistani comic that dared to be compared to his caliber was Umar Sharif, who too had broken out from his cult status and gained mainstream popularity, mainly through commercial theatre.

But Umar’s comedy was more populist, rapidly using Karachi’s street lingo and imagery, whereas Moin Akhtar still kept a middle-class sensibility about his acts.

Nevertheless, when Umar directed, scripted and acted in his own film in the early 1990s, Moin Akhtar followed suit.

Umar’s film became a box-office hit, and Moin Akhtar, fresh from his successful acting exploits on TV, invested heavily in his own film called Mr.K2.

Unfortunately the film turned out to be a financial and critical disaster. Friends suggest that this colossal failure took a heavy toll on the comic genius who was also a heavy-smoker and loved to stay up nights with friends and colleagues.

A reckless and unhealthy lifestyle coupled by his workaholic nature and the failure of his film venture led him to suffer a heart attack. He got a by-pass done in 1997 but returned to regain what he had lost.

He began hosting celebrity shows, but it was Anwar Maqsood’s satirical talk-show, Loose Talk, that brought him back into the limelight.

A parody of BBC’s Hard Talk, Anwar Maqsood would play Pakistan’s version of Tim Sebastian week after week, talking to all sorts of fictional characters, from politicians and maulvis, to heroin addicts and businessmen – all of them played with ingenious insight and hilarity by Moin Akhtar.

It is said Moin Akhtar had played more than 200 different characters on the hit show!

Alas, this mind-boggling exhibition of versatility was to be this comic genius’ last great hurrah before his death from a heart-attack at the age of 60.

This article was originally published on April 23, 2011

According to a press release issued on Tuesday, the decisions were made in a meeting at the headquarters of the Capital Development Authority (CDA) chaired by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, whose ministry oversees the CDA.

Residents of Islamabad, ever proud of their city’s natural charm, took to X in a fury to denounce the plans to develop one of the city’s most lush green areas.

Netizens questioned why the project was necessary and what had been done to assess and mitigate the environmental harm that would result from it.

Even Senator Sherry Rehman, the former federal minister for climate change, called on the government to review the plans. She said the Margalla green area is a “protected zone” and highlighted the “brutal” evictions in Bari Imam, saying “compassion and compensation must come before anything else for vulnerable populations living in these areas from before 1947”.

Some users had suggestions on what could be done in place of development in the Margallas, ranging from building environmentally conscious attractions to building hotels and parks elsewhere in the city.

There was also a feeling there were other places in the country that could use a new 1,000 kanal park or two.

While details are still scarce, the park is expected to be built in the capital’s D-12 sector, one of the northernmost sectors bordering the Margalla Hills.

The development of hotels is especially uncertain as the area highlighted for the park is zoned in a way that would not allow major construction projects to proceed.

While it is unclear whether the CDA will alter its zoning laws or if the hotels will be built somewhere else, what is clear is that the people of Islamabad love the city’s trees and don’t want to see them cut down and replaced with concrete structures.

In a video posted by People magazine, the star talked about life in her 40s and said, “I want to live a long, healthy life, Inshallah, I hope so.”

Yeah, we did a double take while watching that clip and so did a bunch of people on X who thought they might have misheard something there.

Some people were sent and others were taken out by the invocation. One user even theorised that the actor’s pronunciation and placement meant Hathaway was someone who knew what the phrase meant and where to use it.

Inshallah wasn’t all she said in the interview.

In the sagely style of a person who lived their four decades on earth to the fullest, she said being 40 lets you look back at “how certain decisions bore fruit over time and so, you can kind of assess if you want to continue making those decisions, or if you want to make new ones”.

Hathaway said age had given her a better understanding of the phrase “take it with a grain of salt,” and she’d learnt to “really value the chill”.

She also said that in life “you can either fear aging, or you can fear dying young” and we really think someone needs to put that on a poster.

The actor said she embraces aging with “curiosity” and that some things don’t change as you get older, “You still never know what’s coming around the corner… and that’s true if you’re like 11 or you’re 43.”

The exposé, filmed over the course of several weeks in late 2025 after insider information said malpractice continued after a similar outbreak in 2024, claimed to have identified 331 children infected with the disease, linking the spread of the virus to syringes being reused at the hospital.

Netizens were outraged at the continued endangerment of young lives, calling the incident “sick” and “criminal”.

One user questioned what the government was doing about the repeated violations of basic medical ethics at a public hospital. He also said the use of disposable syringes had been banned in Pakistan, which poses another question of how this could happen.

He wasn’t alone in demanding answers, many users on X wanted to know what action was to be taken in light of the revelations.

One user called the situation “unbelievably cruel on so many levels”, decrying how “unnecessary” it was because of the low cost of syringes.

One user recalled that a similar story unfolded in Jalalpur Jattan. He lamented how nothing had changed in 18 years.

Activist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr also spoke out on the issue, mentioning past outbreaks in Sindh and how there were free programmes for patients to treat the disease.

He also cleared up some misconceptions people have regarding HIV. He clarified that the virus only spreads through injections and unprotected sexual activity.

He reiterated how regular human contact with a patient cannot result in HIV transmission. Unfortunately, as the report from the BBC pointed out, many of the children infected in Taunsa were facing societal stigma because of their illness.

Meanwhile, provincial authorities insisted corrective measures had been taken at THQ Hospital Taunsa after 11 HIV-positive patients were brought to Dera Ghazi Khan from the area.

They said a subsequent screening mission had identified 331 patients under the age of 12 and a permanent AIDS treatment facility was established at the hospital to deal with any further cases.

Without naming the BBC, the authorities said details of the corrective measures had been shared with the international broadcaster. The provincial health department said failure to include these steps in the report was “against the principles of responsible journalism”.

Jake Sully — a paraplegic marine, broken and discarded by his own civilisation — arrives on the planet Pandora as a spy. Within the film’s runtime, he tames the supreme aerial predator leonopteryx, becomes Toruk Makto (rider of the great leonopteryx) and leads the indigenous Na’vi against the very military he came with.

The indigenous people of Pandora do not merely accept him. They anoint him. The land, the creature, the prophecy — all of it folds around the outsider and declares him chosen.

