Reese Witherspoon breaks silence after father’s hospitalization

Pakistani dramas have long been a mirror to the society they come from, and Aik Mohabbat Aur is doing exactly that. The ongoing drama, in which Qudsia Ali plays Maham and Abbas Ashraf Awan plays Faris, explores the painful reality of marriages where women find themselves trapped with narcissistic partners. In a candid conversation with Fuchsia Magazine, the two actors stepped out of their fictional roles and spoke plainly about the dynamics they believe are damaging real relationships in Pakistan today. Abbas Ashraf was direct about where he believes the problem begins, and it is not with men themselves but with how they are raised. He said the narcissistic complex in men is a product of parenting, specifically the way sons are conditioned from childhood to feel superior to everyone around them. Parents, he argued, tell their sons they are the inheritors, the ones who matter, the ones who carry the family forward, while daughters are quietly assigned a lesser place. That imbalance, repeated across generations, plants the seeds of the entitlement and control that later destroys marriages. His prescription was as straightforward as his diagnosis. “Make both your sons and daughters feel equal if you want to stop your sons from becoming negative narcissists,” he said. It is a simple idea that carries enormous weight precisely because of how rarely it is practised. Qudsia Ali brought a different but equally sharp perspective to the same conversation, turning her focus toward the women who stay in difficult marriages long past the point of reason. Her explanation was rooted not in weakness but in a specific emotional wound. She said that many women are deprived of parental love from the very beginning of their lives. When they finally encounter even a fragment of affection from a partner, however temporary or conditional it may be, they hold on to it with everything they have because they have never known anything different. “Women are deprived of parental love and when they get even a glimpse of love, they lie down and take everything,” she said. “They take even a temporary love as they are extremely insecure.” The image is striking and uncomfortably accurate for anyone who has watched a woman accept treatment that from the outside looks impossible to justify. Qudsia did not offer this observation from a distance. She acknowledged that she herself had carried insecurities of her own, and that she had done the work to understand and overcome them. It was a moment of personal honesty that gave her words additional weight. Together, their observations form a connected picture of how the same system of unequal parenting produces both the men who expect everything and the women who accept anything. The drama they are appearing in explores exactly this territory on screen. But in this conversation, they chose to name it plainly off screen too, and that directness is what has made their remarks resonate beyond the usual boundaries of a promotional interview.

Javed Akhtar has been writing words that endure for more than five decades, and in a candid conversation with Vogue India, he turned his gaze toward what he believes is happening to creativity in the digital age. What he found does not reassure him. The veteran lyricist and screenwriter argued that the internet and its algorithms have created a culture of creative fear, one in which people are no longer willing to take the risk of doing something that has not already been done before. “The echo chambers created by the internet have made most people afraid to do something for the first time,” he said. “Once someone else does it, they’re fine to follow in their footsteps.” He extended that observation into a broader concern about how people engage with ideas and the world around them. “People no longer want to pause, think, analyse or sit with an idea. They are living happily, so why would they bother to think about this universe or the vastness of nature? For them, it is a waste of time.” For Akhtar, this impatience is incompatible with the kind of work that lasts. “Meaningful creation requires time, discomfort and reflection,” he said, adding that his own willingness to question dominant voices and widely accepted ideologies has always come from exactly that kind of sustained engagement with ideas. He was particularly pointed about the music industry and the way commercial priorities have pushed the role of lyrics to the margins. “Today, words have become less important because the marketing team has decided that slow music won’t trend,” he said. The result, in his view, is an industry that remixes old material with inferior new writing rather than producing something genuinely fresh. “But then they take those same songs, edit the mukhras and remix them with some inferiorly written antaras. There was a time when writers had more space. Today, other forces dictate what music gets made. And yet, songs that are decades old still endure, while many recent ones have a short shelf life.” His advice to young writers was direct and unglamorous. Read more. Not only classical literature and celebrated authors, but light reading too. “The real loss is not in reading something trivial but in not reading at all,” he said. On the creative process itself, Akhtar drew a distinction that cuts to the heart of what separates craft from genuine art. “All arts can be divided into two parts. On one hand, there’s imagination, passion, fantasy and romance, and on the other, there is craft. You can learn the craft in a crash course. But imagining, fantasising and romanticising cannot be learned. There are no courses for yearning.” He closed with a lesson passed down from his father that has stayed with him throughout his career. “It is very easy to write in difficult language, but very difficult to write in easy language. When you write simply, there is no space for your idea to hide behind big words. Only if you are totally convinced of what you are writing can you afford to use transparent language.” It is a principle that has shaped some of Hindi cinema’s most enduring words, and one that no algorithm is likely to teach.