May Musings - 05

I’ve spent a lot of today knee deep in a couple of creative projects: one, reworking a script that I’m developing with the amazing Tania Safi called SAME SAME, and the other a more corporate podcast that I will be sharing soon, inshallah. I’m also stoked to share that my latest episode as host of the BBC World Service show ‘The Conversation’ was released today: on the politics of body hair. I talk to two different women, one Irish and one Turkish, about their relationship with body hair, it’s removal, and it’s relationship to feminism. Would love for you to listen and share your thoughts!

Click through to listen to the episode

How has everyone’s first day of Ramadan been? I’ve kept my energy expenditure low, and have bittersweetly welcomed that moment when you wake up and think - oh, I have all this spare time because I don’t need to eat or drink anything before I Ieave the house…

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If today has taught me anything, it is in the importance of setting aside one’s ego in creative work. It’s a relatively new thing for me, in the sense that the profession I was trained in - engineering - is very much about numbers, an outcome achieved by following a set process that will allow you to arrive at the correct conclusion. ‘Creative’ or artistically creative work seems to operate quite differently in that we each need to find processes that work for ourselves and the specific thing we are working on at the time. Now, I may be creating a false binary here between the creative and the technical, but I certainly feel the shift.

The good news is, when you are able to focus on the work and not the ego, the outcome is invariably improved. Yallah, Allah give us strength to keep putting ego aside.

Khair, inshallah.

Spots of Substance: 22nd July 2012

  How was your week? I learnt a whole bunch of new things about motorsport journalism, fell flat on my rear at the first time ice skating for nearly a decade…and began Ramadaan.  I also spent a lot of time online and here are some particularly interesting things I came across!

(after you check out the links, of course :P)

Striking truths. A new picture with an inspirational saying (like the above) every day…

So what is Ramadaan exactly? Glad you asked: Ramadaan guide for non-Muslims

Why smart people are dumb via The New Yorker

Perhaps our most dangerous bias is that we naturally assume that everyone else is more susceptible to thinking errors, a tendency known as the “bias blind spot.” This “meta-bias” is rooted in our ability to spot systematic mistakes in the decisions of others—we excel at noticing the flaws of friends—and inability to spot those same mistakes in ourselves.

How much money do you need to be happy? What is your number? An interesting post on money, happiness, indulgence and sharing…

But what about individuals who are notorious for their struggles with sharing? Surely the emotional benefits of giving couldn’t possibly apply to very young children, who cling to their possessions as though their lives depended on it. To find out, we teamed up with the developmental psychologist Kiley Hamlin and gave toddlers the baby-equivalent of gold: goldfish crackers. Judging from their beaming faces, they were pretty happy about this windfall. But something made them even happier. They were happiest of allwhen giving some of their treats away to their new friend, a puppet named Monkey. Monkey puppets aside, the lesson is clear: maximizing our happiness is not about maximizing our goldfish. To be clear, having more goldfish (or more gold) doesn’t decrease our happiness — those first few crackers may provide a genuine burst of delight. But rather than focusing on how much we’ve got in our bowl, we should think more carefully about what we do with what we’ve got — which might mean indulging less, and may even mean giving others the opportunity to indulge instead.

Omar Offendum – A Syrian American rapper, using his gift to try bring voice to the uprisings in Syria, muses at The Rolling Stone.

Owen Jones: On Islamophobia in Europe

In France – where recently 42 per cent polled for Le Monde believed that the presence of Muslims was a "threat" to their national identity – a record number voted for the anti-Muslim National Front in April's presidential elections. Denmark's third largest party is the People's Party, which rails against "Islamisation" and demands the end of all non-Western immigration. The anti-Muslim Vlaams Belang flourishes in Flemish Belgium. But those who take a stand against Islamophobia are often demanded to qualify it with a condemnation of extremism. When is this ever asked of other stands against prejudice?

How do you deal with feelings of intellectual inadequacy? “I am not as smart as I thought I was…”

Epilogue: The Future of Print, a beautiful video

 4 Lessons in Creativity from John Cleese! Brilliant, truly brilliant.  It is similar to what he says in the speech below in 1991…