Zindagi ki Diary - Mi Vida Loca
Ye blog un kahanioN ka hai jo hamare aas paas rehti hain
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
Monday, November 04, 2024
Saturday, November 02, 2024
Iqbal on uinverse
اقبال ۔۔
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Ustad says!! (Qamar Jalalvi)
بے وجہ خَم نہیں ہے کمر میں میری قمر
Monday, October 28, 2024
Saturday, October 26, 2024
Thursday, October 24, 2024
Tuesday, October 22, 2024
A bus driver
(Shared by a friend)
I was stuck on a crosstown bus some years ago in New York City during rush hour. Traffic was barely moving, and the bus was filled with cold, tired people who were deeply irritated with one another and with the world itself.
Sunday, October 20, 2024
Friday, October 18, 2024
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Cassie
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Lahore vs Karachi
On ongoing teasing between Lahore and Karachi
گو لہور میں ولادت اپنی جگہہ اہم ہے
Tuesday, October 08, 2024
Elites, Poor and sharing
(Shared by a professor of pharmacology in one of the Grand Rounds)
"One life lesson I learned from the pharma industry is that the proportion of price drop is independently associated with anything's use in life among the elite and poor. Elites try to control things but fear sharing, and keep things at a high value so low-income people can't reach them. They are even afraid of sharing things among themselves. As soon as anything in life, like a drug, becomes generic, its price drops quickly. I found that people experiencing poverty are more intent to share and crave less material things. It's the most bizarre paradox of life. I don't mean that a person should stay poor, but there is a line where the human mind loses its tendency to connect with other humans and seek the welfare of other humans - and that's the biggest curve ball of life."
Sunday, October 06, 2024
Historians
The biggest tragedy of humanity is that all of its historians turned out to be lousy futurists.
~anonymous
Friday, October 04, 2024
On "Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel"
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has been a riveting yet hefty read.
It may not be the best text on West vs. the Rest, but at least I did not see racist undertones while trying to understand his problematization of the oversimplified history.
He claims that he was looking for the answers to why history evolved differently on different continents over the last 13 thousand years. He apparently shunned the common racist response of some people/races to be superior to others. His thesis was that the answer had little to do with people and everything to do with their surroundings.He/his argument/books did become quite controversial. He has been accused of having masked his biological determinism or historical racism in the garb of natural disposition and distribution of resources. However, biology has been used to explain a lot of other world dynamics: gender relations, patriarchy/matriarchy, sexuality, success, wealth, and cognition.
The "Jared Diamond is a racist" argument suggests that environmental, ecological, and geographical factors led to the West's colonization of the rest, ignoring the determinants of this. Diamond's argument is seen as racist, as it overlooks the terrible actions of Europeans and their unfavorable ideologies.
European descendants can find comfort in the thought that those before them weren't so bad after all while the Whites may find comfort in the thought of no longer having to deal with the horrors of invasion, slavery, and genocide.
But JD (though sometimes extends it too far) does not say any of that. He says that the different historical paths of different countries are not due to racial superiority but to environmental factors. He thinks geographical traits and the availability of plants and animals that can be tamed are two of the most important factors that determine how societies grow. He challenges the idea that racial differences alone are to blame for past events and stresses how important it is to understand these factors to fix world problems of inequality.