India and Afghanistan now share an independence day. At least, according to the Taliban. August 15 has been Indian Independence Day for 75 years. ( Click here for my openDemocracy piece.) But the Afghan notion of August 15 as independence day is very new. For the past year, the Taliban…

I found ‘George’s Marvellous Medicine,’ a Roald Dahl book I hadn’t read, as a giveaway on a neighbour’s wall and gladly took it home. What followed was a half-hour adventure with the eponymous eight-year-old child of the title. George decides that his dreadful granny’s medicine is not making her “better”…

The day that Salman Rushdie was stabbed in Chautauqua, in upstate New York, an openDemocracy piece on India-Pakistan at 75 quoted the novelist. “The growing likeness,” between India and Pakistan, the piece said, “has struck others, not least Salman Rushdie, whose acclaimed allegorical novel ‘Midnight’s Children’ (1981) centred on India…

Writer Mohsin Hamid was on British domestic radio’s Today programme, talking about his new novel ‘The Last White Man’ (published Thursday, August 11) and it seemed ironic neither he, nor his BBC interlocutor Mishal Husain, said anything about the last white woman standing in the Conservative leadership election. Ironic because…

With less than a week to go before the Taliban mark the one-year anniversary of their reconquest of Afghanistan, one of the most honest and striking reports on the situation has to be from Secunder Kermani of the BBC. His deeply reported piece acknowledges the tumult of the past year…

I recently read a piece on the growing numbers in Australia of Hazara, who are originally from Afghanistan, and it took me right back to the US Embassy complex in Kabul. (‘The Pomegranate Peace’, the novel I wrote from my year in Kabul is available here as an ebook and…

Your friend may find these fragments from 'The Pomegranate Peace' familiar: …The only place on the sprawling embassy compound that used the Afghan/Persian calendar was the bar. The Duck and Cover pretended its dinginess signified intimacy and that poor lighting was conducive to the sort of raging romances that are…