Rida A. Ghumman

the polymath Raza Kazim has passed away. Besides being a lawyer, politician, philosopher and a photographer, he invented 'Sagar Veena' - the first non-fretted stringed instrument for Indian classical music. His daughter Noor Zahra Kazim is the primary performer of it.

One of the reasons I feel sad about students using AI is that they miss out on the experience of writing something mediocre and then improving it through successive drafts. You learn so much about language and argument in that process, and feel such a sense of accomplishment.

Dr. Safaeipour, a faculty member at Shahid Beheshti University, held his restoration and reconstruction class in front of buildings destroyed by the US and Zionist attacks at the university.

in your 40s your brain feels ripe like a juicy mango and you have enough knowledge to write 500 fascinating books and articles but your cats sit on your laptop and your students send you millions of emails so the mango rots and you succumb to dementia

There is never going to be peace in the Middle East until a state whose modus operandi is death, destruction, and despair exists and has free rein to do as it pleases. Israel has and will always be the greatest threat to regional stability. That’s the simple truth of it.

we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through underground networks. where octopuses dream. where elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand over them in silence. where bees communicate through dance, showing each other where to fly. where flowers bloom...where crows remember human faces -especially those who were cruel to them - and pass that memory on to their young. where ants build entire cities. where cats purr at a frequency that can help heal bones. where forests, after fires, grow flowers first.

Yellow-Beillied Prinia Lahore with lovely call

we need to think more about how much violence against the middle east is normalized. mainstream media always paints ir as a "war" or "conflict" and not active racism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and constant dehumanization towards these countries and their people

i think we should all consider a full boycott of usa, including of their cultural exports. books, movies, shows, music, everything. it’s not a culture we should engage with.

The selection of fields for #PhD applicants has begun in Iran. 172,000 people have participated in this year's PhD exam in Iran. Of these, 47 percent are women and 53 percent are men.

oh to wake up to sunlight enveloping your book shelf

i do not care if Trump's comments result in nothing tonight. no one who even thinks of saying the phrase "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" should be allowed to operate an ice cream stand, nevermind the most powerful office on the planet

I genuinely feel sick. This is just beyond anything the mind can fathom. And I keep thinking of what Ta-Nehisi Coates said. If you can’t draw the line at the genocide in Gaza, you can’t draw it anywhere else. Moral failure, on a mass and collective scale, brought us here.

western journalism is special because it has an active voice, passive voice, and a special third voice for when israel does something

writing an e-mail and getting a prompt from AI "this sentence could be more concise" no. i am verbose. i am loquacious. i am long-winded and often redundant even. you machine, do not tell me how to form my words

Couldn’t get to the end of this without wanting to break down…

I visited #SharifUniversity years ago. Met faculty & conversation soon flowed when they learnt I was from Lahore. They spoke with great admiration about Iqbal e Lahori. Bombing it is like Mongols burning Baghdad libraries. Imagine 🇮🇷 doing that to Harvard

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal in mathematics (the Nobel of mathematics), studied at Sharif University of Technology - which was just bombed by US-Israel. No US woman has ever win a Fields medal. The moral descent of USA continues lower and lower.

Tonight we are discussing #ArundhatiRoy ‘s recent memoir in our bookclub session here on Twitter Spaces. Anyone and everyone is welcome to join in and discuss.