Its time to retire the old adage that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Plenty of women don’t have the time to cook, and that’s perfectly ok too.
In a surprising revelation on the ‘A Plus’ Eid special show, popular actress Zara Noor Abbas shared that she has never cooked for her husband. During the show, she opened up about her aversion to handling meat and limited cooking experiences, giving fans an unexpected glimpse into her personal life.
Zara candidly admitted, “I have never touched meat. I don’t even go near it, I don’t prepare it at all. Nowadays, I am in Lahore and I have been enjoying Eid and guests, but I haven’t been to the kitchen. I don’t cook normally; my husband always requests me to cook something. Well, now I am thinking of cooking namkeen gosht for him. Asad and all his brothers are meat lovers, that’s why I chose this dish.”
For those eagerly waiting for ‘Barzakh,’ the suspense about its release is finally over. According to Variety, the makers of the highly anticipated Pakistani web series, starring Fawad Khan and Sanam Saeed, have announced that it will premiere on Zee Zindagi’s YouTube channel and ZEE5 on July 19.
Written and directed by Asim Abbasi, the creator behind Zee Zindagi’s hits ‘Cake’ (Pakistan’s 2018 Oscar submission), ‘Barzakh’ promises to captivate viewers. Zee Zindagi recently released six striking artistic posters to keep the audience excited.
“When all has withered…will love endure? ‘Barzakh’ premieres 19th July on Zindagi’s YouTube and Zee 5 Shows,” the channel captioned the poster on its official X handle. Sanam also shared the posters on Instagram with the same tagline.
‘Barzakh’ had its grand debut at the prestigious Series Mania Festival in France in 2023. This project marks Abbasi’s second collaboration with the channel and reunites Sanam and Fawad for the first time since their hit series ‘Zindagi Gulzar Hai’ ended in 2013.
Set in the beautiful Hunza Valley, ‘Barzakh’ tells the story of a 76-year-old recluse who invites his estranged children and grandchildren to his remote valley resort for a special event — his wedding to the ghost of his first true love. This emotional story invites viewers to think about the mysteries of life, the afterlife, and the enduring power of love.
In yet another case of animal cruelty in Pakistan, a donkey’s ears were cut off in a village in Rawalpindi district due to a longstanding dispute between two families.
According to the First Information Report (FIR), Tanveer Hussain, who is a resident of Dhakala Dakkhana, Saagri, let his donkey loose on his fields however in an unusual occurrence the animal did not return as it does normally.
When Tanveer went to look for his animal, he found the donkey in an injured condition with its ears severed.
Police have stated that ongoing land disputes between the parties had resulted in a decades-long enmity.
The case marks the second reported incident of animal torture in recent days. In an earlier case, a feudal landlord chopped off a camel’s leg as punishment for foraging in his field in Sanghar, Sindh.
Maverick member of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Sher Afzal Marwat told journalists in London that he can only rejoin the party at the request of incarcerated former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
He told reporters that he’s been out of the party since eight months and will only join again at Imran Khan’s request. Marwat also confirmed that he plans to meet Khan after Eid.
The Member National Assembly (NA) also alleged that PTI misled young Pakistanis living abroad against the state’s security institutions.
The PTI leader condemned the campaign against the country’s institutions.
At least two people have died, and seven others suffered burns after a house in the Shareef Pura neighbourhood of Faisalabad caught fire when a laptop battery exploded on Wednesday.
The house caught fire while the laptop was charging, reported Geo News.
Rescue teams put out the fire and shifted at least nine members of the family, including five children and two women, to the nearby Allied Hospital.
Meanwhile, hospital sources told Geo News that two siblings, a brother and sister, could not survive their injuries, while seven others are receiving treatment.
Punjab Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz expressed regret over the death of the children, extending condolences to the bereaved family.
According to the provincial government’s statement, she has ordered the provision of the best treatment for those injured in the fire.
Last week, a terrifying blaze at the Sahiwal Teaching Hospital took the lives of at least 11 infants.
A senior journalist, Khalil Jibran of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Landi Kotal district, was killed near his residence on Wednesday, Geo News has reported.
Jirbran was heading towards his house with one of his friends when unknown men targeted him, District Police Officer (DPO) Khyber Salim Abbas confirmed.
According to the details provided by KP police, the assailants surrounded the journalist’s car, dragged him out of it and opened fire at him.
The former president of Landi Kotal press club died on the spot, while his attackers made a quick exit.
The journalism community of the district condemned the incident and criticized the authorities for failing to provide safety to journalists.
