Kalse
Hello and welcome to Kalse (cull-say). My name is Sarmad.
This website has been a long time coming.
It was originally intended to be a digital archive of my published news stories in State of Qatar’s newspaper of record, the Gulf Times.
From 2007 to 2011, I had the unique privilege of being Qatar’s first-ever, local-born, English-language, print-media journalist. I covered:
rights (labour, human, rental, consumer),
infrastructure (urban planning, construction, real estate),
ICT,
AfPak, and
For reasons unknown to me, many of these stories mysteriously disappeared from the newspaper’s website following my departure. These stories documented an important period in the development of modern-day Qatar. I have carefully preserved them here, unaltered, as they were originally published for the benefit of researchers. The collection is far from complete, but this is all I could find and salvage.
However, Kalse is more than an archive. After years of working in public relations, where personal reflections had to remain behind the scenes, this platform marks my return to personal storytelling. You’ll find here musings on my life across various continents and cultures – including my times in Qatar (1982-), the United States (2001-2004), Egypt (2005), Pakistan (2005-2007), and Malta (2014-2019).
These running commentaries explore the nuances of identity and belonging as a third-culture kid and the ever-shifting perspective of a global citizen.
What does Kalse mean?
The term Kalse in the Urdu language signifies both “the yesterday that was” and “the tomorrow that will be”.
Hop on the rickshaw!
The logo – a golden rickshaw with brown tyres – carries symbolism: the gold-hued body represents the intellectual and cultural zenith of Islamic civilisation in South Asia, whilst the brown tyres pay homage to, well… the brown people. It was lovingly created by another third-culture kid, a Saudi-born Indian national, Sabreen Aziz. The logo is thus more than an aesthetic choice, but a compass guiding my dream of one day going on a road trip from #KabultoKerala, meeting and connecting with fellow South Asian Muslims freely.
