Cartography of Crime: Spatial and Topographical Contentions and Contestations

Crime is a socio-cultural phenomenon which is in dialogue with a number of nuanced and polyvalent variables such as economy, culture, politics, topographical fabric, to name only a few, and therefore bears telling significance in the society. Since time immemorial crime has been persisting in the society and has been ceaselessly evolving in commensurate with socio-cultural developments in general and particularly with spatial and topographical alterations. It is sometimes supposed that crime seems at times to be a consequence of disjunctive and disruptive sharing of worldly resources conditioned by certain geopolitical status quo and at once a means for questioning ontological stability of certain a prioriepistemological and sociological strands. At this point, one may be reminded of that contextual specificities play pivotal role in drawing the contour of crime and thus are of profound pertinence. Due to the liberalization of economy happened during 1990s, the overlapping trajectories of space and place inured by the irrevocable and irresistible forces of globalization have problematized stereotypical assumptions of crime and as a consequence of it, a number of aporias including the problematic interface between crime and space induced by changing topographical specificities, within the paradigm of crime have been triggered.1 Ensuing contradictions, on the one hand, insist that one needs to reexamine the negotiation of crime with space and place in the post-globalization scenario in order to expound the changing nature of crime, and on the other hand, induce that critics are supposed to engage themselves in examining the problematic interplay among crime, space and place. There are some Pakistani novelists who have begun to deal with problematic negotiations of crime with space and place conditioned by social, cultural, economic, political, and religious alterations in the context of Pakistan. This article is intended to intervene into select Pakistani novels incorporating Akbar Agha’s The Fatwa Girl (2011), Omar Shahid Hamid’s The Prisioner (2013), and Bilal Tanweer’sThe Scatter Here Is Too Great (2013) to question the representation and ontological stability of crime in the select fictions and to lay bare some inherent loopholes in conventional understanding of crime’s affinity with space and place, taking recourse to criminology

Appraising “Green Development”: An Ecocritical Reading of Temsula Ao’s Laburnum for My Head

The existence of human beings presupposes the presence of Nature which gives substantial room to human beings to accommodate themselves in it, none the less; human beings in return turn violent and insensible to it. Being the part and parcel of Nature, everybody has the right to make proximity to Nature but nobody can be allowed to cause damage to it under any circumstances whatsoever. If needed, one can draw sustenance from Nature but nowadays, on many occasions, natural resources are being indiscriminately exploited for selfish interests. Temsula Ao’s short story collection, that is, Laburnum for My Head incorporates two contrapuntal tales—“Laburnum For My Head” and “Death of a Hunter”— at the opening of it to project the long standing tension between radical environmentalism and reformist environmentalism. This paper is intended to bring out this conflict as represented in the garb of tales thereby asking thinkers to mull over the notion of “green development”, paying adequate heed to the necessary requirements of impoverished human beings

Transnational Organized Crime, Islamophobia and Globalization in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Contentions and Contestations

9/11 terror strike had wrecked havoc on the cultural, political, economic, religious, to name only a few, configurations in America thereby disconcerting social status quo at large. Before the demolition of twin tower in America, a marker of economic condescension of America upon the rest of the world, America had resorted to a number of politico-economic ploys to invite skilled workers in America intending to chisel the steady prosperity of America in the domains of commerce and education. For instance, America, intently, used to cater scholarships to impoverished yet brilliant students, across the world, to study in premier academic institutions in America inasmuch as they had planned to employ unswerving and unwavering youths to build up the future of America. In addition to it, the emergence of Multinational Companies was triggered into action in 1980s onwards to open up the economy of America so as to make lucrative gains from all over the world. These MNCs tactfully recruit local youths to extract and exact maximum labour possible at the expense of minimum salary. Before 9/11, America began to emerge as mighty economic power in the domain of commerce. 9/11 terror strike unsettled America’s steady rise in the global market, and most importantly, called neoliberal fiscal policies into question. In post-9/11 scenario, non-Muslim native residents of America turned violent against Muslims, for the demolition of twin tower was devised and carried out by Al Qaeda, a Muslim terrorist outfit. Naïve Muslims living in America were made subject to humiliations, tortures, torments, misery, among others, perpetrated by infuriated non-Muslim natives who became intolerant to Muslims particularly after the 9/11 terror strike. Pitted against this political upheaval in America, induced by sudden slumps in economy, Mohsin Hamid, one of the most brilliant novelists of twenty first century of Pakistan, has posited the poignant tale of Changez, the protagonist of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, against the backdrop of 9/11 terror strike and its concomitant consequences. Debunked and disillusioned, shattered and battered, Changez engages himself in a conversation with an unknown American at Lahore café and unfolds his harrowing experiences of four and a half years stint in America. Hamid is supposed to have penned down this novel to project the contentious intersections and interactions among transnational organized crime, Islamophobia and globalization. This article is devised to investigate the interplay among the trio, taking recourse to pertinent theoretical insights into cognizance, and to interrogate Hamid’s interventions into the problematic overlapping of the trio

A real-time TDDFT scheme for strong-field interaction in Cartesian coordinate grid

In this communication, we present a new approach towards RT-TDDFT through time-dependent KS equations based on an \emph{adiabatic eigenstate subspace} (AES) procedure. It introduces a second-order split operator technique in energy representation to implement the approximate TD propagator in AES. Most of the elements in TDKS matrix are directly computed in Cartesian coordinate grid (CCG). To demonstrate the internal consistency of our proposed scheme, we computed the TD dipole moment and high harmonic generation spectra using an adiabatic local density approximation. The comparison with available theoretical results ensures the feasibility of this proposed route.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl