Nisho's note for Rambo
Rambo, born Afzal Khan, rose to fame with '90s action-comedy films and tied the knot with Sahiba, Nisho's daughter and fellow film star, in 1998. Still going strong, the couple has raised two sons.
In the middle of the segment, Nisho playfully launched into a couplet that had the audience roaring with laughter, and then sighing with admiration. With her signature flair, she described the curious evolution of Pakistani sons-in-law: "Neechi nazrein aur phool sa lehja, har khata se yeh paak hotay hain / Joon he shaadi ho aur banein damaad, bohot khaufnaak hotay hain."
As the room erupted in response, Nisho clarified that this was not a cheeky dig at Rambo. "There is no need to praise my son-in-law. Everyone already knows Jan Rambo!" She furthered on, "When daughters marry men like him, their futures are nothing short of radiant."
Clips from the show quickly went viral, with many calling it "the mother-in-law moment of the year."
In the same interview, she revealed that suitors still propose to her but added, "Men are disloyal; they're often after a woman's money." She clarified, "Not all, but some." While her contemporaries like Sangeeta, Bushra Ansari, and Samina Ahmed married, she said she won't. "I was foolish about love and marriage when I was young. Now, I have wisdom," she said, laughing, a moment that made everyone else laugh too.
Tensions once brewed between the actor and her son-in-law, particularly when Rambo reunited Sahiba with her estranged father after decades. This act of love, though complicated, led to a moment Sahiba would never forget. In March 2024, she met her biological father, Inam Rabbani, for the very first time, an emotional reunion captured in a video on her YouTube channel. Clips circulating online showed tearful embraces, hesitant confessions, and a father overwhelmed by guilt and gratitude.
After 42 years of silence, Rabbani told Sahiba he had held on just to apologise before he died. Sahiba, moved by his remorse, chose to forgive him. While she expressed lingering fears of abandonment, she listened as he acknowledged Rambo as a good husband.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Express Tribune
25 minutes ago
- Express Tribune
Exhibit showcases new media art
The Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) is hosting Seeing, (Seen): Reframing the Moving Image in Pakistan, a groundbreaking exhibition bringing together artists from Pakistan and the UK to explore the transformative potential of the moving image as a medium of resistance, disruption and reimagination. Seeing, (Seen) engages with themes of memory, identity, and temporality, positioning the moving image as a fluid, uncontained force in contemporary visual culture. It contributes to the evolving discourse on new media and experimental art within Pakistan's unique cultural context. The exhibition features works by prominent Pakistani artists Abdul Hadi, Farida Batool, Kaiser Irfan, Mahnoor Ali Shah, M4HK, Rabeeha Adnan and Ujala Khan, alongside UK-based artist duo John Wood and Paul Harrison, with additional selections from the British Council Art Collection. A dynamic public programme will run throughout the exhibition, including artist talks, panel discussions, workshops, lectures and presentations focused on film, media, identity, and perception. Curated by Islamabad based curator and designer Sarah Rajper, the exhibition reframes film, video and new media as powerful tools for questioning how we see, sense and experience the world. The exhibition is the culmination of Rajper's participation in the prestigious Art Exchange: Moving Image curatorial fellowship - a year-long international programme, supported by the British Council and organised by LUX (UK) and Art South Asia Project. The fellowship included opportunities for mentorship, critical exchange and research visits to major UK institutions such as Tate Modern, Somerset House, Barbican Centre and the British Film Institute. The exhibition opens with a public reception on 30 July 2025, from 4.00pm to 8.00pm, featuring the Artist Panel Discussion from 6.00pm to 7.00pm, and will remain on view until 8 August 2025. Daily viewing hours are 10.00am to 4.00pm (closed Saturdays) at PNCA, Islamabad. Organised in partnership with the Lahore Digital Arts Festival and PNCA, this cross-cultural showcase offers audiences a chance to engage with boundary-pushing work at the intersection of art, technology and social commentary.
