Born with Wings is a powerful, eye-opening account of Daisy Khan’s inspiring journey of self-actualization. Guided by her faith, Daisy Khan is a women’s advocate and has devised innovative ways to help end child marriage, fight against genital mutilation, and, most recently, educate young Muslims to resist the false promises of ISIS recruiters.
Here are some of Daisy Khan’s thoughts on Islam and gender equality:
The Quran, believed to be the central religious text of Islam, lays great emphasis on upholding a woman’s dignity no matter what the circumstances.
By carefully studying the holy Quran, Daisy Khan was convinced that gender equality has always been a part of Islam. However, because of misguided interpretations of the Quran especially by men, women have suffered several injustices.
Daisy Khan points, that in the religious scriptures of Islam, nowhere is it stated as a rule that a woman has to maintain her modesty by wearing hijabs or burqas.
Muslim women have historically always had rights. Fourteen hundred years ago, when these rights were not granted to even Western women, Muslim women have had the right to property, the right to divorce, the right to inheritance and the right to have a career simply because men and women are considered equal in Islam. The situation is quite different today simply because of faulty interpretations of the Quran’s verses.
Category: Excerpts
Tradition by Brendan Kiely – An Excerpt
The students at Fullbrook Academy are the elite of the elite, famous for their glamour and excess. Their traditions are sacred. But they can hide dark and dangerous secrets.
From New York Times bestselling author Brendan Kiely, comes Tradition, a stunning novel that explores various dangerous traditions that exist in this prestigious boarding school.
Take a sneak peek into what goes on at The Fullbrook Academy by reading an extract from the novel now!
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For the record . . .
JAMES BAXTER
Most people don’t get second chances. I wasn’t sure I deserved one. I wasn’t sure I even wanted one. But I got one: Fullbrook Academy. This is what I did with it.
JULES DEVEREUX
I once heard another girl put it like this: This is a boys’ school and they accept girls here too. At Fullbrook, they told us to be ready to take on the world, but then they told us to do it quietly. What if I wanted to be loud? What if I needed to be?
The night everything changed . . .
JULES DEVEREUX
I’m fighting for breath and all I can do is look up and see the white flame of moonlight outlining each branch, every leaf. I’m in the dirt, again, shoulder against the tree, the shock of air so cold it seizes my bones. I can still feel his grip on my arm, as if he’s still here, shackling me to the trunk with his hands and his weight, but he’s not. He’s gone. I’m so cold. I’m shaking, but it feels like it’s this tree and the sky above that are shaking, that are blurry, unreal, no longer what they were. It’s as if I’m naked, but I’m not. It’s as if the ground is swinging up to slap me, but it’s not. I collapse by the edge of the bluff. There are still voices in the woods behind me. Voices down along the far end of the bluff. Voices in the night air like invisible birds screeching in the wind.
There’s a voice inside me, too. It’s mine, I think, but it doesn’t sound like me. It’s me and it’s not me. It grows louder and louder, barking, bellowing up from somewhere and squeezing my head with noise. It’s me and it isn’t, or it’s me splitting in two, and this other voice, this new voice, keeps shouting. Run, it says. Run, run, run.
I’m so close to the cliff edge, I could crawl forward and drop, crouch on one knee by the side of the pool like I did when I first learned to dive, but I’m hundreds of feet in the air, and the voice tells me to back up. I obey. It tells me to stand, and I use the tree to help me to my feet. Run, it says again, and I do, into the woods, down the far path, away from the party, away from the other voices, away from everyone. I know where I’m going, but I still feel lost. Alone. I just want to get home, though the word means nothing now. Just because I live there doesn’t mean it’s somewhere safe.
JAMES BAXTER
I can’t believe this, but I’m so out of breath I have to crouch down and lean against the back wall of the girls’ dorm, just to put some air in my lungs. Damn, it hurts. But you can’t lug a passed-out person through the woods, across campus, get her up through the bathroom window, and not want to collapse. Even if you’re me. And even if I did get some help.
I know she thinks I’m an asshole, and I didn’t do it to change her mind. I just did it because it was the right thing to do and I knew it was the right thing to do, and it was the first time in a year I’d felt so certain I knew right from wrong—that I had to do the right thing and forget all the rest.
