Prominent host and comedian Tabish Hashmi and his wife Hira Khalid shared details about their first meeting for an arranged marriage.
The couple appeared for their first-ever joint interview with host Nida Yasir on ARY Digital’s Ramadan special transmission ‘Shan e Suhoor.’ Hira disclosed, “Tabish’s father and my grandfather used to be childhood friends.”
“But there was surely love at first sight,” the host said at which point Hira interrupted her, humourously saying, “From Tabish’s side.”
They reminisced about their initial meeting during the final days of Ramadan when Tabish, along with his family, visited Hira’s place, and Tabish fell in love with her at first sight.
When asked what initially attracted her to her husband, Hira said, “It was an arranged marriage. At that time, I agreed solely because of my parents’ decision, but eventually, gradually, I started liking many of his qualities.”
Hira also revealed that Tabish preferred face-to-face meetings over long calls during their engagement, prompting her to come up with excuses to meet him. Hira and Tabish have been married for over 12 years and have two children together, a daughter and a son.
A young man in Islamabad shot his female cousin dead before taking his own life in the Soan area of Khanna police station on Monday.
The girl, a first-year student in college, had refused the boy’s marriage proposal multiple times, stating that her focus was on her studies. The family also had categorically refused to give her hand in marriage to her cousin.
As per police reports, upon rejection, Akash barged into the house of the girl and opened fire at his cousin who was studying in her room, killing her on the spot.
تھانہ کھنہ کے علاقہ میں لڑکے نے لڑکی کو فائرنگ کرکے قتل کردیا۔
Later, he turned the gun on himself and ended his life with a bullet to the head.
A report by Iftikhar Chaudhry published in the Express Tribune states that police handed the bodies over to relatives after examination while a report of the incident was registered and further investigation was underway.
A Pakistani couple was sentenced to life in prison by an Italian court on Tuesday for the 2021 murder of their daughter after she refused an arranged marriage.
Saman Abbas, 18, was living in Novellara near Bologna when she disappeared in May 2021, having rejected the previous year her family’s demand that she marry a cousin in Pakistan.
A tribunal in Reggio Emilia in central Italy ruled that the parents ordered the murder and that an uncle had strangled his niece.
The uncle was sentenced to 14 years after accepting a plea bargain, while two cousins were acquitted in an affair that shocked the country.
Abbas had denounced her parents to the police and social workers placed her in a shelter in November 2020.
But she visited her family in April 2021, planning to pick up her passport and start a new life with her boyfriend, whom her family disapproved of.
She disappeared soon after, and police, alerted by the boyfriend, raided the family home in May but the parents had already left for Pakistan.
The young woman was probably killed the night of April 30 to May 1, according to surveillance camera footage showing five people leaving the family home with shovels, crowbars and buckets, before returning two and a half hours later.
A year later Abbas’s body was found in an abandoned farmhouse with a broken neck.
Her brother told police that he had overheard his father talking about the murder and that it was the uncle who had killed his sister.
The father, Shabbar Abbas, was arrested in Pakistan and extradited to Italy in August 2023.
The uncle, Danish Hasnain, was turned over by French authorities while the cousins were arrested in Spain.
The four men were present at the trial, but the mother, Nazia Shaheen, is still a fugitive.
If you could share an unpopular opinion about marriage, what would you say?
Pakistani women are sharing cold hard facts with this trend on X (formerly Twitter), sharing their frank opinions about marriage. Since desi societies predominantly consider marriages to be a system arranged without a woman’s consent or opinion, many women shared what they thought about relationships, living with parents and other issues Pakistanis should really consider listening to.
We completely have to side with this one. Your wives are not hired helpers for your home or your parents.
If your wife moves in with your parents you owe her. This is even before she bears and raises your children. Very beghairat of any man who raises his voice to a wife who puts up with his mother. https://t.co/ycqGsW9ex7
— OhChiefestAndGreatestOfCalamities (@mustyoumustard) September 9, 2023
Never take any excuses like this from someone who claims to love you.
A United Kingdom (UK) bachelor Muhammad Malik has set up a website called ‘Findmalikawife.com’ and bought several advertising hoardings across Birmingham in order to find a wife.
“Save me from an arranged marriage,” read the billboards, along with the link to his website.
On the website, the Pakistani explains, “My ideal partner would be a Muslim woman in her 20s, who’s striving to better her deen (religion). I’m open to any ethnicity but I’ve got a loud Punjabi family so you would need to keep with the bants.”
“I just haven’t found the right girl yet. It’s tough out there. I had to get a billboard to get seen!” he added.
The 29-year-old told BBC, “I’m creative and love doing the most random and absurd things.” The billboards will stay up till January 14.
A man and a woman reportedly committed suicide by consuming poisonous pills after their families did not agree to their marriage, The Express Tribune reported.
The lovers, Adnan and Muqaddas, wished to marry each other but the woman’s parents had arranged her marriage elsewhere.
On the wedding day, the disappointed couple committed suicide by consuming poisonous pills.
After the incident was reported to the police, the officials took the bodies into custody. The bodies were handed over to the families after the legal formalities.
According to the police, the marriage ceremony was about to happen when the incident took place.
The funerals of both the deceased were held amid a gloomy atmosphere in the village.
When Nashra Balagamwala’s Pakistani family started pressuring her into an arranged marriage, she decided to get creative to avoid the myriad of suitors being foisted upon her.
Nashra Balagamwala
Like many young women in South Asia, she was targeted by older women, nicknamed ‘Rishta aunties’, who wanted to pair her up with eligible men. Arranged marriages — where a couple are matched by family members — are common in South Asia. Netflix’s recent series Indian Matchmaking shed light on the topic and became an instant hit trending in both Pakistan and India.
Speaking of her own experience, Nashra said, “It truly started when I was 18, right as my sister got married … literally, the day of the wedding, all the aunties started coming up to me and saying, ‘You’re next, you’re next.”
“I’d wear the fake engagement rings, or whenever an auntie was looking I’d pour an extra helping of food on my plate,” she said, as the matchmakers considered women who didn’t watch their figure to be less desirable brides.
Those real-life strategies inspired her to create the board game “Arranged!” where players take the role of teenage girls trying to escape an ‘auntie’, which features in Gamemaster, a documentary about aspiring game designers released this month.
Wanting a different life, Balagamwala convinced her family to allow her to wait until she was 21 — and as she reached the deadline as a student at Rhode Island School of Design in the United States, she came up with the idea for the game.
“When I was going back for the winter break, my parents had a boy lined up for me to meet,” she said.
“So to de-stress from that I started creating this list of all the crazy things I used to do, or that my cousins used to do, to try to discourage the Rishta aunties.”
In “Arranged!,” the girls attempt to deter auntie by drawing cards with commands like getting a tattoo, wearing a sleeveless shirt, talking about pursuing a career, or being seen hugging a male friend.
But cards like being able to make a perfectly round roti flat bread, or having a sister who is known to be very obedient to her in-laws, move auntie closer to a player.
When the board game was released in 2017, it drew anger from some acquaintances in Pakistan — but the media attention also made Balagamwala an undesirable wife in the eyes of the aunties and convinced her family to stop pressing her to marry.
On the contrary, she was contacted by dozens of young women, mostly from India, who said the game helped them to start conversations with their families and opened their eyes to the stress they felt.
“Now they’re like, ‘You do you, find your own guy,” laughed Balagamwala, who is currently studying for a master’s degree exploring the links between design and social justice at Harvard University.
“There is still a little bit of that stress in their hearts and minds where they are like, ‘Oh my God, she’s 27 and there’s no boy on the horizon’ so I think that stresses them out,” she added.
