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A book that charts Pakistan’s aspirations and challenges.
Writing about Pakistan is cliché-ridden. Fear is the dominant motif: mullahs, terrorists, nuclear bombs. And beneath that is victimhood: refugees from floods and military adventures, women in burqas, emaciated children. Little of the actual fabric of everyday life comes across. Nothing of the struggles against neoliberalism, nothing of the struggles against the kleptocracy of Military, Inc. Nothing of the searing poetry from Gilgit, nothing of the graffiti from Gwadar.
Pakistanis are alive. Sold by governments who should save them, killed by secret agencies who should guard them, bombed by American drones, ‘structurally adjusted’ into starvation, beaten, rendered, tortured and disappeared, and yet, inscrutably, immutably, even joyously, they are still alive.
DISPATCHES FROM PAKISTAN is an introduction to that liveliness, with sixteen original essays that take us from Balochistan to Baltistan, and poetry from Jalib and Riyaz. This collection is essential reading for anyone who is invested in the social history of transformation underway in Pakistan.
With shrewd analysis rendered in accessible language, DISPATCHES lays plain the complex and vitally important conditions unfolding in 21st-century Pakistan.
ISBN - 9789380118031
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Pages : 327
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