13 research outputs found
Poetics of Cross-cultural Assimilation: A Study of Taufiq Rafat’s ‘Reflections’
No full text‘Reflections’ is one of Taufiq Rafat’s longest, most complex poems, with significant philosophical contours and symbolism. It is also the most important in a very personal sense. The author presents a study of this poem as based on three major themes: the concepts of Birth, Death and Rebirth, the relationship between life and art and the mystic apprehension of the artistic, poetic experience
“Unwilled Choicesâ€: The Exilic Perspectives on Home and Location in the Works of Zulfikar Ghose and Mohsin Hamid
No full textFor many immigrants, geographical dislocations and cultural shocks often entail traumatic experiences. This is one of the many paradoxes of the contemporary world that, on the one hand, people live in an increasingly borderless world where cultural, economic and political frontiers are eroding due to global communications system and post-industrial technologies; and, on the other hand, since September-11, the world has been experiencing a new wave of xenophobia in public, and megalomania among many world leaders and politicians, resulting into the closing of borders and an irrational fear of the ‘other’ or the new “barbariansâ€. Until September-11 happened, American cultural production seemed to achieve what Ralph Waldo Emerson prophesied about in 1845: “In this continent – asylum of all nations – we will construct a new race, a new religion, a new state, a new literature which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the Dark Agesâ€. September-11 caused a sort of abortion of history – history moving in a linear, progressive fashion was disrupted with a jolt of epic proportions, creating hiatus in the Emersonian dream. In order to negotiate this disruption in the experience of the South Asian-American immigrants and investigate the issues of identity, exile, Home, and cross-culturality, in this study I have selected two writers of Pakistani origin: Zulfikar Ghose, with his rich experience of multiple exiles, is the prototype writer in exile; and Mohsin Hamid, an emerging voice in the post-September11 scenario. In his novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Hamid encapsulates the dilemma of American Muslims since that fateful day. By discussing the work of two writers who, despite being contemporaries, represent two different perspectives on ‘home’ and exile (September-11 being the cut-off point), I try here to establish the difference between the pre- and post-September 11 exilic perspectives by analyzing Ghose’s protagonist in Tripple Mirror of the Self, representing exile in the classical sense of the word, and that of Hamid as a divided, liminal figure trying to exist on the threshold of cultures and rediscovering his cultural roots in the wake of September 11 events
Impact of Radical Islamisation of Education on Pakistani Society
No full textThe radicalization of Pakistani society has invoked international security concerns in this age of global terror. However, few analysts have delved into the real causes of how a culturally diverse and tolerant society came to be radicalized to such an extent that almost all trails of terrorist attacks end up in this country of 180 million people. This article traces the history, rather briefly, of how the national educational policies and curricula in social sciences and humanities have been changed to serve the jihadist ideology in Pakistani society. The crumbling social order in Pakistan is not only an indication of the bad governance but also the systemic inculcation of ideologies of hatred and extremism among a whole generation of school children and college graduates. It is a society where extremism, not only of the radical Islamists but also of the common man, is on the rise. Many Pakistani social scientists blame the flawed educational policies, framed since Independence in 1947, for the rise of nationalist, religious and sectarian ideologies that have been eating the vitals of state and society in Pakistan. Instead of creating a humane and just society, the national educational policies, particularly the one promulgated during the Zia era, have contributed to the radicalization of the youth. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this scenario is that the policymakers have not yet realized the gravity of the situation as is evident in the attitude and policies of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan towards the state of social sciences and humanities in the country, and reflected in the statistics given in its own annual reports
Requiem of a (Socialist) Dream: Locating Tāraṛ’s Aiy Ghazāl-i Shab in Global Capitalism
No full textThis article presents an analysis of Mustansar Hussain Tāraṛ’s novel Aiy Ghazāl-i Shab (2013). According to Awān this ‘is the only novel of its kind in Urdu literature that documents the socio-political, cultural and ideological aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its socialist ideology.’ Through the intertwined stories of its characters, he says, Tarar has traced the rise and fall of Marxism and its political praxis as communism/ socialism
Reception and Experimentation of the Urdu Literary Form: The Case of the Ghaẓal in America
