South Asia Citizens Web

Few incidents of terrorism have caused such large-scale outpouring of grief, anger and shame as the massacre in the Peshawar church last Sunday. But will this outrage awaken the Pakistani people to the urgency of dealing with the cancerous growth in their body politic of which the attack on the old church was only a symptom?

Gordon Edwards of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. Gordon makes it clear that the terrifying outflow of contaminated water pouring through the Fukushima site is a clear and present threat to all living things in the Pacific Ocean and to human life in general.

KARACHI: Forum for Secular Pakistan (FSP) supports Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s decision to call off the proposed peace talks with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan. A state can talk with an enemy that follows some rules of warfare, not with brainwashed criminals who conduct cowardly attacks on innocents.

A video recording of Karamat Ali, the widely respected labour movement activist from Pakistan speaking on the subversive role of poetry of Majaz, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Makhdoom, Ali Sardar Jafri, Habib Jalib and others in capturing the popular imagination and shaping of progressive political culture in Pakistan of the 1950’s-1960s and after. This recording was made at a Tribute to Asraur ul Majaz an to Faiz Ahmed Faiz at Ramjas College in Delhi University on 24 February 2011.

It is important to ask why women’s education and the corresponding enhancement of women’s voice and influence in family decisions have not done much to eliminate selective abortion of female fetuses. Educated mothers seem clearly less inclined to neglect girls compared with boys once they have been born; but they seem almost as keen on having boys rather than girls as uneducated mothers are. Here larger questions of enlightened understanding and scrutiny of traditional values become central and go beyond women’s role and influence in family decisions. There seems to be a lack of adequate awareness of the oddity of seeing girls as inferior to boys, and a lack of knowledge about what happens in other places where such discrimination against girls is not present.