meethapani

  Comfortable Cities Walking through Karachi’s old city inevitably one’s eyes lift above the cacophony of the street to the quiet sadness of beautiful stone balconies, roof top belvederes and elegant doorways clothed now in a cobweb of wires trapping errant plastic bags, concealing crooked shop signs. The newly renovated Khalikdina Hall with its handsome portico and gracious hall made for the people of the city, where once local elders came to read the daily newspapers, and whose hall echoes with the sounds of animated meetings and gatherings give a glimpse into a Karachi where the quality of life of its people mattered. Cities were once made to be comfortable and graceful. Deep balconies and interior courtyards for women, and informal chabootra platforms projecting onto the street for men. Public buildings had wide steps to sit on and shaded passageways.   The 12 th C Andalusian judge, Ibn Abdun, is often quoted for saying ”Architecture is the haven where man’s spirit, s...

  How Much is Enough? Most discussions about what is considered ‘enough’ centre around money and power. To be the most powerful, the wealthiest or the most famous, once the desire of mighty kings and despots, has now filtered down in modern societies, with rags to riches stories becoming commonplace. However, the modern world is increasingly characterised by insatiability, an inability to say “enough is enough”, and an insatiable desire for more money or power. Enough means having enough to live, enough to be happy, and enough to thrive. So how does one arrive at what is enough? Enough is not a number. Individuals have their own measure of enough. The wise know what that limit is, for others, society’s limiting systems — legal or moral — determine when enough is enough. King Ashoka won a battle against the Kalinga kingdom, with 100,000 deaths and even more taken captive. That was his ‘enough’. Appalled by his own ruthlessness, Ashoka became a Buddhist, dedicated to spreading th...

  Exhausted Nations As the year draws to a close, many experience an end of year fatigue, as people assess the year’s losses and gains. This year is dominated by the exhaustion of nations. It has been a year of protests by the affronted - the inaction over the Palestinian genocide, the panic of US citizens over the recent extremely polarized elections, or Pakistanis reeling with disbelief over the macabre spinning of events that challenge the predictions of the most seasoned political pundits. There is a contest of “who will blink first” rather than the glorified ideals of right and wrong.   It has reached a point of no surrender as each side is in a fight for survival, unable to concede defeat as the stakes are too high. There will be regrouping, debriefings, reassessments of strategies, and new plans of action. Stephanie Van Hook, Director at the Metta Center for Nonviolence, says it is not about putting a different kind of person in power; it is about awakening a di...

  Trapped in the Nineteenth Century In 1851 the English poet Mathew Arnold, only 32 at the time, described his era as “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born”. It could equally apply to our times as we gather the shards of “a dead time's exploded dream”. The 19 th C was a remarkable century. It provided the building blocks upon which the 20 th C was built, with its many inventions from the elevator and escalator to the sewing machine and the vacuum cleaner. The telephone, the light bulb, alternating current and batteries. The first motion pictures, the first gramophone, the first railroads, the motor car, traffic lights, museums and blue jeans, coca cola and the zipper. The first test cricket match, football clubs, new games such as basketball and volleyball and the revival of the Olympic games.   The first detective novels, horror stories and science fiction.   X rays, vaccines, aspirin and anesthesia. The first steel ships, the unde...

  In Defense of the Tangible We are poised hesitantly before a future in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital technology will be an integral part of our lives - decision making, production capabilities, education platforms, medical practice, warfare, business transactions, governance, policing and many more functions we cannot even anticipate. Hesitant, because as Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI", warns, within the next five years AI could dominate our lives with more intelligence than humans and more alarmingly it can potentially make decisions independently of human instructions. He has worked on deep learning and Artificial Intelligence since the 70s, so his words carry weight. Digital technology is already a part of our lives – on our phones, laptops and in our surroundings. We can walk through a Van Gogh painting, or among the dinosaurs in a museum and travel to distant places with virtual reality devices. Virtual Assistants, the ever-attentive Siri...

  Fabricating Stories   People can fabricate stories, spin lies, weave a web of deceit, lack moral fibre. Lives can be interwoven, or hang by a thread.   They can be dyed in the wool, or wool can be pulled over someone’s eyes. A person can have tangled nerves, or lose the thread of an argument. These idioms derive from the ancient art of weaving. Considering the Indus Valley has been producing cotton textiles continuously for at least 7,000 years, there are far fewer references to weaving in South Asian languages than one would expect. Tana bana or warp and weft, describes the intricacies of a situation,   jitni chadar utna phailao ( only stretch as much as the size of your sheet) warns against over-reaching ambition. The more sinister associations with spinning and weaving emerged from Greek mythology. Athena, the goddess of wisdom and crafts, punishes her rival Arachne by turning her into a spider to have her webs forever destroyed. The three Fates control de...