If you care about a person, my ex-girlfriend used to tell me, don’t just tell her. Show her. Show up, listen, and act so she knows you heard her. Seems so simple the way she put it, but it’s never that simple. An avalanche of other pressures buries that wisdom most days, all days, except this night, when, for some reason, I heard that advice strong and true, like a wind through the eaves of the old wooden rooftop above me.
Way up in the sky the man in the moon has something like sad eyes, as if his pale face gazes down with pity, as if he wishes something better for us, or maybe wishes we ourselves were the ones who were better. I’m sure I’m sober, not drunk, just going a little crazy to think like that, but I think it anyway, because I feel that way. Sad. Like this whole stupid paradise, this very good school, is nothing but a fancy promise, a broken one, a big lie. And worse, that I’m actually a part of it.
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Still Me by Jojo Moyes – An Excerpt
Jojo Moyes, the author of bestsellers Me Before You and After You brings the third Lou Clark novel, Still Me. The third book sees Lou arrive in New York to start a new life. What Lou doesn’t know is she’s about to meet someone who’s going to turn her whole life upside down. Because Josh will remind her so much of a man she used to know that it’ll hurt. Lou won’t know what to do next, but she knows that whatever she chooses is going to change everything.
Let’s read an excerpt from the book, Still Me.
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‘Reasons for travel, ma’am?’ The moustache twitched with irritation. He added, slowly: ‘What are you doing here in the United States?’
‘I have a new job.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m going to work for a family in New York. Central Park.’
Just briefly, the man’s eyebrows might have raised a millimetre. He checked the address on my form, confirming it.
‘What kind of job?’
‘It’s a bit complicated. But I’m sort of a paid companion.’
‘A paid companion.’
‘It’s like this. I used to work for this man. I was his companion, but I would also give him his meds and take him out and feed him. That’s not as weird as it sounds, by the way – he had no use of his hands. It wasn’t like something pervy. Actually in my last job it ended up as more than that, because it’s hard not to get close to people you look after and Will – the man – was amazing and we . . . Well, we fell in love.’ Too late, I felt the familiar welling of tears. I wiped my eyes briskly. ‘So I think it’ll be sort of like that. Except for the love bit. And the feeding.’
The immigration officer was staring at me. I tried to smile. ‘Actually, I don’t normally cry talking about jobs. I’m not like an actual lunatic, despite my name. Hah! But I loved him. And he loved me. And then he . . . Well, he chose to end his life. So this is sort of my attempt to start over.’ The tears were now leaking relentlessly, embarrassingly, from the corners of my eyes. I couldn’t seem to stop them. I couldn’t seem to stop anything. ‘Sorry. Must be the jetlag. It’s something like two o’clock in the morning in normal time, right? Plus I don’t really talk about him anymore. I mean, I have a new boyfriend. And he’s great! He’s a paramedic! And hot! That’s like winning the boyfriend lottery, right? A hot paramedic?’
I scrabbled around in my handbag for a tissue. When I looked up the man was holding out a box. I took one. ‘Thank you. So, anyway, my friend Nathan – he’s from New Zealand – works here and he helped me get this job and I don’t really know what it involves yet, apart from looking after this rich man’s wife who gets depressed. But I’ve decided this time I’m going to live up to what Will wanted for me, because I didn’t get it right, before. I just ended up working in an airport.’
I froze. ‘Not – uh – that there’s anything wrong with working at an airport! I’m sure immigration is a very important job. Really important. But I have a plan. I’m going to do something new every week that I’m here and I’m going to say yes.’
‘Say yes?’
‘To new things. Will always said I shut myself off from new experiences. So this is my plan.’
The officer studied my paperwork. ‘You didn’t fill the address section out properly. I need a zip code.’
He pushed the form towards me. I checked the number on the sheet that I had printed out and filled it in with trembling fingers. I glanced to my left, where the queue at my section was growing restive. At the front of the next queue a Chinese family was being questioned by two officials. As the woman protested, they were led into a side room. I felt suddenly very alone.
The immigration officer peered at the people waiting. And then, abruptly, he stamped my passport. ‘Good luck, Louisa Clark,’ he said.
