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Muna Khan

Muna Khan

Dawn

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No child’s play

I HAVE a distinct memory of sitting at my dear friend Duc’s cafe-cum-gallery in Hanoi watching CNN discuss Barack Obama’s foreign policy right...

previous day 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

Polls apart

AN old, rickety house in upstate New York has served as a landmark since I began visiting family here in 2017. It is hard to miss because it has a...

14.04.2024 30

Dawn

Muna Khan

Uncovering our shame

I AM assisting my youngest sister in the US on a documentary, which is part personal narrative, part investigation on the closure of a bank in the...

07.04.2024 40

Dawn

Muna Khan

Missing info

IS there such a thing as unprecedented conspiratorial thinking? I feel the word ‘unprecedented’ is often abused, especially by Pakistanis unaware...

31.03.2024 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

Forget about it

SOMETIME in the mid-2000s, while moving house in Karachi and sifting through things to keep, I came across an old briefcase filled with our school...

24.03.2024 90

Dawn

Muna Khan

The plot sickens

REALITY TV shows are my on/ off guilty pleasure. I should be more embarrassed to admit this, but here we are. It began with a curiosity for The...

17.03.2024 70

Dawn

Muna Khan

Inconvenient truths

I LOVE getting my students to watch a movie about journalism. I usually give them an assignment wherein I ask them to examine how or whether the film...

10.03.2024 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

Maryam-bashing

WHEN I was teaching at a journalism programme in Karachi a few years ago, former editor of The News, and columnist Ghazi Salahuddin would give a...

03.03.2024 40

Dawn

Muna Khan

Smoke and mirrors?

A LINE from a piece I quoted a few weeks ago has stayed with me: “Does social media cause this anger or does it reveal it?” This was from a 2022...

25.02.2024 80

Dawn

Muna Khan

All about women

I UNDERSTAND that politics is the art of compromise, but why must women’s bo­­dies be sacrificed at the altar of deal-making? This question weighs...

18.02.2024 100

Dawn

Muna Khan

‘This is us too’

IMRAN Khan and his supporters, according to the Twitterati, are ‘the worst thing to happen to society’ — they’ve ruined tehzeeb, family...

11.02.2024 100

Dawn

Muna Khan

Fight to forgive

COULD you forgive your daughter’s murderers, and then hire two of them to come work for the organisation set up in her name? This is what Linda and...

04.02.2024 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Lesson plan

LAST year I felt a bit stumped when students in my news media literacy class told me they knew who Altaf Hussain was but didn’t really believe the...

28.01.2024 70

Dawn

Muna Khan

Beyond headlines

YOU can’t get all your news from headlines. I was reminded of this last month in the US, when reading stories about Harvard president Claudine...

21.01.2024 70

Dawn

Muna Khan

Healing Pakistan

QUARANTINING during Covid in another country without your tools of comfort is tough. Of course, I am grateful for the support system I did have, like...

14.01.2024 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Not a new normal

I TESTED positive for Covid on the first day of the new year in New York. It is not an ideal start to the year, or holiday, but the period of...

07.01.2024 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

Heal thyself

PAKISTAN has given me citizenship and an autoimmune disease. This is my assessment, not my doctor’s obviously. I am aware of my privilege and how it...

31.12.2023 80

Dawn

Muna Khan

Equal citizens

MANY of us are likely to know someone who travelled to another country to give birth and secure that country’s citizenship for their child. It’s...

24.12.2023 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Bad business

IN my lectures about audience metrics — who and how audiences view and share stories — I always bring up Freaks and Geeks, a 1999 TV show that was...

17.12.2023 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

The big picture

HAVE you watched a show, movie, press conference and then heard someone talk about it and wondered whether you both saw the same thing? It is not...

10.12.2023 70

Dawn

Muna Khan

‘We’re worth it’

LATELY, I’ve been wondering what I’m worth. I don’t mean this just from a self-esteem perspective or a religious one. I’m thinking, instead,...

03.12.2023 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Lone ‘rager’

IN 2009, as I was planning my return home from Hanoi, I told a group of friends I wanted to become active in politics, maybe eventually contest...

26.11.2023 30

Dawn

Muna Khan

Being seen & heard

GOING to graduate school in the US as a mature student meant I felt a disconnect with younger students, especially around language and identity...

19.11.2023 70

Dawn

Muna Khan

We cannot forget

WHEN I landed in Beirut in 2009, the immigration officer asked if it was my first time in Lebanon. Technically it wasn’t, I told him, because I was...

12.11.2023 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Pressing on

DON’T you get tired writing about the same thing, asked my friend ST, after she read through several of my old columns — her idea, not mine; we...

05.11.2023 30

Dawn

Muna Khan

NON-FICTION: THE TWO NAOMIS

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World By Naomi Klein Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN 9780374610326 416pp. Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger...

29.10.2023 10

Dawn (Magazines)

Muna Khan

Mission Lion-heart

FOR the past month, we’ve been hearing iterations of ‘sher aya’ (here comes the lion), referring to the return of Nawaz Sharif, but I’m here...

29.10.2023 90

Dawn

Muna Khan

Eyes wide open

WHILE at college in the early 1990s, I had the pleasure of attending a guest lecture by Edward Said. As a teenager whose schooling was through a...

22.10.2023 80

Dawn

Muna Khan

Meet the press

I KNOW what happened with the ‘forced’ interviews that recently ran on TV. I know the circumstances that led to them, what happened in the studio,...

15.10.2023 50

Dawn

Muna Khan

Monk à la mode

I HAD the good fortune to travel up north recently with my family. The few days in a picturesque town, getting plenty of rest, laughter and good food...

08.10.2023 40

Dawn

Muna Khan

Stepping up

IN 2014, I had the good fortune of attending a talk by my favourite writer, David Sedaris, where he read from a yet to be published piece about his...

01.10.2023 60

Dawn

Muna Khan

Missing justice

I ONCE read somewhere that there are a handful of languages that have words to describe a parent whose child dies. There’s ‘vilomah’ in Sanskrit...

24.09.2023 90

Dawn

Muna Khan

What’s the point?

ONE of my favourite parts about teaching is learning from students. Whether it’s something inane like who is Ducky Bhai to important issues like...

17.09.2023 90

Dawn

Muna Khan

Sleepless in Karachi

WHEN I moved to Hanoi in 2008 to work at a newspaper as a copy editor, my toughest challenge was readjusting my meal timings. Our shifts began at 2pm,...

10.09.2023 100

Dawn

Muna Khan

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