In 2006, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego hosted a conference. Among the speakers was Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium.
During one of his presentations, he narrated his experience of taking a survey course in Arts and Design while studying Physics at Harvard College, a liberal arts school. At one time, students were given a heap of pumpkins and assigned to draw them with charcoal. After weeks of drawing pumpkins, the class was told (to the bewilderment of Tyson, who had a science background), “Don’t draw the pumpkins. Draw the space between the pumpkins!”
While the media is still abuzz with coverage of the changes the 27th Amendment to the constitution of Pakistan has wrought, it is also worth studying the amendment’s negative space – items that were reportedly part of early negotiations but were not included in its final form. Of key interest to me among them was the rollback of the recentralisation of
It has been more than a month since a “ceasefire” took hold in Gaza. That, of course, does not mean that the killing of Palestinians has stopped. It simply means that it has been reduced to a rate that allows international media to ignore it.
And so, the world has largely moved on from the story. But I haven’t. In July 2024, I joined a medical mission to Gaza and spent 22 days there, volunteering at hospitals. What I came back with is something I cannot easily explain.
The man my family knew, the son, brother, and husband they laughed with, the father who played with his children, feels lost to them now. I call him the “previous Talal”.
My children, wife, siblings, parents, friends and colleagues, they all see the change. They tell me I have become distant, quiet, detached, and sometimes hard to reach. My emotions are messy and raw in ways words often fail to capture. It is not a single feeling, but a swarm of emotions that is
