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? ...

We all know our planet is limited. It means the resources it carries are limited. From the time humans came into being, they are continuously extracting minerals and other natural resources from the land to meet their needs. Human is still searching new and better reserves of resources to meet its ever growing needs and demand. Sustainable development guide human to live their lives in such a way that the carrying capacity of this planet must be taken care of. Good health, long-term wealth and living standards improvements should be accomplished for every human without disturbing the biodiversity. Three key elements of sustainable development: economy or profit, environment or planet, social or people. All of them are interlinked and there should not be any development that make them apart from each other. Definitions of Sustainable Development: "Improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems" (IUCN, UNEP, WWF) ...

Sustainable development is a wide spread concept. This is because it deals with almost each and every aspect of life. Different public and private organizations, socialists and environmentalists presented their views about the Sustainable development and defined this concept in different ways. Sustainable development is an integrated approach that includes economy, environment and society. All of these three elements should be kept in balance but it is difficult to manage them in equality. " Three Sectors: Economy, Environment, and Society " is the first and most basic view. This model divides sustainable development into economy, environment and society. These are three interconnected rings and where these intersect each other; sustainable development takes place. It is the most simple model and mutually exclusive as well. It means that there is a trade-off between these three elements. Economic growth can destroy environment or society and vice versa. Also there is...

He was a shy boy. Even he also feel shy while saying Salam to anyone he does not know. But he want to follow the teachings of Islam and that includes every Muslim should say Salam even to a stranger because all the Muslims have a strong relation of brotherhood. He took a step towards the elimination of his fear of rejection. On the way from mosque to house after Asar prayer there was an aged man sitting on a chair. He started saying salam everyday to that old man. Few days later, the boy after offering prayer went directly to the ground from mosque. On that day, the boy was excited to play cricket after few weaks. It was a month of Ramadan and he was coming back home with his friend and the time was running out for the Aftari. He saw that old man was sitting on the same place where he daily met him and that old man's eyes were questioning that, where you were little boy? I was waiting for you but you did not came today. The old man cannot stand on his own but he grabed the hand of...