Last night I, along with bloggers Ayesha Saldanha and Deonna Kelli Sayed, was invited to participate in a special Elham event regarding the role of blogging in cultural development, with particular emphasis on the literary aspect of online writing. I read several of my posts and answered some very interesting questions from the attendees.
Click to continue reading “Elham event: culture, digitized”
Ever curious, people have brewed and smoked almost everything that protrudes in one form or another from the earth and then some. Coffee is, without a doubt, the most popular of these experiments.
The perfect brew follows the perfect roast. It’s a delightful play on our senses that begins with smell before sight. The smell primes us for an encounter with a dark, rich liquid. A liquid that promises to wake up our other senses as well as our body and mind. And that, it surely does.
The first sip quickly crescendos into the blend’s unique character. A rapid cascade follows. Traces of continents and countries and herdsmen amongst plantations meet, greet and dissipate. From Yemen to Brazil, and from Ethiopia to Sumatra, your everyday blend coffee is truly a multicultural experience in its own right. If you will pardon deficient nation labelling, coffee is developing countries in a cup.
Click to continue reading “More delicious than a thousand kisses”
Salar Abdoh writes a prescient piece on Iranian cinema for Words Without Borders. Some gems include:
…being Iranian today means, among other things, being associated with what the President of the United States has called the Axis of Evil. Evil suggests barbarity. So each time an Iranian film wins an award, each time a reviewer calls Iranian cinema “vibrant” and Iranian society “intellectually vital,” one feels vindicated.
Click to continue reading “Iranian cinema: Vindication, freedom and guerrilla filmmaking”
