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A Brief History of The Taliban
The popular narrative, especially in the western media, suggests that the Taliban movement emerged out of nowhere in 1990s and it conquered Afghanistan within no time. A closer look, however, tells a different story. What is this story? We explore it with the help of the books written by Ahmed Rashid and James Fergusson on… Read more
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How Thinking-People Should Choose a Career
Why is a banker a banker? A lawyer, a lawyer? A doctor, a doctor? In other words, why do people do what they do? Most of us will give different answers to this question. Robert Louis Stevenson, a 19th-century Scottish writer, had an interesting point to make on the subject. He suggested that people do… Read more
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What Universities Can Learn from Religion
There are two worlds out there: the world of facts and the world of values. The first is what we learn and explore, the second is what we act upon. In the modern, secular education settings, we learn a great deal about the former but rarely do we pay as much attention to the latter… Read more
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The Art of Essay-Writing
Arthur Benson, in his essay The Art of the Essayist narrates a short story to make an interesting point about essay-writing. It goes something like this. An itinerant sign-painter comes to a village inn whose sign-board he has had his eye for some months and has watched with hope its rapid progress to dimness. But,… Read more
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A Bachelor’s Guide to Counter Married Folks
If you are a bachelor, this is what the married people would almost always tell you: you are missing out on the superior pleasures of life which we can neither articulate nor display, but they are there. There is usually a sigh after that, god knows why? How do you respond to such a clever… Read more
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An Introduction to Zen
Just as it is impossible to explain the beauty of a sunset to a man blind from his birth, so it is impossible for sages to find any words which will express their wisdom to common folks. For the wisdom of sages is not in their teachings; otherwise anybody might become a sage by simply… Read more