Express Tribune
16 hours ago
- Express Tribune
Between inheritance and invention
Literature often arrives before theory finds a name for it. Long before Pakistani writing in English was granted the dignity of critical attention, poets and novelists were already grappling with the dilemmas of belonging, the dislocations of Partition, and the uneven legacies of empire. What was once regarded with suspicion or condescension has become an essential register of Pakistan's modern literary imagination — a way to reflect on the unfinished stories that history leaves behind. In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English stands as both an affirmation and an inquiry into that transformation. Edited by Muneeza Shamsie, this anthology follows her earlier collection, A Dragonfly in the Sun, which first attempted to chart the contours of Pakistani English literature. Where the earlier volume sought to establish the field's existence and seriousness, this sequel arrives in a changed landscape. Over the two decades it covers — from 1997 to 2017 — Pakistani Anglophone writing has achieved international prominence, developed new idioms, and begun to address audiences both within and beyond the country's borders. The anthology assembles the work of 86 writers, reflecting a remarkable breadth of forms. It comprises poetry, short stories, novel excerpts, memoirs, life writings, essays, and drama. This diversity is not merely a matter of genre. Still, of sensibility: it suggests that Pakistani English literature has evolved into a domain capacious enough to hold multiple, sometimes conflicting, conceptions of identity and cultural legitimacy. The first contributor in the volume is Taufiq Rafat, a poet often credited with pioneering an indigenous voice in English. His inclusion underscores the lineage of literary experiment that has shaped Pakistani writing since decades after independence. Rafat and his contemporaries were among the first to insist that English could be adapted to local rhythms, landscapes, and preoccupations without surrendering its expressive power. In his work, the language of the coloniser is refashioned to accommodate the cadences of Punjabi and Urdu sensibility, a process that has inspired generations of poets since. At the other end of the anthology is Sarvat Hasin, part of a younger generation whose writing signals the continuity of this project into the twenty-first century. Between these two writers lies an array of perspectives that together document how Pakistani English literature has expanded its thematic and stylistic range, becoming both more introspective and more outward-looking. The introduction situates this development in a historical and cultural context. Shamsie traces how, in the years after 1947, English was viewed with suspicion by nationalist critics, who saw it as the language of colonial administration and social privilege. Yet she also emphasises a different dimension: the charge that English writing belonged to a social elite, disconnected from vernacular traditions and ordinary lives. While this association with privilege has persisted, the anthology demonstrates how, over time, English has also become a medium for serious engagement with Pakistani histories and sensibilities. What once seemed alien could be reclaimed, transformed by literary imagination, and reshaped into a language capable of expressing indigenous experience with authenticity. The anthology reveals how this process has matured. The poetry section, which occupies a substantial part of the collection, includes figures such as Adrian A. Hussain, Waqas Khwaja, Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker, and Kaleem Omar. Their inclusion illustrates the range of poetic practice: from reflections on Partition and displacement to meditations on language, faith, and intimacy. Among them, poets like Kaleem Omar — and to some extent Waqas Khwaja — have engaged with the ghazal form, adapting its classical structures within English. Shamsie's introduction highlights such experiments as part of a broader effort to create a Pakistani idiom in the language of the former coloniser, demonstrating that English could be made responsive to traditional literary forms rather than simply replacing them. The prose selections cover both fiction and life writing. Novel excerpts and short stories by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Uzma Aslam Khan, and Bapsi Sidhwa reflect the increasingly international profile of Pakistani writers. In the period the anthology spans, several of these authors received global recognition, their work shortlisted for major prizes and translated into multiple languages. Through their stories, Pakistani narratives entered wider conversations about migration, religious extremism, and postcolonial belonging. Their inclusion here testifies not only to their literary accomplishment but also to the central role they have played in reshaping how Pakistan is perceived abroad. Memoirs and essays contribute a different texture to the collection. Works by Sara Suleri Goodyear, Fatima Bhutto, and Fawzia Afzal-Khan address the interplay between family history and national trauma. These pieces highlight a central preoccupation of Pakistani writing in English: the effort to reconcile the private with the political, the remembered with the inherited. Memoir in this context is never a purely personal mode; it is an inquiry into how individual lives are marked by the violence and upheaval of collective experience. Drama and theatrical writing also appear in the anthology. Hanif Kureishi and Ayub Khan Din are included not because they write about Pakistan directly, but because their work reflects the diasporic dimensions of Pakistani identity. Their plays highlight how cultural authenticity is shaped not just by geography but by experience, negotiation, and the ambiguities of living between worlds. Diasporic identity constitutes another major theme. Writers whose lives span continents — Moniza Alvi, Imtiaz Dharker, and Hanif Kureishi — explore questions of partial belonging and the longing for a home that may never fully exist. These contributions affirm that Pakistani literature in English cannot be confined to the homeland. It is also a literature of migration, of second-generation inheritance, and lives unfolding in the spaces of airports and border crossings. In gathering these voices, the