Listen to the buildings - please!
"A widow is a person who loses her spouse; an orphan loses his parent, but there is no word in English for the one who loses his child, because afterwards there is not much left to lose," said the protagonist of the movie in his deep midnight radio jockey voice while adjusting black spectacles on his nose. His face felt dead, expressionless, and his eyes blank. I pressed the stop button on my phone and thought if we could halt a painful scene in real life. My mind could draw immediate analogies between this scene and the pain through which the parents of the kids buried alive under the rubble of a collapsed building in Lahore must have passed. With those kids, their parents would have buried a lot more: dreams, hopes, futures, laughs, generations and life. On August 26, 2025 I wrote an Op-ed with the same title. To emphasise the gravity of the matter, I am publishing under the same title today. Buildings speak – not with words, but through the cracks that snake ac...