Usama Ihsan

You can find good and bad in every nation. It depends on which side you portray the most. Pakistan is a country went through so much of the socio-political instability over the years. But still it fought back really well and stool tall even in the harshest times. Most of the time we put our energy into talking about its failures and issues only. Ignoring the fact that the resilience of this nation is worth appreciating as well. The critiques do not understand the real need of the hour; which is positive criticism. Even though the people of Pakistan have gone through some of the hardest times, still they are one of the hospitable people. They only need a healthy environment to progress. Take an example of people migrated abroad earlier; they have become one of the leading businessmen or women of their fields. Medical doctors, engineers, social scientists, artists and sports persons; in every field the people of Pakistan have become global stars. Talking about the history, this cou...

Development is now a most debated topic. In development, participation of beneficiaries is seen as a better approach. Although it is pretty difficult to insure local participation where donor and mediator agencies originate projects. They have their own set of aims, objectives and time frames in which they have to complete projects. They themselves most of the time became barrier to participation. A better type of development in which self-help groups initiate projects themselves for themselves is required. There is a self-help group based in Islamabad achieving great outcomes. These outcomes were never against their needs or wants. The project became successful in a pretty short time span. It became an example for the entire community. Through their journey, they have faced many challenges but still with unity, successfully got out of those. Other communities should also learn from their experiences. In this project report; a member of the community is interviewed to know what the...

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) ...