I stared at him. ‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
I smiled. ‘Oh, thank you! That’s really kind. I mean, it’s quite weird being on the other side of the world by yourself for the first time, and now I feel a bit like I just met my first nice new person and –’
‘You need to move along now, ma’am.’
‘Of course. Sorry.’
I gathered up my belongings and pushed a sweaty frond of hair from my face.
‘And, ma’am . . .’
‘Yes?’ I wondered what I had got wrong now.
He didn’t look up from his screen. ‘Be careful what you say yes to.’
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Supreme Whispers by Abhinav Chandrachud – An Excerpt
In Abhinav Chandrachud’s latest book, Supreme Whispers: Conversations with Judges of the Supreme Court of India 1980-1989, Chandrachud relying on the typewritten interviews of a brilliant young American scholar, George H. Gadbois, Jr. who conducted over 116 interviews with more than sixty-six judges of the Supreme Court of India provides a fascinating glimpse into the secluded world of the judges of the Supreme Court in the 1980s and earlier.
Let’s read an excerpt from this book.
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The broad sense one gets is that dissent is generally frowned upon at the Supreme Court, and dissents get written only in the rarest of cases involving irreconcilable conflict. Chief Justice M. Hidayatullah admitted to ‘ragging’ two of his colleagues who dissented from his view in the very first case they heard together, because he was responsible for bringing them to the court. However, he did feel reassured by their independence. Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar, known for his pro-labour leanings, once wrote a draft judgment with which his colleague, Justice N.H. Bhagwati, disagreed. Bhagwati suggested that Gajendragadkar make some changes to the judgment in order to secure Bhagwati’s agreement to sign off on it. Gajendragadkar refused to change a word of his draft. Bhagwati signed the judgment anyway, since another judge on the bench, Justice S.K. Das, had also agreed to sign it, and Bhagwati did not want to dissent. In February 1983, a bench of two judges had said that in a death penalty case if the person convicted is not executed within two years, then the sentence automatically stands commuted to life imprisonment. Shortly after this judgment was delivered, it was overruled by a bench of three judges of the court. Justice A. Varadarajan believed that if the two judges who had delivered the judgment in the earlier case had sat with the three judges who decided the later case, even they would have been convinced to be a part of the majority in the later case.
Justice H.R. Khanna, arguably one of the greatest dissenters of all time at the Supreme Court, who disagreed with the majority view in the Habeas Corpus case, admitted that he did not dissent in one of the early cases he heard in the court even though he disagreed with the view of the majority. The Supreme Court’s judgment in that case had the effect of raising car prices. Although he ‘did not feel happy with the view they took’, Khanna agreed with the judgment of the majority because he ‘did not think it proper to strike a discordant note at the very beginning’ of his judgeship at the Supreme Court. ‘The atmosphere in court’ at the time, noted Khanna, ‘was of general cordiality.’ This, of course, did not stop Justice Khanna from dissenting in the Habeas Corpus case, where a majority of the judges of the bench held that the right to seek the writ of habeas corpus and to challenge arbitrary arrest and detention could be suspended during an Emergency. Dissent at the Supreme Court, then, seems to be reserved for the most egregious and exceptional circumstances.
‘I did not believe in writing separate or dissenting judgments for nothing,’ wrote Justice P.N. Shinghal in a letter to Gadbois. ‘So if I have written dissents,’ he continued, ‘they were necessary to place my irreconcilable views on record.’ Justice A.C. Gupta was critical of his colleagues who were eager, in big cases, to write separate judgments. He pointed out that Justice E.S. Venkataramiah wrote a judgment of over 300 pages in the Judges case. Justice Krishna Iyer felt that writing a dissent gained little, and did not serve much purpose. He stressed that the whole court was very congenial, ‘delightfully united’, and there was a ‘happy sense of cooperation’ prevalent at the time. He believed that divided decisions were not as good as unanimous ones. In fact, who is writing the majority judgment for the court also matters. Justice P. Jaganmohan Reddy believed that the majority judgment of the Supreme Court in the Bank Nationalization case should not have been written by Justice J.C. Shah because Shah had delivered the judgment in an earlier case in which the court had taken a seemingly contrary view. He felt that somebody else should have written the majority judgment or even a concurring judgment. The majority judgment of Shah was extensively discussed by the judges prior to being delivered, and several passages were removed and added by other judges. The court wrote one judgment in order to achieve clarity and avoid contradictions.
