My First Paki

I’ll never forget the first time I got called ‘Paki’. I was five years old, and the sun was smiling down on me and my family as we made our way to a country fair, not far from home.
We were the only brown people in the village. My parents had left their big Indian city (population three hundred and seventy thousand) to settle in a little English village in Kent (population circa two thousand), in the late 60s, early 70s.

Why the Burqa Ban Debate is Dumb

As of this week, it has become illegal for people in France to wear face veils in public – that means that Muslim women who cover their faces for Islamic purposes (burqa) are no longer able to do so without being subject to paying a fine. If it comes to the fore that she was forced to do so by her family or husband, the fine gets even heftier at €30,000. And as predicted, the internets were buzzing with a host of responses.