This is not a coincidence of plot. It is a structure. And it is ancient.

Fantasy returns obsessively to the same architecture: an outsider enters a world not his own, encounters a people whose customs are foreign to him and, through exceptional ability and romantic initiation, fulfils a prophecy the indigenous people had kept for themselves.

Paul Atreides in Dune becomes Muad’Dib, rides the sandworm and leads the Fremen against the empire strip-mining their world — before building a larger empire of his own. In Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen arrives among the Dothraki as a transaction, a girl traded for an army. She takes the heart of the khal [warlord], learns the language, walks into fire and emerges khaleesi [queen].

The trope is not the result of a personality flaw in individual storytellers. It is a narrative technique. And from Robinson Crusoe to Dune’s Paul Atreides and Avatar’s Jake Sully, it has been doing the same work…

The pattern is not the prophecy. The pattern is the transfer. The pattern holds across genre, medium and decade.

Structure as ideology

The Martinican philosopher Édouard Glissant called this vulnerability by its right name. His concept — the right to opacity — holds that indigenous and marginalised peoples are entitled to keep their cultural practices, their prophecies and their interior life inaccessible to outsiders.

Glissant understood that, to become readable to the nation, to the empire, to the state, is to become conquerable. Interpretation precedes extraction. The anthropologist arrives before the soldier, but the soldier follows. What can be translated can be taken.

Fantasy, in this sense, is the literature of violated opacity. The outsider hero does not merely observe the indigenous world. He masters it. He learns the language faster than the natives expect, bonds with the sacred creature no one else could tame and earns the intimate trust of the people’s most powerful woman.

This last element is not decorative. It is what scholars have called the Pocahontas theology. It holds that, if the incoming outsider takes the heart of the indigenous woman, he acquires — through the covenant of romantic and eventually marital union — legitimate access to her body, her people, her land and the intimate knowledge of her culture.

The Catholic Church formalised this logic through marriage doctrine. Colonial law extended it. Fantasy renders it cinematic.

This is why love and prophecy travel together in these narratives. The prophecy legitimises the claim in the eyes of the people. The marriage transfers the property. Together, they produce a hero who is both spiritually endorsed and legally entitled. He has not conquered. He has been chosen.

The novel as a weapon

Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said argued — and this is not metaphor — in Culture and Imperialism that the novel itself was among the primary narrative instruments of colonisation. This is not metaphor. Robinson Crusoe — most commonly cited as the origin of the English novel — features a shipwrecked Englishman who encounters strange peoples, subdues a native he names Friday and builds a functioning colonial outpost on the island he treats as unowned.

What is adventure, Said asks, but an act of enterprise? Moby Dick is the obsession of a white captain with a white whale. Heart of Darkness is a journey into the African hinterland that is really a journey into the European self. The fantasy novel extends this tradition — Crusoe with magic systems, Captain Ahab with his white whale obsession, Heart of Darkness’ Kurtz with a prophecy already written in his name.

But the story did not stay in the library. It was put into the classroom.

In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his infamous Minute on Education, proposing the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions, morals and intellect.” The curriculum was the mechanism.

Colonised children across Asia and Africa were made to read the very texts that cast their own peoples as silent, waiting and illegible. They memorised Robinson Crusoe. They studied Rudyard Kipling. They were examined on their comprehension of The White Man’s Burden — a poem whose burden, notably, the white man had appointed himself.

The colonised did not merely encounter the outsider-hero narrative. They were made to reproduce it, to praise it, to aspire toward it. The most intimate conquest is not of territory, it is of imagination.

The consequences persisted long after formal empire ended. Several generations of postcolonial intellectuals have described the condition of seeing themselves through the coloniser’s eyes — of internalising their own opacity as backwardness, their own customs as primitive, their own prophecies as superstition.

The curriculum taught them to identify with Crusoe rather than Friday, with the arriving hero rather than the people he arrives among. It made the coloniser’s ascension feel not merely plausible but natural, even desirable. That is a more durable conquest than any garrison.

The manufactured messiah

The most uncomfortable version of the fantasy trope remains Dune. Frank Herbert wrote it as a critique. Paul Atreides is explicitly a messianic figure whose rise the author distrusted. But the novel contains a detail more damning than the ascension itself.

The Fremen prophecy that names Paul as their messiah was not ancient. It was planted. The Bene Gesserit — a secretive sisterhood that manipulates bloodlines and governments across the empire — had seeded messianic myths across dozens of cultures generations earlier through a programme called the Missionaria Protectiva. The purpose was explicit: manufacture a prophecy in advance so that a Bene Gesserit operative could later arrive and fulfil it.

Herbert was not merely warning against charismatic leaders. He was showing that the prophecy itself was a colonial instrument, engineered by outsiders for future exploitation. The Fremen did not dream their messiah. Someone else dreamed him for them and then sent him.

Readers still turned it into a power fantasy. That is what four centuries of conditioning produces — an audience trained to experience the coloniser’s welcome as a happy ending, even when the author is explaining the mechanism to their face.

Another ending is possible

Glissant’s opacity is not absence. It is resistance. When a people’s prophecies remain untranslated, the outsider cannot fulfil them. He cannot arrive and find that the ancient texts describe him. He cannot tame the sacred animal because he does not know it exists. Opacity is the condition under which a people’s future remains their own.

Fantasy keeps writing the same story because empire keeps needing it told. And the story has a name by now. The white saviour complex is not a personality flaw in individual filmmakers. It is a narrative technology — one that recasts colonial entry as selfless sacrifice and indigenous acceptance as the highest honour.

Jake Sully does not go home richer. He stays and leads. That is the refinement. The old empire took the land and left. The white saviour stays, loves, suffers and redeems — and in doing so, makes the taking feel like a gift.

What is telling is what other traditions did not produce. The great messianic figures of non-Western imagination are always of the people, never apart from them. The Mahdi in Islamic eschatology rises from within the community of believers. The Hindu avatar descends into the world in forms native to it — Rama among men, Krishna among cowherds. The Jewish messiah is awaited by the covenant people, not delivered to them by an outsider who happened to wander in and prove himself.

