Pakistan Aslant

We’re in Pakistan — “the country that could kill the world,” in a native line that lingers. Or maybe the new normal. Think of Pakistan, we’re told by Pakistanis, as a model or perhaps a warning of the rising, rough, tough inequalities in the world, even in our embattled United States.

Early on we planned to see this nightmare aslant — less with oft-quoted strategists, more with the imaginative class, so to speak: with the typically grim but mettlesome singers, story-tellers and artists of Sind and the Punjab. They are wonderfully available, individual, candid women and men who have their own dark, truth-telling traditions. They each tell different stories, of course — and almost all of them different from the standard line of an “Af-Pak” crucible of global terrorism. Many of them point rather to “Indo-Pak” roots of the modern turmoil, in the Partition that carved two wounded and unequal sibling rivals out of the British Raj in 1947.

This compilation of conversations spread over two episodes explores the fissures in the state alongside the resilience of its citizens. Guests include: Mohammed Hanif, Daniyal Mueenuddin, Zeb & Haniya, Ayesha Jalal and Ashis Nandy. Hide full description

We’re in Pakistan — “the country that could kill the world,” in a native line that lingers. Or maybe the new normal. Think of Pakistan, we’re told by Pakistanis, as a model or perhaps a warning of the rising, rough, tough inequalities in the world, even in our embattled United States.Early on we planned to see this nightmare aslant — less with oft-quoted strategists, more with the imaginative class, so to speak: with the typically grim but mettlesome singers, story-tellers and artists of Sind and the Punjab. They are wonderfully available, individual, candid women and men who have their own dark, truth-telling traditions. They each tell different stories, of course — and almost all of them different from the standard line of an “Af-Pak” crucible of global terrorism. Many of them point... Show full description