I read George Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four,  published in 1949, many years ago. Orwell painted a chilling picture of a dystopian superstate, Oceania, in the book. I could not imagine then, that I will return to the book in a few years, to better understand the prevailing socio-political milieu in my country. Some days back Central Board of Secondary Education removed excerpts of two poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz – one of the most talented poets of twentieth century who wrote in Urdu – from the curriculum of 10 th  and 12 th  classes. I read this news with horror as I recognised the similarity between Oceania of Orwell’s  Nineteen Eighty-Four  and our present. Rulers of Oceania have designed a completely new language, the Newspeak, and want to erase the old language, the Oldspeak, from people’s memory. ‘All real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. … (it) will exist only in Newspeak versions, no...

  This Colour of My Heart Romantic love is a fabric of many shades. It is a melange of disparate emotions: obsessive longing, peaceful contentment, perpetual unease, imperturbable calm, incurable desolation, unparalleled ecstasy, throbbing tenderness, delusional envy, abject devotion, obsessive jealousy. This love is a necessity of life. It engenders life and nourishes it. Only purpose of life on earth– there is no extant evidence of life anywhere else in universe– is self-replication. Nature has stumbled on a sophisticated mechanism to fulfil this aim in our species: the romantic love. What a convoluted process to achieve a simple, although universal goal of life! This longwinded approach of nature– not wasteful, as nature is incorrigibly parsimonious in using its resources– has painted the canvas of human experience in unbelievably vibrant colours. These have been the muse of poets and story tellers since the time man discovered such occupations of mind.   Faiz Ahmad...