Nabil Tahir

By Arshad Awan | PUBLISHED August 23, 2026 Among the surviving artistic treasures of ancient Gandhara, even the smallest objects reveal profound insights into the lives, beliefs, and cultural values of the people who inhabited this remarkable crossroads of civilisations. The Mirror Handle-Standing Woman, dating to approximately the first century BCE and carved from phyllitic schist, is one such object.

By Our Correspondent | PUBLISHED August 23, 2026 “Whatever the world has given me, in the form of experiences and events/ I am now returning it to where it belongs” This couplet translated from Urdu is wonderfully apt about Saeed Mehdi’s timely memoir. For a civil servant who spent much of his life observing history from within the machinery of the state, it is a particularly befitting final gesture.

By Farrukh Kamrani | PUBLISHED August 23, 2026 Load-shedding alters the state of my consciousness. When the lights go off, I cease to be the same person I was. So if I did something wrong with that person in one of those narrow alleys of our neighbourhood that night, the electric company should be blamed for it. I still can’t believe that I stooped low enough to corner that miserable, ugly creature. I tend to disagree with Shakir the Lame that looks become immaterial when it is dark.