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Ha Ha Hu Hu: A Horse-headed God in Trafalgar Square – Excerpt
Ha Ha Hu Hu tells the delightful tale of an extraordinary horse-headed creature that mysteriously appears in London one fine morning, causing considerable excitement and consternation among the city’s denizens. Dressed in silks and jewels, it has the head of a horse but the body of a human and speaks in an unknown tongue. What is it? And more importantly, why is it here?
Let’s us read an excerpt from the book.
The animal gestured that the floor was all muddy and there was nowhere to sit down. People understood the gesture. They brought a big stool and handed it to the animal. The animal sat on the stool in the lotus position, closed its nostrils and began to meditate. Nobody understood what it was doing. After about an hour, it opened its eyes and stood up, tied the now dry cloth around its body and put the cloth it was wearing out to dry. It pointed towards the fruits, gesturing for more. The Lord Mayor sent his men and had a large basket of fruits brought in. The animal then gestured asking for a chƟmbu. Where could you find chƟmbus in England! So they gave it a glass instead. The animal took the glass, sprinkled a few drops of water on the fruits, muttered something, waved its hand around the fruits and then ate all the fruits. It gestured for more water. They gave it more water from the hose. The animal drank the water.
Sitting on the stool, the animal looked quietly around at everybody. It laughed again. Now the people understood that that was how the animal laughed. The animal pointed towards the cage and gestured asking why it was there. Everyone was amazed.
Someone in the crowd said, ‘No, this isn’t an animal. This is a human being. The head is a horse’s head but this surely is a human being. We have discovered new continents, but we haven’t yet discovered the continent where people like this live. Let’s find out what his language is and which country he comes from. Looks like he comes from a very civilized culture. Why put him in a cage? Get him out.’
The police officers didn’t agree. ‘We can’t free him from the cage,’ they said. ‘How can we be sure that it’s not an animal? What if it pounces on the crowd and eats people alive?’
So the cage stayed.
The officers talked about many things to the animal in English. It was clear the animal did not understand. Then they spoke in French, German, Italian and Russian, one after the other. Still the animal did not understand. They brought a black man and had him speak his language to the animal. Listening to all these languages, the animal began to laugh as if it were ridiculing them. The police didn’t know what else to do. After a little while the animal neighed, which sounded to people at a distance like ‘Kim ma e sudam? Kim edam?’ By now everyone knew that the animal was talking. But it did not know any of their languages, so they did not know how to communicate with it.
However, they noticed something interesting: The animal was totally calm and looked uninterested in the people around it.
All this time, the soldiers stood with loaded guns. Coming close to the bars, the animal looked at one of their guns. A soldier standing behind the animal was frightened and walked four paces back and held the gun close to him. The animal turned around and saw his frightened face. It realized that the man’s hands held some kind of an instrument for killing. It looked at the gun with some interest and asked the policeman to see the gun. The policeman refused.
Everyone looked on in amazement.
The sun was setting. People were leaving for their homes. For fun, the eight-year-old son of a police inspector poked at the animal from behind with his badminton racket. The animal turned around as the boy ran away and stretched its hands through the bars to catch him. The boy escaped but the animal did get hold of a soldier, pulling the gun from his hands into the cage. People were frightened and ran away. Even the police and the soldiers were fleeing when the Lord Mayor commanded them to stop.
The animal began to look closely at the gun.
Choices by Shivshankar Menon – An Excerpt
Shivshankar Menon served as national security adviser to the prime minister of India from 2010–14 and as India’s foreign secretary from 2006–09. A career diplomat, he has served as India’s envoy to Israel (1995–97), Sri Lanka (1997–2000), China (2000–03) and Pakistan (2003 06). In 2010, Menon was chosen by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers. Menon in his book, Choices, gives an insider’s account of the negotiations, discussions and assessments that went into the making of India’s foreign policy.
Let’s read an excerpt from the book- Choices.