No Fremen prophecy, honestly told, would have named a Harkonnen. No Dothraki legend, left intact, would have awaited a Valyrian princess. These are not gaps in other cultures’ mythologies. They are evidence of a different relationship between a people and their own future — one in which the future was not expected to arrive on someone else’s ship.

The prophecy was never native. It was always the outsider’s because someone wrote it that way, long before the ship arrived. And the ultimate victory of the empire was ensuring that the children of the colonised learned to believe it too.

Originally published in Dawn, EOS, April 12th, 2026

Yet, despite our nation’s capital hosting its most important diplomatic event in recent history, some Pakistanis, true to their old habits, were more concerned about what female journalists reporting on the event were wearing.

In a sickening, regressive display of just how low people can go when it comes to subjugating women to their ideas of “appropriate dressing”, journalist Gharidah Farooqi came under fire from men — and even women — on social media for what she wore to go cover the event.

We will not dignify their vile commentary by talking about what Farooqi wore, except to say that it was not inappropriate. The real problem here is how women, no matter what they do, no matter what they wear, no matter where they are, will always be criticised by a society that believes it has the divine right to police them.

She was there, she was doing her job, neither the organisers nor the other attendees had any problem with her conduct and yet someone who was probably lying in bed enjoying their lazy weekend believed their thoughts on the journalist’s outfit were important enough to air to the world.

We wish we could tell you this was an isolated incident, that this was just an anomaly, but it’s a common experience for women across the country and something Farooqi has faced before.

Former prime minister Imran Khan once said she was asking to be harassed by reporting from male-dominated spaces, which is emblematic of the problem. We just hate it when women go out into the world and do things.

From assuming all women are bad drivers, to making unfounded claims against women in the entertainment industry to keeping the nation’s daughters away from an education and a career in the most extreme cases, nothing a woman does can ever be right.

Which brings us to the second problem — a few of the comments began to compare what Farooqi wore to journalists who were reporting for the Iranian press.

The government in Iran is conservative to the point that there are laws on what women can and cannot wear. Iran’s own women, or at least substantial segments of them, are not happy with this and have taken that anger to the streets in past.

The third and most pressing issue is one of privacy, consent and straight-up AI-enabled digital harassment. As Farooqi pointed out in a post on X, much of the conversation seems to be revolving around a picture of the journalist taken from behind without her consent.

Now, that’s bad enough to warrant its own outrage, but then people, blessed with the power of generative AI, created inappropriate clips from the picture in what her fellow journalist Asad Ali Toor rightly described as “disgusting”.

This too is neither uncommon nor surprising — superimposed images, deepfakes and now AI just casually undressing women on the internet based on their pictures. Material used to harass women online has not only gotten more realistic, it’s also become easier to produce.

Something has got to give, because these archaic ideals of meek women confined to their homes, living their lives at the whims of men, are relics of a time long gone.

Men, especially the ones discussing the “decency” of women’s clothes on the internet, need to learn a thing or two about basic human decency.

Authorities need to step up protection for women facing harassment, online and offline, because nobody is safe until everybody is safe.

As for Farooqi, she said this wasn’t the first time she’s been harassed online and while we’re sorry she — or anyone — has to go through that, we have a message for her: go and show them who’s boss.

Cover via Gharidah Farooqi/X

No mehndi celebration in the 90s felt complete without ‘Zara Dholki Baja Goriyo’. No child drifted off to sleep without ‘Chanda Mama Door Ke’. No birthday could be celebrated without ‘Tum Jiyo Hazaron Saal’. No lovers’ quarrel truly ended without ‘Acha Ji Main Haari Chalo’. No journey ever began without ‘Hawa Ke Saath, Ghata Ke Sang Sang’. No moment of romance was whole without ‘Tumse Milke Aisa Laga’ and admit it, no shower felt complete without ‘Thande Thande Pani Se’.

Bhosle was part of the lives of many, like me, yet her journey was never a bed of roses. Born in 1933 into a family already defined by the towering legacy of Lata Mangeshkar, she faced the immense challenge of stepping out of her sister’s shadow and establishing her own identity in music. She never had the luxury of choosing songs like Lata did and sang whatever came her way. While her younger sister Usha Mangeshkar did not achieve the same level of prominence, Bhosle eventually found her path through perseverance, talent, and the opportunities that came her way.

The collaborators she worked with — be it OP Nayyar, SD Burman, RD Burman, or AR Rahman — reflected how perfectly her timing aligned with changing musical eras, allowing her talent to flourish across generations.

When Nayyar decided not to work with Lata, he relied on Bhosle and they produced songs like ‘Maang Ke Saath Tumhara’ and ‘Urain Jab jab Zulfain Teri’ (Naya Daur, 1957), ‘Aye Meherbaan’ (Howrah Bridge, 1958), ‘Bahut Shukriya’ and ‘Aap Yunhi Agar’ (Ek Musafir Ek Haseena, 1962), ‘Deewana Hua Baadal’ and ‘Ishaaro Ishaaro’ (Kashmir ki Kali, 1964), ‘Jaiye Aap Kahan Jayenge’ and ‘Yeh Hai Reshmi Zulfo’ (Mere Sanam, 1965) and ‘Ao Huzoor Tumko’ and ‘Kajra Muhabbat Wala’ (Keemat, 1968).

A tussle between music director SD Burman and Lata created a rift between the two that lasted from 1958 to 1962, and Bhosle benefited from it. ‘Chor Do Aanchal’, ‘Haal Kaisa Hai Janab Ka’, ‘Acha Ji Main Haari’, ‘Ab Ke Baras Bhej Bhaiya Ko Babul’, ‘Tujhe Mili Roshni Mujhko Andhera’, ‘Koi Aya Dhadkan Kahti Hai’, ‘Dhalki Jaye Chunariya Hamari Ho Ram’ and ‘Raat Akeli Hai’ from Jewel Thief were simply outstanding.

