Our quest for a purpose in Life
By: Saara Abid, Asfa Altaf “The major challenge for the modern generation turns up to be the creation of such a world where every man has a sense of purpose” ~ Mark Zuckerberg HARVARD is for the luckiest and the most astute of all humans. Going to Harvard is in itself an accomplishment, a PURPOSE […]
Love of learning
By: Steven Singer My daughter probably would be shocked to discover what I truly think about grades. They don’t matter all that much. The other day she brought home a pop quiz on sloths from her third grade class. It had a 40% F emblazoned on the top in red ink. I grabbed the paper […]
Quiz: all about towers
‘Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower’
By: Berty Ashley This wrought iron lattice tower was named after the engineer whose company designed the tower. It was opened to the public for the first time on May 6, 1889, and you can climb the 1,665 steps to the top. Initially they wanted to dismantle the tower in 20 years but by then […]
Factfulness review: The miracle of human progress
Is a tendency towards negativity, fear and blame preventing us from seeing all the good in the world?
By: Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta As district medical officer in Mozambique, Hans Rosling discovered a previously unknown paralytic disease. Later, he became a professor of international health, co-founded Médecins Sans Frontières in Sweden, and a renowned public educator. His TED talks have been viewed over 35 million times. Rosling was also a sword swallower, having learned the […]
Ibn Battuta and Shaikh Murshidi
By: Dr A Q Khan After travelling to Makkah, Madina, southern Persia, Iraq, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Ibn Battuta reached the Indian Subcontinent, where he travelled from Sindh to the north west and then on to Delhi (which he called Dilli). At that time, Sultan Ghiasuddin Tughluq was the king. The king’s son, Mujahid Muhammad Shah […]
7 Andrei Tarkovsky Films and Their Philosophical Takeaways
By: Ben Wilson Andrei Tarkovsky was born to Arseny Tarkovsky, a poet, and Maria Vishnyakova, a well-educated literary woman, in 1932 Soviet Russia. His life would be one of poetic vision and his father’s interests would influence his private life and his films. He attended school alongside poet Andrey Voznesensky, and he studied piano, art, […]
Into the brave new age of irrationality
The assault on rationality is part of a concerted political strategy
By: Sanjay Rajoura Much has been written and said about the assault on liberal arts under way in India since the new political era dawned. But the real assault is on science and rationality. And it has not been difficult to mount this attack. For long, India has as a nation proudly claimed to be […]
WRITING MALALA’S STORY
There is a difference between a life and a story: the problem with trying to write about Malala is that Malala herself doesn’t really know how the story is going to end. Her uncertainty leaves chroniclers adrift and often reaching for neat ways to tie up the endings that don’t ring true to the vagaries of real life.
BY: Bina Shah Malala Yousafzai’s recent return to Pakistan, after five years of exile, spawned columns of newsprint and dozens of television hours reporting on the heady weekend where she and her family were feted at the Prime Minister House and then taken on a high-security visit to her hometown of Mingora in Swat. Over […]
How Rodgers and Hammerstein Created Modern Musical Theater
BY: JASON ROBERT BROWN At some point in the 1950s, Rodgers and Hammerstein transformed from a pair of hardworking men in the theater into An Enterprise, and by the time I was growing up in the ’70s, that enterprise was an established brand, reliably stodgy and comforting and firmly entrenched in Eisenhower-era values and, for […]
Quiz: on musicians and artistes
BY: Berty Ashley X was born in Mumbai on April 29, 1936, and is undoubtedly the most famous person from India in his profession. His father, a noted concert violinist, encouraged him to study music from a young age. He has worked with an illustrious line-up of international orchestras and was awarded honorary citizenship of […]