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I am often asked why India committed itself to not using its nuclear weapons first. The center-right National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government adopted the no-first-use doctrine when India first publicly tested nuclear weapons at Pokhran in 1998, and all subsequent governments of India have reiterated this pledge.1 The doctrine states that:
The fundamental purpose of Indian nuclear weapons is to
deter the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons by any
State or entity against India and its forces. India will not be
the first to initiate a nuclear strike, but will respond with
punitive retaliation should deterrence fail.
India will not resort to the use or threat of use of nuclear
weapons against States which do not possess nuclear
weapons, or are not aligned with nuclear weapon powers.
There is still some residual anxiety in India about the wisdom of this commitment, particularly in military minds. Why have a weapon and forswear its use? India could have followed the United States and Pakistan in retaining the option of using its most powerful weapon first should the nation’s defense require it.
The answer to that question lies in India’s nuclear doctrine, which is itself a product of the unique circumstances in which India finds itself. Those circumstances also explain why India chose to test nuclear weapons and become a declared nuclear weapon state (NWS) in 1998.
By the late 1990s, India was in a situation where two of its neighbors with whom India had fought wars after independence, Pakistan and China, were already armed with nuclear weapons and were working together to build their capabilities and proliferate them in Asia. The international nonproliferation regime was not in any position to address this problem. India therefore chose to become a declared NWS in 1998. The Indian government made that decision in the face of opposition by all the major powers, despite misgivings within Indian society, and after twenty-four years of international nuclear sanctions resulting from India’s first nuclear test, Pokhran-I, in 1974. (India described the 1974 test as a “peaceful nuclear explosion,” adopting a term from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whereas the 1988 test was described by the government of India as a nuclear weapon test.) Those sanctions had been designed to “cap, cease and roll back” India’s civil nuclear program and potential to make atomic weapons. They had failed to do so. Since 1974, India had also been threatened with nuclear weapons at least three times: twice by Pakistan and once, implicitly, by the entry of the nuclear-armed U.S. aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal during the 1971 war with Pakistan. (The Enterprise had also entered the Indian Ocean in 1962 when India and China fought their brief border war, but that move was intended to support, not threaten, India.)
When India decided to test nuclear weapons publicly, in 1998, it was evident that nuclear weapons, because of the scale and duration of the destruction they cause, are primarily political weapons, the currency of power in the nuclear age, rather than effective warfighting weapons. The government of India therefore declared after the 1998 tests that these weapons were to prevent nuclear threat and blackmail, and that India would not be the first to use nuclear weapons against other states. If, however, anyone dared use nuclear weapons against us, we would assuredly retaliate and inflict unacceptable damage on the adversary.
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An Unsuitable Boy by Karan Johar – An Excerpt
Karan Johar is synonymous with success, panache, quick wit, and outspokenness, which sometimes inadvertently creates controversy and makes headlines. KJo, as he is popularly called, has been a much-loved Bollywood film director, producer, actor, and discoverer of new talent. Baring all for the first time in his autobiography, An Unsuitable Boy, is both the story of the life of an exceptional film-maker at the peak of his powers and of an equally extraordinary human being who shows you how to survive and succeed in life.
Let’s read an excerpt from his best selling book, An Unsuitable Boy–
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My first proper meeting with Shah Rukh Khan was on the sets of Karan Arjun with my dad. Then I met him on the sets of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge where I told him that many years ago, I had sat across him in Anand Mahendroo’s office. He said he remembered being there but didn’t remember seeing me. Now when I look back, it was a really weird first meeting. Who knew what life had in store for both of us?
My father had taken me along to the sets of Karan Arjun. I knew Kajol was going to be there; she was somebody I had known as a child (she was one of the few people who lived in South Bombay, on Carmichael Road). I was a bit nervous because my father had started taking me around a little (he said I should go out there and meet people). He wanted to sign Shah Rukh for Duplicate. This was before I started to assist Adi (Aditya Chopra) in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. So I called Kajol and said, ‘I’m coming for the shooting of your film. Will you be there?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I’m doing a song sequence, “Jaati Hoon Main” [which went on to become quite popular].’
Karan Johar has detailed his long friendship with Shah Rukh Khan in his autobiography, ‘An Unsuitable Boy’. Karan writes that after the duo went through a slightly distant patch, they reconciled at a party for Deepika Padukone’s ‘Piku’ success.