Later, the 70s and 80s defined the Asha-RD era, a musician six years younger than her and the son of her guru. Though RD Burman and Bhosle married in 1980, the list of hit songs they produced from 1966 to 1993 is tremendous. Be it Teesri Manzil’s peppy ‘Aaja Aaja Main Hoon Pyar Tera’, the hippy ‘Dum Maro Dum’, the jazzy ‘Jaane Jaan Dhoondta Phir Raha’, or the cabaret classic ‘Piya Tu Ab To Aaja’, the sultry ‘Chura Liya Hai Tumne Jo’, the playful ‘Chori Chori Solah Singar’, the melodious ‘Do Lafzon Ki Hai’, or the deeply reflective ‘Mera Kuch Saamaan’ — each song showcased a different shade of her brilliance. Even the songs in Rangeela, Taal or Lagaan by the techy AR Rehman were a piece of cake for Bhosle, who had no qualms in changing gears.

She also had a brief contact with Pakistan, though she never actually crossed the border. At the time, Pakistan had a very similarly-named actor, Asha Posley, the heroine of the very first movie produced in Pakistan, Teri Yaad. The movie starred Posley alongside Nasir Khan, Dilip Kumar’s brother. At the time, Bhosle was in Bombay and was still known as Asha Mangeshkar.

Posley was born Sabira Begum and was rechristened by the legendary music director Ghulam Haider, who also played a key role in shaping the careers of Lata Mangeshkar. Posley was the daughter of music director Inayat Ali Nath and came from a musically gifted family — her sister, Kausar Parveen, was also a well-known singer in the 1950s. Although senior to both Lata and Bhosle, Posley had already made her debut as a supporting actor in the Punjabi film Gawandi (1942) long before any of the Mangeshkars entered the picture.

When Asha Mangeshkar eventually married Ganpatrao Bhosle she became Asha Bhosle, a name strikingly similar to Asha Posley, which led to occasional bouts of confusion and brief controversy.

Collaboration with Pakistanis

By the 1990s, only a handful of songs by Bollywood singers were recorded in Pakistan — often as personal favours (like Hemant Kumar for Muslehuddin in Humsafar, 1959) or through last-minute arrangements (such as Talat Mehmood for Fazl Karim Fazli for Chiragh Jalta Raha 1962).

Bhosle became the first major female voice to record multiple songs for a Pakistani film, lending her voice to Adnan Sami Khan’s Sargam 1995. Tracks like ‘Pyar Bina Jeena Nahin Jeena’, ‘Barse Baadal Dil Mein Hulchul’, ‘Pyar Hai Yehi To Pyar Hai’, and the evergreen ‘Zara Dholki Bajao Goriyo’ went on to become anthems for the generation born in the 1990s.

The leading lady of Sargam, Zeba Bakhtiar — who knew Bhosle personally from her Bollywood days and had travelled with her to India for several shows — played a key role in bringing her on board. Speaking to Images, she recalled Bhosle as “lovely, affectionate, and extremely kind”. However, she also expressed regret that Bhosle’s songs in Sargam were later dubbed by Hadiqa Kiani due to censorship concerns, as India–Pakistan relations in the 1990s were not particularly cordial.

Adnan Sami Khan — the music director and leading man of Sargam who was once married to Bakhtiar — shared close ties with the Burman family. He later collaborated with Bhosle again for Badaltey Mausam.

The album received a warm response upon its release in Pakistan in 1997, but when it was released in India, it became a massive hit. The song ‘Kabhi Tu Nazar Milao’ turned into a chartbuster and eventually paved the way for Adnan’s move to India, with significant support from Bhosle.

After Sargam, Bhosle collaborated once again with another Pakistani legend, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan who was composing for Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya 1997. The introductory song for Miss World 1994 Aishwarya Rai, ‘Thoda Sa Pagla Thoda Deewana’, carried an energy that only Bhosle could bring. The duet with Udit Narayan, ‘Jaagi Hui Fizayein Hain’, was equally impressive.

Bhosle was also part of the soundtrack of Javed Fazil’s Mein Ek Din Laut Kay Aaoon Ga, where she sang a duet with Jawad Ahmad, also the music director of the film. Ahmad recalled to Images recording the song with her. “I had the privilege of working with her in 2007 on the film Mein Ek Din Laut Kay Aaoon Ga, where I recorded a song titled ‘Dil Ke Taar Baje’ with her in India at Jagjit Singh’s studio. She was not only an extraordinary singer but also a gracious, humble, and encouraging personality. Despite her legendary status, she treated everyone with kindness and respect, and even engaged deeply with the creative process, refining her performance with great artistry,” he said.

“I still remember how she once sang a line differently to add her signature style, then graciously adjusted it after discussion, reflecting her openness and professionalism. Working with her was an unforgettable experience. She belongs among the greatest voices of South Asian music, alongside legends like Lata Mangeshkar and Noor Jehan. Her voice and legacy will continue to inspire generations, and she will always be remembered with love, admiration, and prayers across the world.”

In 2005, Bhosle released an album as a tribute to legendary ghazal maestros Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali and Farida Khanum. The album featured eight of her favourite ghazals, reinterpreting timeless classics with her own expressive style. It included renditions such as ‘Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo’, Ghulam Ali’s ‘Chupke Chupke’, ‘Aawargi’ and ‘Dil Mein Ek Lahar’, along with Mehdi Hassan’s ‘Ranjish Hi Sahi’, ‘Rafta Rafta’, and ‘Mujhe Tum Nazar Se’.

She also appeared as a guest on Sur Kshetra, a collaborative musical talent show between India and Pakistan. Aired in 2012, it was a musical battle between teams of two neighbouring countries that brought together a truly iconic judging panel featuring three legendary voices of South Asia: Bhosle, Runa Laila, and Abida Parveen.

Their presence transformed the competition into a celebration of music beyond borders, where classical depth, playback brilliance, and Sufi spirituality met on one stage. Together, they represented the golden era and timeless diversity of South Asian music, making the show not just a contest, but a historic meeting of legends.

Ironically, Bhosle made her debut when India and Pakistan were one, and one of her last famous songs was ‘Prem Me Tore’ for Begum Jaan in 2017, which depicted Partition.

Bhosle was far more than a legendary playback singer — she was a living bridge across eras, borders, and musical traditions. From the golden age of Indian cinema to cross-border collaborations in Pakistan, her voice evolved with time while never losing its emotional depth, versatility, or freshness. Whether in classic duets, playful cabaret numbers, romantic melodies, or modern experimental tracks, she continuously reinvented herself and expanded the possibilities of what South Asian music could be.

