Cooking was introduced to me not at home but in school, when one of our teachers, Mrs Mohammady took it upon herself to start cooking classes for girls. For this, she first had to convince the school headmistress that there would be no danger, since the girls would not be operating the stoves themselves. Then, she sought permission from the other teachers to let her use the staff room, as it was the place that had a makeshift stove to prepare tea.

Being a mother of daughters, Mrs Mohammady felt strongly about teaching them kitchen skills, which she considered a life skill. She wanted the same for boys but, unlike the girls, it was not so simple to get them to sacrifice one of their two sports or games periods to learn cooking. She started with girls in the sixth grade, who were older and responsible enough to be trusted in a kitchen, and who were also quite excited about taking cooking classes. I was one of them.

Mrs Mohammady encouraged us to put together and maintain our own cookbooks. We decorated them with pictures of cakes and pies, or whatever else in foreign magazines looked scrumptious enough for us to cut out and paste in. This went alongside recipes we penned of the cuisines we had learned to prepare. When we could not find pictures in magazines, we drew.

The first thing we made in the staff room kitchenette was crunchy caramelised peanut bars. Pancakes were next, followed by pakorray [vegetable fritters] and more such simple recipes.

With gas shutdowns a regular reality, these no-cook recipes are as useful today as they were when first learned decades ago…

Mrs Mohammady encouraged us to experiment and practise at home, though this proved harder than it sounds. My mother, though she appreciated the teacher for taking it upon herself to teach her daughter and her classfellows how to cook, did not feel entirely comfortable with me using the stove and oven at home.

At the same time, she did not want to dampen my enthusiasm entirely. Hence, she introduced me to recipes that did not involve fire. She took me to bookshops to look for cookbooks about salads, sandwiches, chutneys, shakes and desserts that did not require cooking.

Learning to make them was its own kind of pleasure. I continue to return to the recipes that I came up with in those days, especially in current times of gas shutdowns and shortages. Here, then, are some of the recipes I return to still — especially on days when the gas is out and patience is short.

SUMMER SALAD

Chop a medium-sized onion, bell pepper, carrot and half a cabbage into julienne slices. Take two medium-sized tomatoes and cut into small pieces. Transfer it all into a large bowl and squeeze the juice of one fresh lemon over it. Add half a teaspoon of salt, black pepper, chilli flakes and half a cup of plain yoghurt. If you like, sprinkle it with chopped fresh coriander before mixing it. The salad is ready. Serve cold.

COLD CUCUMBER SANDWICHES

Peel and slice a cucumber. Take a few bread slices and remove the edges before spreading mayonnaise on one side. Place the cucumber slices on the bread, add small pieces of bottled jalapeno slices to add taste (optional) and cover with the other slice to make a yummy snack that may be stored in the fridge and enjoyed cold.

SALTED MINT LASSI

Take two cups of yoghurt, one-fourth cup of mint leaves, half a teaspoon of crushed ginger, a teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of black salt (optional) and one-fourth teaspoon of white cumin seeds. Transfer them to an electric blender along with half an ice tray of cubes. Mix in the blender on medium for 1-2 minutes and pour into a jug. Your chilled and refreshing lassi is ready.

PAAN LADDU

This one takes a little preparation, but most of it is hands-off. You need to first prepare gulkand, a simple concoction of rose petals and sugar. Just get lots of red rose petals from any roadside florist, rinse them and leave them to dry in a strainer. When the petals are dry, take a few at a time and add in two teaspoons of sugar to it before crushing and mixing them together with your hands in a bowl. Repeat the process by adding a handful of petals at a time and adding in more sugar. Transfer to a glass jar, close the lid and leave it in the sun for three to five days, after which the mixture starts looking similar to strawberry jam. Store it in the fridge.

Take a paan [betel leaf] or two from any paan shop. It’s even better if you have paan growing at home. Put the leaves (broken into little pieces) into the blender. Pour in a small can (about 400g) of sweetened condensed milk, a pinch (if powder) or two drops of green food colour (if in liquid form) and mix well.

Take two cups of desiccated coconut and mix it with the green betel leaves paste. Form small balls of the mixture, while placing a teaspoon of gulkand in the centre of each. Coat these balls with desiccated coconut before serving.

The writer is a member of staff. X: @HasanShazia

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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At the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, ‘Riverless Water’, London-based Pakistani artist Saba Khan’s debut solo exhibition in the United Kingdom (UK), explores the human and environmental legacies of the Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. Built in the 1960s on the Jhelum River, its construction submerged large parts of the Mirpur hamlets and triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK, significantly shaping the cultural landscape of England’s north and midlands.