I had this preconceived notion about Shah Rukh. I thought he was this young brat, borderline arrogant. But within five minutes of that meeting in Film City, my opinion of him changed. He was warm and chatty.
I remember my father got out of the red car we had and Shah Rukh came up to the car and opened the door for him. It was meant to be a ten-minute meeting, but they had broken for lunch or something and Shah Rukh spoke non-stop for two hours! He was so accessible, friendly and respectful of my father that he won me over in those two hours. I was very sensitive about how people treated my father because I knew what he had gone through. He said, ‘I’ve heard so much about you, sir, and such wonderful things about you as a human being.’
… That was my first meeting with him. I remember coming back and telling my father what a nice guy Shah Rukh was. He was so different from what I thought movie people were like. I had seen my father dejected and disappointed with so many of his fraternity people. I was not cynical but I was apprehensive about them. But Shah Rukh was an outsider and he was new. His syntax as a human being was very different from others in the film zone. I remember being completely enamoured by how he connected as a human being. He was so charming. He was not my favourite actor; I was a big Aamir Khan fan. But somehow in that two-hour meeting, my entire perception of him changed. I felt he was magnetic, charming, funny and sensitive. All these qualities came jumping out at me.
There’s so much that’s been said about Shah Rukh and me. Yes, there was definitely a distance between us in recent years but that was because we were not working with each other. There’s no other reason. And there were a lot of people who broadened this gap. There were people who said things to him, and who said things to me.
I sent him a message to come on Koffee with Karan in the last season, for the New Year episode, to which he didn’t reply. But he replied to every other message I sent him, about everything else. Maybe, he didn’t want to come for the show. I understood he didn’t want to come, and he expected me to understand. I didn’t ask him after that. It’s not that I called him and said, ‘Why are you not replying?’ But I called him when there was a problem or a situation I needed his advice on. Or I would go and have a drink with him in his house.
When two people are so close, when they’ve done six feature films together and then haven’t worked together on the set for a while, there’s bound to be a gap. That’s the way the industry is. The fault is mine because I went on record to say I would never make a film without Shah Rukh Khan. I should not have said that because I put that seed in his and everybody else’s head. I don’t blame people for saying things because I went on record and then didn’t live up to my promise. So it’s my fault. I don’t blame him. Also, you get attached to somebody, and Shah Rukh is a very possessive person. He’s a possessive friend. I think I may have hurt him when I made a film without him. And I think I got hurt because when I did, I felt he didn’t give me that paternal or fraternal feeling that I had from him otherwise. I think we were two hurt friends for no reason.
Shah Rukh and I have the most awesome chemistry at work. When we work together, it’s magic. And when the right film is to be made, it’ll be made. But it has to be something that we both love. Even when there was this minor or mild distance between us, on many levels, he was still my first go-to person in a situation of distress, or to seek help or advice. When I had a falling out with Kajol, the first call I made was to Shah Rukh. He came to meet me, spoke about it to me. Then I called Adi, and we discussed it. But my instinct was to call Shah Rukh first.
He had nothing to do with the problem. But I still called him because somewhere Shah Rukh, Kajol and I have been so close. We’ve built a very solid part of each other’s careers together. I called him to discuss the situation, to know whether what I was saying was valid and right. And he was very helpful. He called me right through every day that week to check whether I was okay.
When Gori Tere Pyaar Mein bombed — and I was not used to having that kind of a big failure — he called me to ask, ‘Are you okay?’ I said, ‘Yeah, things happen, shit happens. Once in a while you have to deal with a film that doesn’t work.’ So while admittedly there was a distance between us, it did not take away from the largeness of our relationship.
I think Shah Rukh and I are aware of the fact that people are envious of our relationship, which is why we’ve never had a blowout with each other. There was a simmering, silent, respectable distance between us. But there’s also an equal amount of love and affection we have for each other. That’s never going to go. I have a huge amount of respect for him. He can ask anything of me and I will do it. And I know that if I were in dire straits, and if he could do something to change that situation, if it was in his power, he would do everything to help me. There’s a big layer of love and respect still, and no one can come in the way of that.
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The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World, An Excerpt
Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and startup advisor who has served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, and a venture partner at Metamorphic Ventures. In his book, The Fuzzy and the Techie reveals the counterintuitive reality of business today: it’s actually the fuzzies – not the techies – who are playing the key roles in developing the most creative and successful new business ideas. They are often the ones who understand the life issues that need solving and offer the best approaches for doing so. It is they who are bringing context to code, and ethics to algorithms. They also bring the management and communication skills, the soft skills that are so vital to spurring growth.
Here’s the introduction by the author.
The terms ‘fuzzy’ and ‘techie’ are used to respectively describe those students of the humanities and social sciences, and those students of the engineering or hard sciences at Stanford University. Stanford is what’s known as a ‘liberal arts’ university not because it focuses on subjects that are necessarily liberal, or artistic, but because each student is required to study a broad set of subjects prior to specialization. The term liberal arts comes from the Latin, artes liberales, and denotes disciplines such as music, geometry, and philosophy that can together stretch the mind in different directions and, in that process, make it free. Each of these subjects is meant to broaden the student, force them to think critically, to debate, and to grapple with ambiguities inherent in subjects like philosophy. They are also meant to help the student cultivate empathy for others in subjects such as literature, which forces one to view the world through the eyes of another human being. In short, they are less focused on specific job preparation than they are about the cultivation of a well-rounded human being. But at Stanford, beneath these light-hearted appellations of ‘fuzzies’ and ‘techies’ also rest some charged opinions on degree equality, vocational application, and the role of education. Not surprisingly, these are opinions that have bubbled well beyond the vast acreage of Stanford’s palm-fringed quads and golden hillsides, into Silicon Valley. In fact, these questions of degree equality, automation and relevant skill sets in tomorrow’s technologyled economy are ones we face in India and across the world.
This decades-old debate to separate liberal arts majors from the students who write code and develop software has come to represent a modern incarnation of physicist and novelist Charles Perry Snow’s Two Culturesa false dichotomy between those who are versed in the classical liberal arts, and those with the requisite vocational skills to succeed in tomorrow’s technology-led economy. In India, from the earliest entrance exam standards that determine whether or not students move toward or away from engineering, we have created policy and education pathways that separate rather than foster an understanding between these ‘two cultures.’ Whether a student sits for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) for admission to an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), for the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Admission Test (BITSAT), the VIT Engineering Entrance Exam for a coveted engineering seat at Vellore Institute of Technology or for a regional common entrance exam in Maharashtra, Karnataka, or West Bengal, students are quickly funneled down very specific predetermined paths, and are perhaps less able to explore their own passions or values. And this is not specific or unique to India, but endemic across many cultures and societies.
This book not only seeks to reframe this ongoing debate, by taking into account the very real need for science, technology, engineering and math, so-called ‘STEM’ majors, but also acknowledges their faux opposition to the liberal arts. Indeed, as we evolve our technology to make it ever more accessible and democratic, and as it becomes ever more ubiquitous, the timeless questions of the liberal arts have become essential requirements of our new technological instruments. While those fabled graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology, or of the great engineering academies such as Manipal, develop critical skills and retain steadfast importance in laying the technological infrastructure, most successful start-ups require great industry context, psychology in understanding user needs and wants, intuitive design, and adept communication and collaboration skills. These are the very skill sets our graduates in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences provide. These are not separate or add-on skills, but the imperative components alongside any technological literacy.
As a fuzzy having grown up in a techie world, this false dichotomy has been something I observed in Palo Alto, California, where Steve Jobs donated the Apple computers we used in high school. This was something I observed furthermore as a Stanford student; as an employee of Google, where I spent over a year launching two teams in Hyderabad and Gurugram, India, as an employee of Facebook, and then as a venture capitalist at a $2-billion fund on Sand Hill Road, California. Peering behind the veil of our greatest technology, it is often our greatest humanity that makes it whole. Having met with thousands of companies, the story I want to share with India is that no matter what you’ve studied, there is a very real, and a very relevant, role for you to play in tomorrow’s tech economy. Our technology ought to provide us with great hope rather than fear, and we require policymakers, educators, parents and students to recognize this false divide between becoming technically literate, and building on our most important skills as humans.