Actor Ahsan Khan calling it the “end of an era”.

Actor Adnan Siddiqui paid tribute to the singer, saying her voice “had a way of filling even the quietest moments with something devastatingly human”.

“Today, it’s that seem silence that feels heavier. Thank you for the emotions you gave us, the memories you became and the magic you left behind. You’ll always be heard, somewhere… somehow.“

Actor Ahmed Ali Butt thanked her for the “immortal melodies”.

Singer Ali Zafar called her an incredible artist. “Asha Bhoslee G’s work will continue to inspire generations. Such voices don’t fade with time. They become a part of it, he wrote on X.

Fellow singer Shuja Haider said Bhosle’s voice reached people all over the world, inspiring millions of fans from the past, today, and the future.

“Her name will always be remembered as one of the greatest in world music. A special chapter has closed.”

Actor Yasir Hussain shared the news on Instagram with a line from a ‘Naam Goom Jayega,’ a song by Bhosle’s late sister Lata Mangeshkar.

RJ Anoushey Ashraf shared a note on artists travelling between Pakistan and India when things weren’t so “complicated”. “Today, as we say goodbye to Asha Bhosle, it reminds me how deeply her voice lived in all our homes, on both sides.”

She said, thankfully, shared music doesn’t need visas, permissions, or political analysis. “It just shows up, resonated, and [stays] and is still the one thing people from both sides of the border appreciate fully. Maybe we should all upgrade our playlists for world peace.”

Reactions continue to pour in as more people wake up to the sad news of Bhosle’s passing.

That’s right guys, Pakistani netizens have started fangirling once again and this time, the unsuspecting target of their affections is Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi, who is visiting Islamabad this week for high-stakes negotiations with the United States.

X was flush with fan cams and edits of the minister, with one user calling him “aura guy”.

Someone on X asked the ultimate question on everyone’s mind right now — we don’t know, but we have suggestions for lunch.

People in Islamabad had their own reactions to Araghchi being in town: some were happy to have him, other’s had FOMO because they couldn’t see him personally.

FOMO is probably what led one netizen to demand the minister be taken to Centaurus for a meet and greet with all his fans.

Another said they would be forced to take drastic measures if denied the opportunity to meet Araghchi.

There was just a little bit of comparison between the negotiators on both sides.

Lastly, in a display of traditional Islamabadi hospitality, someone suggested the guest be taken the city’s serene hiking trails and given some time to rest. “He’s been through a lot, he needs some fresh air,” the user said.

Whatever their reasons may be, everyone is looking towards Islamabad today (Saturday) as talks between the US and Iranian delegations are set to commence. A breakthrough in the talks could bring the region closer to peace if a resolution to the month-long war between the US, Israel and Iran can be reached.

At the FIFA Series tournament in the Ivory Coast, the girls in green made history by pummelling their opponents from the Turks and Caicos and securing a massive eight-to-none victory.

Congratulations began to pour in from proud fans, including President Asif Ali Zardari, who called the win a “moment of national pride”. Others had similar messages of support for the team.

A user shared footage of the game’s fourth goal, where Mariam Mahmood kisses the team’s emblem on her shirt after powering the ball right into the opposing team’s net.

Another couldn’t believe the final score, posting it in all caps for the world to see.

The team’s technical ability and prowess on the field was praised.

Some netizens felt they could give a challenge to Pakistan’s male athletes. Others felt the men’s football squad could even learn a thing or two from the victors.

One fan was upset our team wouldn’t be playing in the South Asian Football Federation’s Women’s Championship this year when the side is the strongest it’s ever been. The tournament will be held in India and Indian sources report Pakistan has opted to skip due to strained ties — particularly in sports — with its eastern neighbour.

Pakistan are due to play Mauritania in their next game on Sunday followed by a bout with hosts the Ivory Coast on Thursday. We’ll be keeping an eye on their progress. Go girls!

With his arrival poured in a tsunami of content on X, as Pakistanis did what they do best — share memes.

First, everyone was quite sure he’d need to head to get his degree attested at the HEC and we all know what an ordeal that is.

He’d soon realise the value of his dollars.

Which would lead to a shopping trip.

He may indulge in a quintessentially Pakistani pastime.

But that might introduce him to the bane of every Pakistani’s existence — e-challans!

And who can forget the other bane of our existence — PTA tax.

And of course, no trip to Pakistan would be complete without paying a visit to Nida Yasir’s morning show where he would be asked some hard-hitting questions, we’re sure.

He could line up some other appearances while in the country.

Though it isn’t all roses. He’d soon get an idea of what Pakistanis are suffering through when it comes to fuel prices.

We hope he didn’t forget multiple copies of his ID card.

Someone needs to tell him to ignore the scam messages.

We’re not sure how he could resist Islamabad’s beauty.

Even if he’d need to navigate some serious detours to appreciate it.

If there’s one thing we can be sure of, he’d have some good food. We aren’t sure how his stomach would fare after though.

While he’s in town, we’d have the best commentators on duty.

We also wonder this.

The Pakistani government needs to look into this asap.

Pakistanis, please never stop making memes.

As Pakistanis celebrated the government’s successful mediation efforts and the world breathed a much-needed sigh of relief, Pakistani celebrities were also full of praise for Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and Chief of Defence Forces and Chief of Army Staff Field Marshal Asim Munir.

Mahira Khan said the news is huge. “Pakistanis around the world feeling proud. In a world where war [mongering] is rising, we chose peace and mediated it,” she wrote, calling for the peace to last.

She ended her note on a hopeful “Pakistan Zindabad”.

Singer Farhan Saeed said the ceasefire was a “big relief” to the region, but also to the world at large, calling it the “biggest diplomatic win for Pakistan”. He prayed for a permanent end to the fighting.

Actor Aijaz Aslam said Pakistanis stood “tall with pride” today after their country had “carved out a monumental moment in history, bringing together the seemingly impossible”.

He congratulated PM Shehbaz and FM Munir, whose leadership he said, “has put Pakistan at the forefront of peace”. He said the world’s eyes, “from the Gulf to the US,” were now on Islamabad and called on everyone to “celebrate this landmark step toward a more peaceful future”.