anthology underscores the necessity of recognising diaspora as an integral aspect of the Pakistani Anglophone tradition. Several thematic concerns emerge across the volume. Partition remains a defining subject, approached not simply as a historical rupture but as an enduring source of memory and grief. For many of the writers included here, Partition is less an event than a recurring trauma — a set of absences and unspoken losses that continue to shape the stories families tell about themselves. The 1971 war and the creation of Bangladesh, long neglected in Pakistani English literature, receive attention in selections by Sorayya Khan and Durdana Soomro, among others. These works confront the dangers of selective memory and the ethical challenge of acknowledging complicity as well as suffering. The anthology also foregrounds the War on Terror as a shaping context for contemporary writing. In both fiction and poetry, authors grapple with the moral and psychological consequences of a period marked by violence, fear, and surveillance. These are not simply topics imported from the headlines; they are lived realities that have left their mark on the language itself, giving rise to new metaphors of rupture and dislocation. One of the anthology's contributions is to show how literary form itself has been transformed by these pressures. The presence of the ghazal alongside free verse, the mingling of satire with elegy, and the juxtaposition of memoir with fiction suggest a tradition that has learned to resist the simplifications of cultural explanation. Rather than offering a single, unified image of Pakistani identity, the anthology presents a field of tensions: between nostalgia and critique, between local rootedness and transnational movement, between inheritance and invention. If A Dragonfly in the Sun was an effort to legitimise Pakistani English writing, In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English feels like a record of its maturation. It no longer seeks to prove that Pakistani literature in English exists or deserves a place. Instead, it sets out to document the complexity of that existence and the questions it continues to raise. The anthology refuses to impose closure on a tradition still in formation. More than a collection of texts, the anthology becomes a map of sensibility — a way to trace how writers have responded to the dilemmas of language, belonging, and history. Its significance lies not only in the range of material it gathers, but in the perspective, it models. By treating Pakistani English literature as a living tradition — shaped by argument, experiment, and dissent — it invites readers to see it not as a supplement to Urdu and regional literatures, but as a vital dimension of contemporary Pakistani culture. At a time when cultural identities are often reduced to singular narratives, this volume emphasises the value of complexity. It affirms that literature is most vital when it admits contradiction, when it resists the consolations of nostalgia, and when it dares to question the very categories that define it. In the New Century ultimately stands as both an archive and a provocation — a testament to the enduring conviction that literature, even when contested, remains one of the most powerful ways a society can imagine itself anew. In the New Century: An Anthology of Pakistani Literature in English Compiled and Edited by Muneeza Shamsie Published by Oxford University Press Pakistan, 2025 Pages: 600 Price PKR 2495/- ISBN: 978-0-19-906091-7 The writer is a Pakistan-born and Austria-based poet in Urdu and English. He teaches South Asian literature and culture at Vienna All facts and information are the sole repsonsibility of the writer
Express Tribune
a day ago
- Express Tribune
Urdu version of lauded play comes to capital
The Chand Nagar Cultural Centre is proud to announce the first-ever Pakistani adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning stage play, "Doubt: A Parable", which is being performed on July 26 and 27 at the Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai Auditorium in Islamabad. This production is the Urdu translation of the play by John Patrick Shanley, translated by the director and theatre educator Imran Iftikhar and Adil Yousaf. Iftikhar expressed his excitement and gratitude, for being granted permission to adapt and stage this masterpiece. "I'm sharing this news with immense pride and gratitude that I've been formally granted permission by John Patrick Shanley — the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter — to translate, adapt and stage his masterpiece theatre play, Doubt: A Parable, for the Islamabad audience in Urdu," he shared. The play, "Doubt: A Parable", was written by American playwright John Patrick Shanley in 2004. It was adapted into a mystery thriller film titled "Doubt" in 2008, starring Hollywood's renowned actress Meryl Streep. The film received critical acclaim and showcased the powerful story and themes of the play. "Doubt: A Parable" explores the complexities of human nature, delving into themes of faith, doubt, power and morality. Set in a small-town school in Punjab, the play raises questions about truth, silence and the grey areas in between. With its suspenseful plot and impactful characters, this production promises to be a thought-provoking experience for the audience. Imran Iftikhar further added, "This is not just a milestone for me as a director and translator but a historic moment for Pakistani theatre. To my knowledge, this is the first time a Pulitzer Prize-winning play is being officially produced in Pakistan. Bringing this globally acclaimed work to our local stage is a huge responsibility — and an opportunity to elevate the standards of theatre productions in the region." He hopes that "this production will open new doors for international theatre in Pakistan and spark critical conversations about ethics, education and truth." Chand Nagar Cultural Centre is dedicated to telling bold, thought-provoking, and relevant stories through theatre and arts in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The play is translated into Urdu by Adil Yousaf, directed by Imran Iftikhar and features a cast of young theatre actors from the twin cities. "Doubt: A Parable" is being brought to life by Chand Nagar Cultural Centre, with the aim of creating a platform for meaningful storytelling and cultural exchange.
