Tag: Cross-border Dialogue

🎶 Bravo, Kabir | Artists Across Borders

This Sunday, something quietly powerful is taking place: Indian and Pakistani artists will share a virtual stage, and among them is our very own Kabir Altaf, performing as a Hindustani classical vocalist and ethnomusicologist based in Pakistan.

Kabir shared that Sheema ji personally invited him to sing, and he’s planning to perform the Kabir bhajan already available on Spotify. A simple act but a potent one. Rooted in shared heritage, offered in public.

It’s easy to be cynical about India–Pakistan relations. But these moments matter. When musicians from Sindh and Delhi, translators from Karachi, and filmmakers from Mumbai come together, even on Zoom, they create a space that politics cannot reach. A space where memory, performance, and shared roots do the work diplomacy cannot.

This is the kind of initiative we need more of: not policy, but presence; not diplomacy, but dialogue. These exchanges don’t dilute identity; they deepen it.

Bravo and huzzah to Kabir, and to all involved.

🗓 Event:

Indian–Pakistani Artists in Dialogue

📅 Saturday, 3rd August 2025

⏰ 7:30 PM Pakistan time / 8:00 PM India time

👩‍🎤 Moderator:

Sheema Kermani – Bharatanatyam dancer, theatre personality, Karachi

🎙 Featured Speakers & Performers:

  1. Dr. Syeda Saiyidain Hameed – Writer, former Member of India’s Planning Commission

  2. Dr. Ghazala Irfan – Philosopher and Chair, Department of Humanities, LUMS; affiliated with All Pakistan Music Conference

  3. Anand Patwardhan – Documentary filmmaker, Mumbai

  4. Saleema J. Khawaja – Vocalist of Punjabi Kafi and Guru Nanak verses, Lahore

  5. Neela Bhagwat – Hindustani vocalist (Gwalior Gharana), Mumbai

  6. Azhar Shan – Folk musician from Sindh

  7. Dhruv Sangari – Hindustani classical and Sufi vocalist, Delhi

  8. Zainub J. Khawaja – Musician, member of Harsukhiyaan, Pakistan

  9. Yousuf Saeed – Documentary filmmaker, known for work on classical music in Pakistan, Delhi

  10. Kabir Altaf – Hindustani classical vocalist and ethnomusicologist, Pakistan

  11. Nishtha Jain – Documentary filmmaker, Mumbai

  12. Zahra Sabri – Lecturer and translator, Karachi

  13. Zulaikha Jabeen – Independent scholar, India

 

🔗 Join via Zoom

Click here to join

Meeting ID: 897 8701 6742

Southasia Is One Word

Reflections on Pervez Hoodbhoy at MIT

Zachary L. Zavidé | Brown Pundits | May 2025

Pervez Hoodbhoy needs no introduction. As one of Pakistan’s leading physicists and public intellectuals, he has long stood at the uneasy crossroads of science, nationalism, and conscience. He spoke this week at MIT’s Graduate Tower — the final stop on a grueling five-city U.S. tour, a new city every two days — in support of The Black Hole Initiative, a cultural and intellectual space he’s building in Pakistan. Despite its ominous name, the initiative is a wormhole, not a void: a cross-disciplinary bridge connecting physics, literature, art, and civic life.

What followed was less a lecture, more an exposition — sober, lucid, and grounded in decades of hard-won clarity.

The Logic of Annihilation

Dr. Hoodbhoy walked us through Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine: under long-standing military assumptions, if the north–south arterial route is severed, a tactical nuclear strike becomes viable. But the calculus is disturbingly abstract. Hiroshima’s 20-kiloton bomb killed 200,000. India and Pakistan each possess an estimated 200 warheads. One general once told him that, by crude arithmetic — obscene as it sounds — “only” 80 million would die in the event of a full exchange. Continue reading Southasia Is One Word

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