Through a curated sequence of 12 paintings, drawings, archival material and video interviews with Birmingham elders, Khan traces a journey from the political spectacle of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) to the lived realities of Mirpuri migrants in post-industrial Britain, highlighting histories of loss, trauma and marginalisation often absent from official narratives. The curator, Roma Piotrowska, emphasises the exhibition’s importance for local communities with Pakistani roots, viewing it as a reflection on technological ‘progress’, climate justice and postcolonial identity.

Khan explains she did not go directly to Mangla Dam. Her interest and investigation started during her time in France, where she studied water bodies as part of her research and drew some drawings of French dams in the Alps. It was there that she first saw the enormous scale of human-made structures designed to contain millions of tonnes of water — monumental interventions transforming entire landscapes.

Furthermore, she was inspired by Beijing-based artist Liu Chuang, who documented the socio-technical impacts of big dams in China, and Khan shifted her focus to her homeland. Her research led her to the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) archives, where she found a 1951 article by the David E Lilienthal, an American public administrator, titled ‘Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?’

Saba Khan’s deeply poignant exhibition in Birmingham explores how the Mangla Dam’s construction triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK

Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, visited the subcontinent in 1951 and warned that India and Pakistan were on the brink of war over Kashmir. He proposed that joint, technocratic development of the Indus Basin was the only route to peace and prosperity. This approach directly influenced the World Bank-led mediations that culminated in the 1960 IWT. Some hydropower experts note that the treaty, negotiated in a Cold War climate partly to curb Soviet influence, controversially allocated the west-flowing rivers to Pakistan as the lower riparian.

Pakistan’s water access was not inherently at risk even without the treaty. The agreement, signed by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Field Marshal Ayub Khan, effectively partitioned the Indus system. Pakistan received the western rivers — the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — and, to compensate for the loss of the eastern rivers, embarked on the Indus Basin Project, supervised by the British firm Binnie & Partners.

Although hailed as a triumph, the treaty has remained a flashpoint ever since. In 2025, following militant attacks in Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally suspended the treaty, asserting India’s right to its water, triggering a potential war scenario. International mediation secured a ceasefire soon after, preventing escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

Correspondingly, in the 1960s, Britain experienced significant labour shortages in its industrial centres. By chance, many displaced by the dam were granted work permits to migrate to the UK, transporting an entire social fabric from Mirpur’s submerged valleys to the foundries and mills of the West Midlands and northern England.

Cities such as Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester, key hubs of the steel and textile industries, became new homes for this community. As factories and mills declined in the 1980s, the Kashmiri labouring class adapted itself.

In the latter part of the exhibition, Khan highlights the sociological framework of the Indian-British sociologist Virinder S. Kalra’s book From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks. Khan’s paintings shift focus to contemporary urban life and economic activities: from car manufacturing plants to neon-lit halal restaurants, independent small shops and beyond.

Khan’s new body of work acts as a ghostly chronicle in neon greys, greens and blues. She depicts the transcendence of technocratic brutality with the metallic lines of maps and bulldozers physically erasing the intimate cartography of Mirpur’s hamlets, transforming ancestral homes into sites of mechanical intervention. For the Mirpur diaspora, urban progress has been built on their homelessness, on the many graveyards where their forebears are buried, and these sites can no longer be visited.

‘Riverless Water’ is on display at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, England from January 10-April 6, 2026

The writer is an art critic who spends his time in Birmingham and Lahore. He can be reached at aarish.sardar@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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On the screen, horrific images of World War II flicker, showing the skeletal figures of Jewish men, women and children in Nazi concentration camps being marched into the horrors of the “Final Solution.”

It is a sombre cinematic and television ritual we have come to expect. Yet, if one observes the scheduling of these screened tragedies, a pattern emerges.

Whenever the state of Israel faces widespread condemnation for its brutal excursions in the Middle East, the Western entertainment industry develops a sudden, renewed obsession with Jewish victimhood during the last world war.

This is what media scholars call “affective management”, a term describing how our emotional responses are curated by those who control the narrative. In 1988, academics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky examined this as an attempt to mitigate the public relations (PR) disaster of the present with the trauma of the past.

By re-running the tragedy faced by the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, the Western entertainment industry provides a moral counterweight that often dilutes contemporary criticism of Israeli state violence. The criticism becomes ‘antisemitism’.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Israel’s image gradually mutated from the ‘underdog’ of 1948 to a regional leviathan, especially following its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Western airwaves were hit with a wave of Holocaust dramas. The 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust did not just win Emmys. It reached hundreds of millions of viewers precisely as the international community began to grapple with Israel’s diplomatic isolation at the United Nations (UN).

From acclaimed Holocaust dramas to nationalist blockbusters, the strategic revival of past trauma can influence public perception, shifting attention from present-day violence to the moral weight of historical suffering

When the First Intifada broke out in the occupied territories of Palestine in the late 1980s, during which young Palestinians fought Israeli troops with slingshots, the American broadcasting network ABC responded with the expensive multi-part epic War and Remembrance.

As the world watched nightly news footage of Israeli soldiers using violent tactics against Palestinian stone-throwers, War and Remembrance provided an emotional diversion. It ensured that the image of the Jew as the eternal victim remained the dominant cultural framework, even as the Israeli state was acting as the primary aggressor.

In 1997, media scholar Yosefa Loshitzky noted that the “sacralisation of the Holocaust” provides a moral shield, creating a binary where the memory of a past genocide is used to silence discourse on Israel’s contemporary human rights violations.

Films such as The Zone of Interest (2023), which depicts a troubled German commandant of a concentration camp during World War II, do not simply appear by chance. They are launched with massive fanfare at film festivals, precisely when discourse on apartheid or genocide in the Middle East reaches a boiling point.

In the age of Netflix and streaming, this reflex has become even more frequent. During the recent ‘Gaza War’, in which Israeli forces killed tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, and during Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon and Iran, streaming platforms seemed to have gone into overdrive.

Suddenly, films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), meditations on the horrors of the Holocaust, were pushed to the top of ‘recommended’ lists, while old and new documentaries on World War II appeared to tell the same story repeatedly.

This is what the American literature professor Michael Rothberg, in his book Multidirectional Memory, identifies as “screen memory.” The term describes a historical trauma brought forward specifically to obscure a problematic contemporary reality. Viewers become so preoccupied weeping for the victims of the 1940s that they find themselves with very little emotional bandwidth left for the families currently being pulled from the rubble in Gaza and Iran.

However, this is not exclusively a Western speciality. Bollywood has also mastered this art of cultural deflection. Whenever the Modi government in India faces international heat over its increasingly exclusionary treatment of minorities, the Mumbai dream factory starts to churn out ‘epics’ about internal enemies whose ancestors supposedly sought to destroy Hinduism.

This is the Indian version of “competitive victimhood”, or the act of shouting about the past sufferings of the ‘self’ so loudly that the current suffering of ‘the other’ becomes mere background noise.

For example, 2020’s Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior reimagined India’s historical Muslim rulers as monstrous invaders while elevating Hindu warriors as the ultimate defenders of Hinduism. Similarly, films such as The Kashmir Files (2022) or Article 370 (2024) framed the Indian state’s military presence in Kashmir not as an occupation but as a moral necessity, to prevent a return of past tragedies that befell Hindus.

In this narrative, the ‘other’ (largely Muslim) is cast as the eternal aggressor. This shift has been described by the US-based academic Nilanjana Bhattacharjya as the “new Bollywood”, where the screen memory of past conflicts is used to displace the immediate reality of contemporary state-led violence.

This trend went into overdrive after the Indian air force suffered major losses against Pakistan in May 2025. This time, instead of resurfacing a past trauma, a past victory from the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war was brought forward to displace the reality of a recent defeat. This year’s Border 2 is an example.

The Turks, under the banner of ‘Neo-Ottomanism’, have followed a similar script. While Ankara’s regional ambitions draw Western criticism, Turkish television has been dominated by historical fantasies such as Dirili: Erturul. Such shows re-imagine the Ottoman past as a period of heroic resistance against the West and internal traitors. As the Germany-based transcultural studies scholar Josh Carney points out, these dramas function as a “moral reset” for the modern state, priming the audience to view Turkiye as a beleaguered fortress defending its sacred heritage.

The early 20th century Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote that dominant groups shape “cultural common sense”, making their version of history the absolute moral benchmark. When the Western entertainment industry consistently rewinds material on the violence against Jews, it establishes a framework where the security of the Jewish state is an ethical necessity that transcends international law.

By flooding the public sphere with historical trauma, the industry effectively moves the focus from the present to the past. The result is a self-reinforcing loop, where the market for historical tragedy becomes most active exactly when that tragedy serves a political purpose.

Across the board, from Hollywood to Mumbai, the industry’s reflex turns complex contemporary human rights issues into a binary struggle of survivors versus villains. It is a potent form of cultural hegemony, ensuring that the ghosts of the past remain more real to us than the dying children of the present.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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