Life & Style

KARACHI: With the dystopian horrors that currently form our waking reality, one could have easily mistaken it for Black Mirror’s latest season. Yet Charlie Brooker thought it best to resume his culture-changing anthology series and release the seventh season this past Thursday. The last few lacklustre seasons shifted from the original Black Mirror tone. They…

SLOUGH, ENGLAND: My fellow Jane Austen fans, you are going to need strength. This July, we will be coming up to the three-year anniversary of the carnage that Netflix deemed fit to tell us was Persuasion. If you have only just recovered from their rage-inducing character assassination of lovely shy Anne Elliot, you will be…

KARACHI: Life is funny. And absurd. On January 16, 2025, I premiered my debut feature film Indus Echoes at Cinepax Cinemas. The same night, around the same time, the filmmaker I considered my spiritual mentor, David Lynch passed away. Life is absurd. Lynch would have been amused by this irony. He would probably find meaning…

SLOUGH, ENGLAND: No matter how studiously you have combed newborn forums and devoured door-stopper parenting books, every new mother, shortly after having been handed her baby, faces this unnerving thought: “Why did nobody warn me about this?” As new celeb mothers Mariyam Nafees and Saboor Ali are bound to discover, the ‘this’ in question is…

KARACHI: With 2025’s first Eid less than a month away, it’s apparent that netizens are eyeing royalty for their festive picks this summer. This time around, the farshi shalwar is all the rage, prompting open conversations between celebrities, designers, and fashion experts all over the internet. Resurrected from the Mughal era, this regal pair of…

KARACHI: There is something indescribably fun about hating nepo babies. And not just any nepo babies. An unusually potent vitriol greets them when they appear on our screens. Unlike industrial and political dynasties, a star-studded lineage in showbiz is a perennial, very visual reminder of the potholed road to success. An ambitious employee might find…

KARACHI: In a dream, Mo’s grandfather hands him over a key. “Look after this key,” his grandpa says. The key is a symbol of the homes lost in the 1948 Nakba where a large number of Palestinians lost their homes or fled violence and were denied the right to return. In Mo season two, the…

KARACHI: Shahram Azhar is somewhere between nostalgia and reinvention. He greets me over Zoom, with warmth and easy humour that feels like a balm for the slightly disjointed nature of online conversations. It’s the kind of interaction that carries a familiar tinge of the COVID lockdown years — him in the UK, me in Pakistan,…

After a blockbuster comeback in 2023, it has become woke to love King Khan despite his complicated legacy KARACHI: In one of the most iconic scenes from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Shah Rukh Khan teeters on the edge of every woman’s worst nightmare. His character, Raj, finds himself locked in a train compartment with…

SLOUGH, ENGLAND: If you ever feared that an artist you had long since admired would never return to the screen after what appeared to be an indefinite hiatus, 2024 was the year that proved that hope springs eternal. As the year prepares to take its final bow, we take a closer look at three Pakistani…