Originally published by Ad Age here. When I was a teenager, I loved watching “American Idol.” The courage of the contestants baring their hearts and souls in front of the whole world was so heartening. One day my dad, amused by my love of the show, asked me about its premise, and when I explained…

Published here: http://desiwriterslounge.net/articles/papercuts-women-time/ On a clear September evening in 2013, I took the train to the Gene Siskel Film Center in Downtown Chicago to watch a film by an up-and-coming female film-maker at the Turkish Film Festival. Like any Chicago evening at the precipice of Fall, the city’s schizophrenic wind was deeply immersed in a tug…

A few months back a video link to Amal Alamuddin’s speech in front of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) started trending.  The hearing was in regards to the long-standing issue of the Armenian genocide and Turkey’s continued denial of it; Amal Alamuddin was one of the lawyers representing the Armenian side. The case…

Everybody loves to hate on Facebook, even while we continue to, apologetically, stay on it. Let’s acknowledge from the outset that Facebook is already a permanent part of our internet-official lives today – just like Google is. Since we’re acknowledging things, let us also give credit where it’s due: like Google, Facebook has fought a…

This really began in 2008 when I was working for an up-and-coming television news network in Pakistan – a country which was at the time deeply embroiled in the War on Terror that followed events of 9/11. The nascent status of this news channel was shared by almost all other “independent” news agencies and privately…