reclaim your voice.
My German and Chinese parents have always found it important for me to be culturally aware and open-minded. As a result, I am one of those lucky third-culture kids who got to spend the entirety of their primary and secondary education in bilingual and international schools. It is a fair assumption that exposure to different…
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The media is driven by commercial bias, which is associated with advertisers who want to increase their profits. Aside from earning money, publications would be able to retrieve a diverse set of readers. Since journalism is a ‘dying’ industry, marketing and advertising are critical to media’s survival. Thus, readers would rather read celebrity or political…
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Somewhere in the green Taiwanese mountains, above the clouds on a hot August day, I was sitting at a lunch table in an air-conditioned restaurant next to my grandmother and her friends. Somehow, in a setting that seemed so distant from the world below us, we could still feel the fumes of the undeniable tension…
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Early March 2019, I walked past security into Sindh’s magnificent Governor House. The inaugural Adab Festival – a three-day event to celebrate and discuss culture, literature, and society was happening on its premise. I had made a shortlist of the panel discussions I would attend – the foremost being one on education. Like most young…
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I remember when I was in a classroom at my all-girls school and the teacher highlighted a statistic about how 1 in every 5 of us are dying of some terrible disease, and the girl next to me counted the students and for every fifth girl, she pointed her fingers like a gun and said,…
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“Healthcare gaslighting” is a new term that has emerged into many dictionaries. I am sure we have all heard of doctors undermining their patients’ pain and worries by brushing them aside. Many women have come forward to share their experiences with doctors not believing their pain. Nonetheless, I am sure this happens with men too.…
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UN sustainable development goal 4.1 demands the provision of ‘free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education’ to all boys and girls. Education is our remedy to social ills and a golden pass to an inclusive, prosperous future. The problem is that education today is not free or equitable; it is almost without exception a…
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Owing to the month of Pride, several countries around the world hold bubbly, colourful demonstrations to publicly celebrate that love is love, no matter one’s gender. How does this idea born out of liberal thinking reconcile with the self-proclaimed illiberal and conservative government of Hungary? It doesn’t. Even though events such as Pride, which go…
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You never forget your first time. I must have only been in the 2nd grade when it happened to me — I was playing in the driveway of my North Carolina home when an older white kid ruined the otherwise peaceful moment with a message to “go back to your country.” Much like my dad’s…
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