DPO Salim Abbas confirmed that the journalist had received threatening phone calls multiple times. Chief Minister KP, Ali Amin Gandapur, also directed authorities to arrest the attackers immediately.
Diplomats on Tuesday said at least 550 pilgrims died during the Haj, underscoring the gruelling nature of the pilgrimage which again unfolded in scorching temperatures this year.
At least 323 of those who died were Egyptians, most of them succumbing to heat-related illnesses, two Arab diplomats coordinating their countries’ responses told AFP.
“All of them (the Egyptians) died because of heat” except for one who sustained fatal injuries during a minor crowd crush, one of the diplomats said, adding the total figure came from the hospital morgue in the Al-Muaisem neighbourhood of Makkah.
At least 60 Jordanians also died, the diplomats said, up from an official tally of 41 given earlier on Tuesday by Amman.
The new deaths bring the total reported so far by multiple countries to 577, according to an AFP tally.
The diplomats said the total at the morgue in Al-Muaisem, one of the biggest in Makkah, was 550.
The Haj pilgrimage is increasingly affected by climate change, according to a Saudi study published last month that said temperatures in the area where rituals are performed were rising 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) each decade.
Temperatures hit 51.8 degrees Celsius (125 Fahrenheit) at the Grand Mosque in Makkah on Monday, the Saudi national meteorology centre said.
Muslim pilgrims hold hands as they walk with umbrellas to the site where people take part in the Satan stoning ritual, during the annual haj pilgrimage in Mina, Saudi Arabia on June 18, 2024 — Reuters
Heat stress
Earlier on Tuesday, Egypt’s foreign ministry said Cairo was collaborating with Saudi authorities on search operations for Egyptians who had gone missing during the Haj.
While a ministry statement said “a certain number of deaths” had occurred, it did not specify whether Egyptians were among them.
Saudi authorities have reported treating more than 2,000 pilgrims suffering from heat stress but have not updated that figure since Sunday and have not provided information on fatalities.
At least 240 pilgrims were reported dead by various countries last year, most of them Indonesians.
AFP journalists in Mina, outside Makkah, on Monday saw pilgrims pouring bottles of water over their heads as volunteers handed out cold drinks and fast-melting chocolate ice cream to help them keep cool.
Saudi officials had advised pilgrims to use umbrellas, drink plenty of water and avoid exposure to the sun during the hottest hours of the day.
Some pilgrims described seeing motionless bodies on the roadside and ambulance services that appeared overwhelmed at times.
Around 1.8 million pilgrims took part in the Haj this year, 1.6m of them from abroad, according to Saudi authorities.
Unregistered pilgrims
Each year tens of thousands of pilgrims attempt to perform the Haj through irregular channels as they cannot afford the often costly procedures for official Haj visas.
This places these off-the-books pilgrims at risk as they cannot access air-conditioned facilities provided by Saudi authorities along the Haj route.
One of the diplomats who spoke to AFP on Tuesday said that the Egyptian death toll was “absolutely” boosted by a large number of unregistered Egyptian pilgrims.
“Irregular pilgrims caused great chaos in the Egyptian pilgrims’ camps, causing the collapse of services,” said an Egyptian official supervising the country’s Haj mission.
“The pilgrims went without food, water, or air conditioning for a long time.”
They died “from the heat because most people had no place” to take shelter.
Earlier this month, Saudi officials said they had cleared hundreds of thousands of unregistered pilgrims from Makkah ahead of the Haj.
Other countries to report deaths during the Haj this year include Indonesia, Iran and Senegal.
Most countries have not specified how many deaths were heat-related.
Saudi Health Minister Fahd bin Abdul Rahman Al-Jalajel said on Tuesday that health plans for the Haj had “been successfully carried out”, preventing major outbreaks of disease and other public health threats, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
Health officials “provided virtual consultations to over 5,800 pilgrims, primarily for heat-related illnesses, enabling prompt intervention and mitigating the potential for a surge in cases,” SPA said.
Umr-o-Ayyar is everything I could not have imagined: badly written fanfic and a thrilling display of VFX-laden action unknown to Pakistani films.
Invited to the premier on behalf of The Current, I recalled all I had ever known about the character of Umr-o-Ayyar. Having been an avid reader of the legendary series of Dastaan-e-Ameer-i-Hamza and Talism Hoshruba, I was a fan of the conniving, quirky character of Umr-o-Ayyar, a friend and close confidant of the protagonist, Ameer-i-Hamza, but a legend in himself. The expectations were a little too high. The reality was a bit of a downer.