No full textCultural and literary crossing-over has been going on since ancient times. However, as the pace of globalization increased in the twentieth century, literary forms and genres peculiar to one tradition paved their way into numerous others. Just as the Urdu novel imbibed narrative techniques from the Euro-American fictional genre, many poets from the western hemisphere too have inter-textualized Urdu-Hindi generic forms. Of all such inter-textual influences, perhaps the most intriguing is the case of the ghaẓal and its adaptations by a number of American poets. Initially only translations of Urdu ghaẓals of Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Faiz Ahmad Faiz were introduced on the American literary landscape. Gradually, many poets started experimenting with the form in English writings. Writers like Adrienne Rich, Judith Wright, Jim Harrison, John Thompson, D. G. Jones, Phyllis Webb, Douglas Barbour, and Max Plater among others emulated the ghaẓal form. However, coupled with the lack of understanding of the original form and of the native culture in which it evolved, the ghaẓal, it seems, remained an enigma for American writers. The breakthrough came with the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali (19492001) in 1990. Ali’s greatest contribution to modern American poetry was his untiring effort to introduce the essence of the ghaẓal and to establish a permanent place for this genre in modern American poetry
MEMORYSCAPES BEYOND TRAUMA IN PAKISTANI POETRY: INTEGRATING POST-9/11ISM AND (POST)MEMORY STUDIES
No full textContemporary Pakistani poets including Harris Khalique, Rizwan Akhter and Imtiaz Dharker in the last two decades (2001-20) have translated the event of 9/11 and its offshoots into individual, communal, public, prosthetic and transcultural memories of violence, and determined their own paths to manage the turmoil different from the one witnessed by the post-9/11 American poets. This research negotiates with the poetics and politics of difference while highlighting the polyphonic aesthetic structures of (post)9/11- memory in Pakistani poetry. It entwines trauma, memory, and cultural studies, and scaffolds its argument upon the thematic concerns of the selected Pakistani poetry around the four concepts of public fantasy, communal memory, identity displacement, and transculturality. Squaring the theoretical canvas, it traces the repercussions of 9/11 beyond trauma in prosthetic contexts. It further maps how natal alienation – a disconnection of historical memory from the cultural context – not only augments mnemohistory in subjectivity but is also indelible in influencing social, political, and territorial contexts of analogical 9/11 memory. This way, this study will contribute to the understanding of forms of memory and thematic concerns of (post-9/11 Pakistani English poetry. Here, unlike Marianne Hirsh’s use of the term in the context of intergenerational memory, the parenthesized ‘post’ of ‘(post)memory’ refers to the space where my research engages with memory studies theoretically on the rhetoric of difference through which poets construct post-9/11 poetic memorials in Pakistan. In other words, within the canvas of this research, the parenthesized ‘(post)’ provides theoretical space to the diversity of Pakistani poetic voices to 9/11 and its offshoots
Queer but Language: A Sociolinguistic Study of Farsi
No full textAbstract In this paper we have tried to settle whether Farsi,
Synthesis, Morphological Analysis and Photovoltaic Performance of Thallium- and Yttrium-Doped Titanium Dioxide-Based Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells
No full textDiversity and divergence in domesticated and wild Jamun (Syzygium cumini) genotypes of Pakistan
No full textIntrusion detection in internet of things using supervised machine learning based on application and transport layer features using UNSW-NB15 data-set
No full textInternet of Things (IoT) devices are well-connected; they generate and consume data which involves transmission of data back and forth among various devices. Ensuring security of the data is a critical challenge as far as IoT is concerned. Since IoT devices are inherently low-power and do not require a lot of compute power, a Network Intrusion Detection System is typically employed to detect and remove malicious packets from entering the network. In the same context, we propose feature clusters in terms of Flow, Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) by using features in UNSW-NB15 data-set. We eliminate problems like over-fitting, curse of dimensionality and imbalance in the data-set. We apply supervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, i.e., Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine and Artificial Neural Networks on the clusters. Using RF, we, respectively, achieve 98.67% and 97.37% of accuracy in binary and multi-class classification. In clusters based techniques, we achieved 96.96%, 91.4% and 97.54% of classification accuracy by using RF on Flow & MQTT features, TCP features and top features from both clusters. Moreover, we show that the proposed feature clusters provide higher accuracy and requires lesser training time as compared to other state-of-the-art supervised ML-based approaches. © 2021, The Author(s)