Celebrity dermatologist and TV host Shaista Lodhi said it was “encouraging” to see Iran and the US sit down to sort things out and called it a “relief”.

She expressed gratitude to the prime minister and the armed forces, led by FM Munir, and prayed for the ceasefire to lead to “lasting peace in the region and beyond”.

Actor Mira Sethi called Pakistan a “global peace broker”, while her Doctor Bahu co-star Adeel Hussain shared a tweet about Pakistan being a “global peacemaker”, saying he was a “proud Pakistani”.

Model Shehzad Noor, presumably a resident of Karachi, asked the all-important question: now that he’s opened the Strait of Hormuz, can the prime minister please open University Road too?

Observers are now looking to Islamabad in anticipation as the city gears up to host US and Iranian delegations for an in-person moot on Friday. Many are hopeful the talks will result in an extension of the temporary ceasefire and maybe even an end to the war.

This comes after US President Donald Trump threatened a “civilisation will die” if Iran didn’t agree to US terms on Tuesday. Pakistani negotiators were hard at work as a back channel between the warring parties.

Then, less than an hour before the American deadline, Iran’s foreign minister announced an agreement had been reached to enact a two-week ceasefire and for both sides to meet in Islamabad on Friday.

Pakistanis, who woke up to the news, took to X to celebrate the country’s — really, the world’s — biggest diplomatic win in a while.

Some celebrated with poetry…

Others with memes.

Netizens were proud of what had been achieved and many were not planning to be modest about it either.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif was hailed as a hero.

After his month-long phone marathon finally paid off, people wondered who would be calling his office next.

Of course, Pakistanis kept their neighbours in mind during the celebrations, with netizens — including comedian Ali Gul Pir —speculating on how India would react to the development.

Meanwhile in India, some people were willing to acknowledge Pakistan’s achievement, even if it came with a slight sense of disbelief.

Of course, no crisis is complete without Pakistanis unleashing our ultimate weapon: memes. Someone said we had main character energy, another recited a verse in honour of PM Shehbaz.

Of course someone had to point out that the Strait of Hormuz was opened before Karachi’s University Road.

The world is looking to Islamabad with bated breath to see what happens next and whether the ceasefire can be made permanent. In the meantime, Pakistanis are going to make the most of this moment.

Initial reactions to the news were so expletive-laden that we can’t publish them, but then something magical happened. As the dust settled and the people of Pakistan realised what was happening, they brought out their tried and tested crisis-coping mechanism: humour.

To start, a couple of X users were quick to point out the absurdity of a world where a war between three countries made life unaffordable in a fourth one.

Someone pointed out how a lot of people were going to try and fill up their tanks — and anything else they could find — in the final hours before prices shot up.

Students, who have consistently been asking for a suspension of classes in every crisis since the Covid-19 pandemic, were quick to demand classes move online in the face of rising transport costs.

Netizens who were less hopeful about working or studying from home began to consider alternate modes of transportation.

One user regretted selling his old bicycle — much like every Pakistani dad regrets selling that one plot of land — and another felt a horse would be a good investment in these trying times.

Someone — most likely an introvert — gave in to their inner voice and cancelled all their social plans effective immediately.

Netizens said fuel prices weren’t the only things rising rapidly.

Another group felt there were other woes to focus on.

A couple of people even found an especially innovative solution to save money on fuel.

Others also felt the petrol pump was no longer the right place to buy something so expensive; they suggested petrol be sold alongside gold at jewellery stores.

Jokes aside, the price hike is sure to bite hard into people’s incomes, with transport already accounting for a significant chunk of monthly expenses for many Pakistanis.

While the turmoil in the Middle East continues, we can’t be sure when — and if — things will go back to normal.

On Piyari Eid with Javeria Saud, a segment that should have been an easy crowd-pleaser — celebrities guessing who’s who from childhood photos — spiralled into something uncomfortable. Pictures of many young stars were featured, including Mahira Khan, Iqra Aziz, Sajal Aly and Atif Aslam, including one picture that host Javeria Saud claimed was a childhood photo of Yumna Zaidi.

Except, it wasn’t.

As guests, including Yasir Hussain, Nausheen Shah and others, struggled to guess who the child in the photo was, Saud offered vague hints. When pressed further, she described the person as being among people who had been “working since the Stone Age” but had only recently received recognition, before breaking into laughter. A few guests joined in.

It might have passed as an ill-timed joke if the premise itself wasn’t already flawed. The confusion wasn’t because the guests were out of touch, it was because the image wasn’t of Zaidi to begin with. When Shah finally guessed it might be her, Saud confirmed it, doubling down, laughter and all.

Zaidi, understandably, did not find it funny.

Taking to Instagram, she set the record straight with restraint. “This is not my childhood picture,” she wrote, calling it “identity based disinformation” and reminding channels gently that information should be verified before being aired on national television.

But her fellow industry mates, weren’t ready to let another case of sloppy programming topped with crass humour slide.

Maya Ali, in a story that quickly made rounds on social media, questioned why the industry continues to undermine its own without naming names. “When will we start respecting our own talent?” she wrote, pointing out the irony of insiders publicly pulling each other down.

Hania Aamir reshared her statement with a simple “what she said!” Actor Nameer Khan echoed the sentiment, calling out the lack of empathy and respect within the industry.

Umair Nasir Ali, who directed Zaidi’s Nayab, stepped in with an actual childhood photo of Zaidi noting, “Respect begins with getting the facts right JS.”

Saud, for her part, issued an apology, acknowledging that the image had been picked up online without proper verification. She maintained, however, that her “Stone Age” remark had been misunderstood and wasn’t directed at anyone in particular.

But here’s the thing about live television and public platforms, intent is only half the story. Delivery is the other half, and in this case, the laughter did the talking.

Because even if we momentarily accept that the comment wasn’t meant to be about age, or about Zaidi in particular, it landed that way. And in an industry where women are already under relentless scrutiny for how long they’ve been around, how they look, and whether they’re still “relevant,” that kind of throwaway line doesn’t exist in a vacuum. And when it’s followed by mocking laughter, it becomes something harder to brush off as harmless banter.

There’s also the more basic, less glamorous problem — the complete lack of homework. A segment built entirely around identifying celebrities hinged on a piece of information that wasn’t even correct. Verification isn’t a high bar, it’s the bare minimum. And yet, time and again, local television manages to trip over it.