Our greatest human problems require that we blend an appreciation for technology with a continued respect for those who study the human conditions, for they are the ones who teach us how to apply our technology, and to what ends it must actually be purposed. We ought to consider the true value of the liberal arts as we continue to embrace and pioneer our new technological tools. As we move forward, we require the timeless and the timely, the great poets and literature of Bengal and the glass-towers of Bengaluru.
Scott Hartley
Spring, 201
The Lord and Master of Gujarat – An Excerpt
The Lord and Master of Gujarat is set four years after The Glory of Patan, and unfolds at dizzying speed, abounding in conspiracies, heroism and romance. In the book, the kingdom of Patan is under attack from the army of Avanti. People have fled their villages to seek refuge in the city. Amidst the mounting panic, the arrival of Kaak, a young warrior from Laat, sets in motion a frantic chain of events.
Arguably K.M. Munshi’s best-known work, The Lord and Master of Gujarat deftly weaves state politics and battles with personal trials and tribulations into one glorious tapestry.
Here is an excerpt from the book:
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It was a freezing night in the winter of Samvat, 1154. The solemnly flowing waters of the Saraswati resounded fearfully in the stillness of the night. The moist breeze rising from the river made the atmosphere closer to the monsoon than to winter. It was a night when one would prefer to curl up at home next to one’s beloved. Yet, the bank across the city of Patan was occupied by about 400 to 500 people. Some tried to ward off the cold with bonfires; others slept or tried to sleep around the scattered fires. A few, not planning to sleep, sat curled up anxiously. In the darkness, the flickering of the flames cast eerie shadows and filled the night with dread. The whole scene appeared to evoke a gathering of ghouls.
Beside one of the bonfires, a young man sat half-reclined. His head rested on his shield, which lay on the ground. The style of his turban indicated that he belonged to Sorath. His sword lay near his face, covered with his sash. There was no sleep in his eyes. He sat staring at the fire, aiming an occasional woodchip and feeding the fire. He was alone. At a distance sat two men huddled against the tree. They were not talking to each other.
The young man appeared to be about twenty-five years old. His face was dark yet attractive. His eyes were large and forbidding. They sparkled with mischief every now and then.
His physique was strong and shapely. His attire, the ornaments on his wrists and arms, his earrings and the gold chain around his neck suggested that he was a man of means. He had the nonchalant air of an aristocratic warrior.
In a little while, the sound of a fast-approaching camel was heard, followed by the thud of a camel sitting down. Silence fell once again. The young man by the fire sat unperturbed. It appeared that there was nothing more important to him than throwing woodchips into the fire.
A man appeared from the direction of the sound. He was in a hurry and, seeing the young man, turned to him.
The new arrival appeared to be in his early twenties. He was well-armed—sword and dagger at his waist, a shield on his back and a large staff in his hand. He turned towards the young man and for a moment both looked at each other. With the exception of their turbans, their attires were similar, although the newcomer had hardly any ornaments. Both were tall, wellbuilt and attractive. Their eyes shone with a similar sparkle; their broad foreheads were adorned with similar sandalwood marks. Both appeared to be Gujarati warriors who had fought under the glorious Solankis in their conquest of Gujarat. Yet there was a lot that distinguished the two. Their personalities were clearly different. The newcomer was slightly taller, his eyes smaller and sharper, his body firm and lithe. On the other hand, the man who sat there had a rounder face. The flare of his nostrils and large eyes gave him a leonine appearance. He exuded courage and power. The newcomer’s sharp eyes, chiselled jawline and aquiline nose lent him the countenance of a bird of prey. He exuded concentration and caution. If the former looked fearless and calm, the latter looked farsighted and composed. Both were exemplars of characteristics associated only with men of character—one leonine, the other aquiline—one the king of the jungle, and the other the king of the sky.
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6 Exercises That Will Help You Give Birth Naturally
In light of the many complications that arise following a Caesarean-section delivery-such as infections, excessive blood loss, internal scarring –women are increasingly reverting to natural births. Antenatal exercises help in regaining your confidence to deliver naturally according to your own potential.
Here are a few antenatal exercises recommended by Dr. Mahima Bakshi in her latest book, Birthing Naturally.
Please note: Antenatal exercises should not be learnt from any untrained person as it might harm your baby if not done properly and an expert will know what has to be kept in mind before deciding the exercises that are safe for you.
