Ubaidullah Pandit (عبيدالله پنڈت)

When the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was founded in 1950 in the wake of death and destruction wreaked by World War Two, it was expected to operate for three years and then be dissolved. Enter 2022, it’s still at work, with its need felt more than ever. Its role has over the years expanded and its Convention has been growing in its formulations, definitions and clauses. As the refugee crisis has risen dramatically over the past few decades, it’s essential that we have a clear understanding of different aspects and terms involved in the discourse surrounding it, including the number of people who are affected by this crisis, and what’s at stake. There are around 90 million people the world over who have been displaced from their own homeland. Among these 90 million people, 27.1 million are officially recorded as refugees and almost half of them are children. The detailed statistics regarding the refugee crisis can be had on the UNHCR website. We must be invariab...

On January 13, 2021, Lisa Montgomery became the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1953. Among the many macabre and abusive things Lisa was subjected and exposed to in her childhood, perhaps none was more horrible than when her mother, in full view of Lisa, crushed the head of a dog with a shovel. This one incident lodged somewhere deep in the psyche of Lisa would also become a factor, howsoever small, of what she would do years later.   Many people don’t seem to understand how the exposure to violent and graphic content affects us. When little Ada was mauled to death by a leopard recently, the pictures of her mutilated body were carelessly and disrespectfully circulated all over the social media. Some people didn’t even realize what impact it might have on others, particularly on her parents.  Each one of us must know that constant exposure to graphic content degrades our emotional response. If it continues over a period of time, desensitization sets i...

Words have consequences. They are not just an intermediary between our thoughts and our actions. Sometimes they also have a performative and illocutionary function, which means they constitute an action in and of themselves. We advise through words, promise through words, marry through words and end it through words. Written words may have a lasting effect, but the spoken ones have immediate effects in our everyday social transactions. We humans interact with each other solely through language. Our cognitive and emotional states are conveyed to other people through words. So it’s through words that we’ll be weighed, understood or misunderstood. How the other person reacts will depend to a significant extent on the choice of our words by which we connect with them.  Both being empathetic and gaining empathy are functions of words. One may be sincerely and in earnest empathizing with some person, but one needs appropriate words to express this emotion. Similarly, when we seek to be u...

Just when I thought you would be our Lincoln And I would sing to you like Walt Whitman, ‘O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done’, You left the ship too soon in the shifting winds; Long before it set sail, even waiting not for it to sink. Now the sceptre you hold and the helm you steer Have broken the crown you wore and the gavel you held. Take a look at who lies on the deck dead and cold. Fearful trip ours, shameful trip be yours!

I thought she was a Jesus to me, Dividing my life like history; It was somber and bleak before she came. It was 'spring like a pleasant king' after she arrived, Like someone turning the light on again. But when she left, she left me dead and cold, Oblivious and overcast like Israeli assassinations; Like thick rubber jackboots in the Kashmir character. Like an epileptic foaming at the mouth, Shuddering and waving like rosary incantations.

Re-loving is reliving, revealing and rediscovering many a thing, Like spring blooms coming out of naked winters; Like a diamond's coming of age after years of silence; Like iron coming as a revelation from the skies,  Making possible civilizations and the romance in elevators; Re-loving is your and mine replaying The hums and tunes of love recorded in the past; It's our replying to each other with  Many a song of arrivals and departures. Re-loving is reveling in your presence.