Imran Omer

Reality sucks. We know that, and from time to time we feel the need to escape from it to be happy, but if we start living increasingly in a pseudo reality, our chances to overcome hardships of life would be difficult. The Internet has made it possible for us to escape reality, reality which is often painful; if not for us then for the people around us. This escape has been gradual, but at this…

Pandemic: Is it Over Yet?

This pandemic has helped certain addictions to take root in us, especially in our young men and women. From Binge watching to overeating to phone usage, all are parts of the coping mechanism we have been using to survive. These addictions are the challenges we will have to address for quite a while in our homes and classrooms. During the pandemic, because of the isolation and lack of…

In our society, privilege is a dirty word because it is rooted in race and history. It is not about class. In simple terms it is about white dominance over different institutions of society.                   We know we have come very far in coming to terms with racism, and even the extreme right does not dream of going too far back to in the past despite the fact it is afraid to move forward.…

Societies and cultures, and even religions, take their own course of time to evolve. Afghanistan gave refuge to somebody who was responsible for an atrocity against us and we had to take that specific person down, but I don’t know when we started to think that war and military presence can change a society. Culture is in our DNA and it creates the ecosystem we call society.  Culture is part of…

When I hear all about the US army withdrawal after twenty years of conflict in Afghanistan, and the civil war that is about to erupt and leave Afghan society in disarray once again, I can’t stop thinking that perhaps the age-old “war between good and evil” is actually the war between old and new. A war in which one group insists on going back to some point in history and call it the origin of…

Now that it’s almost over…

I have always felt that the people of South Asia in general, but India and Pakistan in particular, live in many centuries at the same time. In these pluralistic societies, there are communities and individuals that live in 17th and 18th centuries, and there are those that live in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Class and culture are responsible for this dichotomy. Class because wealth makes it…