T here was a time when marriage negotiations came with lists that frequently included a refrigerator, a bedroom set, crockery and gold....
E very year, the first proper monsoon rain arrives with all the ingredients of a Lahore love story... The cool air, the smell of wet soil...
Countless academies now operate from converted homes, basements, plazas, upper floors of commercial buildings and rented spaces that were never...
R emember when every family problem in a desi household could be solved with “bas sabr karo”?Now, in contrast, the worst insult you can...
A group of friends is driving through Lahore when someone mischievously plays an Attaullah Esakhelvi song. “Pyaar naal na sahi, ghusse...
A few weeks ago, I was looking through old family photographs with my mother. There they were, frozen in time: weddings from the 1980s and...
G rowing up, most of us are told some version of the same story: you work hard, be decent, respect your elders and think of others before...
T here’s an aesthetic clinic on almost every major street now. They operate independent of a hospital or a physician’s office. There is...
I t is increasingly common to see a video on Instagram where a man, probably in his mid-twenties, sits in his kitchen filming himself cook....
— Photo by Rahat Dar T he Punjab is harvesting wheat. Thousands of acres of it are moving under harvesters in the kind of quantity...
L ahore is back to counting hours and minutes. Recent reporting says urban areas in LESCO’s service territory have been seeing 3 to 4 hours...
A short clip from a café in Lahore has managed to do something that social media does so well and so badly at the same time. It has turned...
T here was a time love used to wait outside girls’ college gates; or outside homes with low walls. Or even outside the kind of narrow...
It is crowded, a little unruly, sometimes unsafe, often unfiltered, but also unmistakably alive. — Photo by Rahat Dar O ne will...
The move to restore the original names of Lahore’s roads, streets and historic colleges, sits well within a broad push for heritage preservation
E id in a big city now increasingly begins with an eerie kind of absence. Not the obvious one, but something more than the relatives you...
L ahore loves a good scandal — and not the quiet kind that hums, but the loud kind that screams for weeks. It takes one clip, photo or...
O n a Thursday evening in Old Lahore, the courtyard of Data Darbar fills with a familiar blend of sound. A group of qawwals sits under...
W eddings are intimate rites; they are also public spectacle. The recent wedding of Junaid Safdar became both: a family ceremony that quickly...
I once got into a rickshaw in Lahore and the driver began, as many do, by circling the idea of money without quite asking for it. Then he...
