SMOKERS’ CORNER: COLA POLITICS

During a panel discussion at this year’s ThinkFest in Lahore, I declared that these days people engage with politics the way they do with a cola brand. After the discussion, a handful of young folk approached me to ask exactly what I had meant by this. I was simply referencing a part of the book The Fragile Absolute by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He uses the Coca-Cola versus Pepsi analogy to describe modern ideology. Žižek writes that the very idea of consumer choice is a farce be...

By none@none.com (Nadeem F. Paracha)