It was a marriage of convenience between the magical world of Harry Potter and the legendary period drama of Ertugrul.
My father, a master in Arabic language and literature, always told me that the name’s correct pronunciation was Ammar-Ayyar and not Umr-o-Ayyar, as per the rules of the Arabic language. Ammar, the protagonist played by Usman Mukhtar, really marked the right box with the name, but unfortunately, that’s about it.
His portrayal of the ‘clueless chosen one’ who remained true to character till the end made him look stupid more than likeable. Just like it was said about Harry Potter that magic still surprised him, Usman embodied the same traits, keeping his quintessential baffled expression intact whether it was his Schrodinger phase or him as an Ayyar.
The hero’s entourage, comprised of Ali Kazmi Salman Shaukat and Sanam Saeed, did leave their mark. It was the story that let them down. Manzar Sehbai’s Guru is there to mentally prepare the chosen, pure-blood Ammar Ayyar just like Master Shifu did with Po in Kung Fu Panda, but his styling, like that of Ertugrul’s Ibn Arabi, seemed out of place in the uber-cool setting. His verbose speeches and boasting of the power to know it all led to an all too predictable ending.
Director Azfar Jafri, known for family entertainers like Janaan and Heer Maan Ja falls short on this period cum super-hero cum action genre. Despite the fact that the two legends featuring the titular character are quite internalised in our language and culture, the movie comes across as an adaption of foreign celluloid. It has elements of Harry Potter’s pure-bloodedness, Voldemort’s black magic, inconsequential mention of physics, a motor-bike chase, Marvel’s VFX, fight sequences, and a world of supernatural elements ironically being dealt with both guns and knives. Consequently, the original plot, if there was any, got lost.
A sign of a flawed storyline is that the movie does not reflect much on the very conflict of the plot as to why the two parties are at war with each other. Ayyars, weak enough to get possessed, riding on bikes, and combating magic with internal powers, guns, and daggers made it all funny, even funnier than the comic reliefs in the film.
The best thing about the movie was the villains. The plot was driven by Sana’s Cheno, inspired by Bellatrix Lestrange, and Laqqa-a desi Voldemort- played by Faran Tahir. They were visibly ominous, and however flawed their dialogues were, their actions made more sense as they acted their part well. At one point in the film, Laqqa, the villain, has his first showdown with Ammar Ayyar, the hero, where the former says to the latter, “I am extremely disappointed after meeting you.” As an audience, you agree with him because such is the extent of Ammar’s incorrigibility. While it is not a well-written character, it performed even worse.
Hamza Ali Abbasi’s styling and acting take the cake. During those five minutes of his guest appearance, you are reminded of the beauty of the original tale. His portrayal of the OG, vivacious and witty Umr-o-Ayyar, who has especially come to knock some sense in the hero, made me reminisce about the accessories he owned, such as “zanbeel,” a satchel he used to carry everywhere that contained all the things under the sun, including the jinns he had entrapped. Alas! Its a lost opportunity.
While the storyline keeps boggling the mind, VFX in the final showdown really gives that larger-than-life experience. It deserves all the praise for being groundbreaking in Pakistani cinema. It’s the story which is the hamartia, a fatal flaw of this presumed epic of a film. The title, Umr-o-Ayyar-A New Beginning, indicates that the makers intend to make a series under the same banner. The next effort should not be as frivolous as this one. Overall, the movie is a good one-time watch that really lacks originality.
An inflation bomb has been dropped on the Pakistani public as the government, in its new 2024-25 budget, imposed an 18 percent General Sales Tax (GST) on baby food and formula milk – a necessity for the nourishment of children.
People have strongly criticised the new tax on its probable risk of worsening malnutrition among infants and children since parents wouldn’t be able to afford baby food.
“In other countries, governments reduce taxes on such products,” said Akmal, a resident of Lahore, to DAWN.
In his budget speech Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb ironically underscored the importance of children’s nutrition in the country.
When asked about the new tax, he replied that it “was not a big deal” as formula milk is purchased by the middle and upper middle classes who can afford it.
What a hot, hot Eid ul Azha most of the country witnessed. But being the resilient country that we are, we didn’t let the weather dampen our celebrations, and that includes our celebrities.
Many actors have shared their pictures, showing off their best outfits for the first day of Eid. Some started celebrating in the evening and posted their pictures later.
Check out some of your favorite celebrities celebrating Eid:
