Vanguard Publications have published the debut book of Pakistani columnist and cultural critic, Nadeem Farooq Paracha (aka NFP).

Paracha began his journalistic career as a reporter in 1990. He has been associated with Pakistan’s largest English language daily, Dawn, and its website, Dawn.com, as a columnist for over a decade now, and has a large readership in Pakistan, and among the South Asian diaspora in Europe and the United States.

Read: Also Pakistan

The book, End of the past, is a documentation of how the consequences of various ideological experiments over the last many decades in Pakistan seeped into the soul of the country, insulating future generations from the world and causing them to experience the worst kind of identity crisis.

NFP’s observations and pithy prose - weaving in personal stories - stems from growing up as the son of a journalist and someone who eventually found a voice of his own as one of Pakistan’s leading cultural critics and satirists.

In the book, he chronologically maps how Pakistan’s spiritual soul was trampled in its quest to gain acceptance as an ‘ideological state.’

Read more: Also Pakistan – III

End of the past is written as an analysis in the form of a narrative as a means of explaining the enigma that is Pakistan.

NFP looks at Pakistan’s political, sporting and cultural histories, hoping that future generations will learn from them and chart a brand new beginning for a country he is still in love with. He pleads and argues for a decisive end of the past so that a new and possibly less tumultuous future can be envisioned and then built.

Related: Also Pakistan - V

The book will be available in stores from January 28, 2016 (in Lahore) and January 31 (rest of Pakistan).

It will also be available at the book stalls of the Karachi Literature Festival (February 5, 6 and 7).