What could have been a fun, nostalgic game ended up exposing two persistent issues — how casually disrespect can be packaged as humour, and how little effort sometimes goes into content that reaches millions.

Zaidi handled it with grace. Her peers backed her with clarity. The question is whether the platforms that sparked this will take it as a cue to do better.

The crunchy cargo was en route from a facility in central Italy to sweet-toothed Poland when the truck carrying it disappeared; both the vehicle and its contents remain unaccounted for.

A spokesperson for the company said, “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with Kit Kat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tonnes of our chocolate.” Investigations into the heist are ongoing.

Users on X seemed to agree, someone was getting a break — and it definitely wasn’t the guys at Kit Kat.

Naturally, there was some discussion on semantics. After all, we needed to label this before it got too far.

Other users were more concerned with the thieves’ motives — what was going on in their heads, what could they possibly want with 12 tonnes of chocolate?

Netizens even had a bunch of potential suspects, including one particularly suspicious neighbour.

Other suspects were identified too, hopefully giving investigators a helpful list to go through.

The fact that over 400,000 chocolate bars went missing just before Easter did not make a very good case for one particular bunny.

Thankfully, Nestle confirmed the heist would not have a significant impact on chocolate supplies in the region and that consumers across Europe would be able to enjoy their favourite treats as usual.

Kit Kat also said the missing bars would be found, with measures in place to identify them using the unique batch codes found on each item.

The internet was soon flooded with clips of the chaos brought about by the storm, with trees uprooted, vehicles overturned and random objects hurled across the city’s roads by powerful gusts of wind.

Mahira Khan, who happened to be on set when the rain started, shared a video showing part of the set collapsing and crew members rushing to take shelter.

Adnan Siddiqui and Fahad Mustafa were filming Jeeto Pakistan when the studio’s roof began to leak, almost causing Mustafa to slip and fall. The rain, however, did not dampen their spirits, as Siddiqui shared a lighthearted moment of them making the best of a bad situation.

Meanwhile in another part of the city, chand raat festivities were disrupted at The Commons and Locate Bazaar, two of the more prominent festivals part of Karachi’s pre-Eid celebrations. Attendees had to seek shelter as debris from food and jewellery stalls was swept up by the wind.

People reported that some restaurants with outdoor seating were ravaged by the storm.

Actor Agha Ali was at home when the rain started, but that didn’t mean he was safe from it. The star shared clips of water seeping in through the windows of his 12th-floor apartment. His solution, which wasn’t 100 per cent effective, involved a towel and dumbbells.

People sent Karachiites thoughts and prayers during this difficult time. TV host Shaista Lodhi prayed for God’s mercy while Sonya Hussyn recounted scenes of destruction as she was coming home after the storm.

Architect Marvi Mazhar questioned the implementation of the 2022 orders of the Sindh High Court regarding the removal of billboards in line with a Supreme Court ruling from 2018.

In a thread on X, she said the city’s susceptibility to heavy winds made the advertisement hoardings a public safety hazard, but they remained a part of the city’s skyline “by quiet compromises and policy backtracking”.

She added that Wednesday’s storm was not the first time weather conditions had made billboards a threat to people’s lives and questioned whether lessons learned in the past were “ignored, or deliberately forgotten”.

This is unfortunately not the first time rain has wreaked havoc on Karachi and it’s unlikely to be the last. As Pakistan’s largest city picks up the pieces after yet another disastrous downpour, many are worried what the upcoming monsoon season will bring.

Cover Photo: Fahim Siddiqi/White Star

On stage, he made his stance even clearer, saying, “No to war, and free Palestine”. The statement earned loud applause from many people in attendance, except Priyanka Chopra, who was standing beside him as the award’s co-presenter.

The Indian actor stood on stage, seemingly caught off-guard and awkwardly smiled at Bardem. Her reaction and the fact that she isn’t exactly anti-war ensured one thing: the internet was not going to let her live this down.

Users were quick to point out how she didn’t seem to be onboard for what is seemingly a common sense stance from Bardem.

Her support for the BJP government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was also brought up, especially in the context of its repression of India’s sizeable Muslim minority.

Chopra’s credentials as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef were also called into question for the umpteenth time. This has become a bit of a recurring theme after she was called out for promoting war between two nuclear-armed states and not saying nearly enough during Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. She shared one post on Instagram calling for a ceasefire and reshared a story another time, something many, many people think was the bare minimum.

Comparisons were drawn between Chopra’s support for the Indian military when it attacked Pakistan in 2019 and Israeli actor Gal Gadot, who is a staunch supporter of the Israeli Defence Forces.

Pakistani users — and even a few from India — refusing to waste an opportunity to make a meme out of the whole situation, began referring to the Indian actor as Daal Gadot.

What we don’t get is why she wasn’t prepared for Bardem — who is a very vocal anti-war and pro-Palestine advocate — to make a statement like the one he made on Sunday. And if nothing else, the actor could have at least schooled her features into an expression that was less uncomfortable.

According to police sources, 44 participants were detained — 25 men and 19 women, including activist Dr Farzana Bari, two of her daughters, and human rights defender Tahira Abdullah.

Police sources told Dawn that the activists were picked up as Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) remained imposed in the federal capital, which empowers district administrations to prohibit an assembly of four or more people in an area for a limited period.

Last year, the Islamabad police registered a case against the Aurat March organisers for staging a protest on March 8 in violation of Section 144.

Islamabad authorities had reportedly refused to grant an NOC for the march from the National Press Club to D-Chowk. The marchers then went ahead with a gathering outside the press club after police stopped them from proceeding towards D-Chowk.

When news broke of the arrests, some wondered why women marching in Islamabad was such a big threat, given the state of the world.

Some had replies to the inevitable — and at this point lame — arguments of ‘foreign funding’.

The hypocrisy of the situation was not lost on people.

Especially given that the prime minister shared a lengthy message paying tribute to women in Pakistan, all while women were being arrested in the capital.

Some people online took issue with their arrests under Section 144. Journalist Hamid Mir called the law a “legacy of colonialism”.

