Usama Ihsan

As the topic suggests, this book holds pretty interesting combination of history, economy and politics. Providing a gist of the entire book in a summarized way is difficult but appealing to do. This book is written by Ha-Joon Chang; he is a South Korean Institutional Economist. Other than that he has a multi-disciplinary background in academia (Economics, politics and development) for writing such a book comprehensively. The main objective of this book is to present the real face of Now Developed Countries (NDCs) and their historical experience about development. The author historically explains how developed countries hide the way they themselves developed, their motives in hiding and what they dictate to developing countries. The author uses secondary sources of data to explain historical perspective. Author defines how industrialization occurred in Britain first and then it was done in other countries afterwards and how different factors helped them in doing so. A detailed histo

Let’s start this with a real life example. Once during a lecture on inequality measuring techniques at my university; teacher had drawn supposedly a graph of unequal society, a student passed a comment “This should be of Pakistan”. Doesn't it shows how we think of our mother land? Pakistan is doing or not doing well as a country is a different story. But here comes a question: Why Pakistan is not doing good in our minds? We from our childhood are sensitized in a way that if a person does anything bad, we relate it to Pakistan; "Pakistani awam". Let's get into the depth of it. I read a quote in a book named "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundara; You begin to liquidate a people," Hubl said, "by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture, its history. And then others write other books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it. Then the people slowly begins to forget what it is and wha

During the industrialization era, cities were becoming the industrial hub and export oriented zones in the United Kingdom. Although the production was done by burning fossil fuels, ultimately harming the environment. But today there are many other ways to get that production done. Basically I want to talk about the real concept of cities. Our cities today are not given role of providing healthy ground for economic activities to grow and develop. Lets start with a question: Why do people migrate from rural to urban centers? Sure! there has been no single factor to be generalized on the general public. Urban centers are seen as the areas where one can upgrade his/her lifestyle. Facilities like better educational institutes, hospitals, transport facilities, electricity availability, better water and sanitation system and much more. All these facilities in the poor countries are expensive for the locals to avail. These facilities comes with heavy cost associated with them. In our villages

What is difficult to you? When we all were in our childhood, we do have had difficulties like lots of homework assigned. The life we were having is now desirable to us, but why not at that time? This question we all have to focus on. The answer can change our mindset for our current and future difficulties. At the time of childhood, we were having a burden less life except for the school, and tuition work. We did not have financial issues at that time; it was a tension free life. That homework was not a burden in-front of the difficulties we have today. So why is that we do have something as a difficulty at certain times but not afterwards. It is because as we are all human, we do have an inbuilt focus that goes heavily on hardness in our life. When we were children, we did not realize the difference between the adult life and the childhood. This focus is one of the reasons that we make our difficulties to get prominent in our mindset while analyzing our life. How to overcome that?