Lawyer Jibran Nasir said it was a bailable offence, theorising that the reason they were detained for hours or non-bailable offences were added to the FIR was “to cause humiliation and intimidation”.

Happy Women’s Day, we guess.

Cover: Muhammad Asim/ White Star

Prior to the announcement, there was already panic buying at petrol pumps, long queues across major cities and — unsurprisingly — a torrent of furious posts online against hoarders. But while the internet is often prone to exaggeration, this anger feels justified.

After all, the hike didn’t happen in a vacuum. It is tied to the rapidly escalating conflict in the Middle East that has sent global oil prices soaring.

According to the government, the increase reflects a sharp spike in international oil prices triggered by the war and fears of supply disruptions. Pakistan, which imports a large share of its petroleum, is particularly vulnerable to global price swings. Authorities insist the move was unavoidable and say prices will now be reviewed weekly because of the volatile global market.

But explanations rarely soothe people who still have to pay the bill.

‘Don’t only punish the people’

The Rs55 jump — dubbed a “petrol bomb” by commentators — set off a wave of anger online, with many people questioning why austerity measures always seem to stop at the public.

Many decried fuel allowances given to government officials, calling for them to be suspended during this time. Government officials and bureaucrats receive different fuel allowances depending on their grades. Punjab recently revised its Motor Transport Policy, under which the chief secretary and IGP are separately entitled to three vehicles – one official vehicle up to 2800cc, one touring vehicle up to 4700cc and one personal use vehicle up to 1800cc. The official and personal use vehicles are entitled to 500 litres and 300 litres petrol per month respectively, while touring vehicles’ petrol is based on actual consumption.

In 2023, Islamabad’s CDA announced a 40 per cent cut on fuel being used by the chairman and members of the board and 30pc cut for other officers. The maximum limit for the chairman and members’ offices was capped at 400 and 300 litres per month respectively.

“Petrol should not be free for any government official or bureaucrat during this time in Pakistan,” one user wrote. “If the common public can suffer and make sacrifices, why can’t they spend a little too?”

Others echoed the sentiment.

For many, the sheer scale of the increase was what made it feel surreal.

Others approached the situation with the kind of gallows humour Pakistanis often deploy when the economy delivers another blow.

One person wrote “They’ve made petrol more expensive. Who’s going to shut down my office then?”

Another suggested a solution dripping with sarcasm: “Can’t our ministers and all other decision makers start working from home?!”

The ripple effect everyone is dreading

The anger is also rooted in something more practical — petrol price hikes rarely stay confined to petrol pumps. When fuel becomes more expensive, transport fares rise, food prices increase and delivery costs go up, triggering a chain reaction across the economy.

So when Pakistanis saw the Rs55 hike announced late Friday night, many immediately understood what it likely means for the weeks ahead.

“A Rs55 per litre jump in petroleum prices will not just be felt at the pump. It will be felt in every kitchen, every bus fare, every small business struggling to stay afloat,” wrote MNA Sharmila Faruqi. “At a time when people are already battling inflation, unemployment and shrinking livelihoods, this decision adds yet another weight on shoulders that are already carrying too much.”

One user believed that a hike like this would also exacerbate lawlessness on the roads, where desperate drivers might resort to risky shortcuts to save even a few rupees.

Actor Maya Ali also weighed in on the issue via her Instagram stories, questioning the logic behind raising petrol prices when officials have warned that reserves are already running low. She asked whether such a spike would magically increase reserves.

One thing is clear, a jump of this magnitude signals darker days ahead. It’s not just about filling up a tank, it’s about the creeping sense that the cost of everyday life will rise faster than anyone’s ability to keep up. And the anger isn’t just about the price itself. Much of it is focused on the imbalance between ordinary citizens tightening their belts and officials enjoying state-funded perks.

Over the past few days, nearly 1,000 Pakistani nationals have crossed back into the country from Iran through the Taftan and Gabd-Rimdan border crossings, according to officials, after tensions sharply escalated following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air strikes.

Around 440 Pakistanis returned on Tuesday alone, including students, diplomats, businessmen, pilgrims and tourists. Immigration officials said border posts were operating round the clock to facilitate the returning nationals.

The evacuations come as the conflict continues to intensify across the region. The strikes that killed Khamenei triggered a rapidly expanding war between Iran, the United States and Israel, with hundreds of targets hit across Iran and casualties climbing into the hundreds.

In other words: it is a very serious situation.

Which is perhaps why the internet could not quite process what one Pakistani evacuee told Reuters.

“We were out on the streets enjoying the atmosphere,” the man said, describing the scene in Tehran. “We were enjoying the explosions but they made us leave.”

The “they” in question was the Pakistani embassy staff who were evacuating nationals for obvious reasons.

The internet, however, immediately lost the plot.

One X user had a valid question. “What is wrong with Pakistanis?” — we wish we had an answer to that.

Another summed up the national vibe with mild concern.

Others took the moment as proof of Pakistan’s strange global brand.

For many, though, the quote simply felt painfully accurate.

Like us, many users weren’t sure if they should laugh or worry about the borderline morbid nonchalance at display.

A lot of users took this as another sign of Pakistanis being “built different”.

A user highlighted that “only Pakistanis could turn a missile alert into street commentary like it’s a cricket match”.

Some users even took it as a sign of Pakistanis’ bravery.

If you grew up here, the reaction is not entirely surprising.

Pakistanis have long had a cultural habit of responding to crisis with humour, deadpan commentary and a refusal to behave in the appropriately terrified way international observers expect. We saw a demonstration of this during last year’s Pakistan-India conflict. It is the same energy that turns power outages into rooftop chai sessions and political turmoil into meme cycles.

But jokes aside, the situation across the Middle East remains volatile.

The killing of Khamenei — confirmed by Iranian authorities after the strikes — has marked one of the most dramatic escalations in decades of tension between Iran, Israel and the United States.

Since then, waves of air strikes and retaliatory attacks have continued, with military and civilian targets hit across Iran and the wider region bracing for further escalation, which makes the Reuters clip both funny and slightly unsettling.

Because while the rest of the world is watching the conflict with alarm, somewhere in the middle of it all, a Pakistani man looked at incoming explosions and thought: “Nice atmosphere.”