Category: TED Videos

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What Kind of Life Do You Really Want to Live?

Posted on by Ahmad Amirali

Somewhere along the way, we have to stop and questioned ourselves, are we living our lives the way we wanted or the way it should be?

Yesterday, while having a discussion about quality life with my students, one of my students ask ‘Sir, how can we know that we are living a quality life?’ Another student answered, ‘it’s simple when we get rich and can be able to buy everything we want, it means we are living a quality life’. The discussion becomes interesting when another student asks, ‘Sir, it means being rich and having lots of money can lead us to live a quality life’. This discussion makes me wonder when a 12 and 13-year-old are anxious about their living, then do we realise what kind of life we should live? Do our life goals are simply to earn money and live a convenient life? Or it should be something that gives meaning to our living, even to our death.

On September 2nd, 2018, a girl named Claire Lucia Wineland died from a stroke one week after a lung transplant at the age of 21. Wineland was born with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that affects mostly the lungs, but also the pancreas, liver, kidneys, and intestine making a person difficult to live a normal life. She lived most of her life in hospital on life support. However, she became an activist, author, TEDx Speaker and social media star. In 2017, she appeared on TEDx and talked about the self-worth: Continue reading “What Kind of Life Do You Really Want to Live?” →

How an Attention-Seeking Behavior Makes You Less Creative?

Posted on by Ahmad Amirali

If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you’re never going to be creatively fulfilled.
– Joseph Gordon-Levitt

One of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is your time and attention. A line that I read a year ago on a website and guess from which site? One of the most attention-grabbing websites, Facebook. Somehow, we all agree with this statement, I saw many of my students who have connected me over social media, shared this post multiple times on their FB walls. Even some people tag it to their besties. It’s a powerful feeling, to get attention – I agree. But What happened when our cravings to all these attention goodies finally fulfilled? And we get all the attention from our favourite people whom we always fascinate in our lives. If you ask me, my experience was not entirely happy.

I think the first time I can remember using my personality to get attention when I was nine. We all have our first childhood crush in the form of a friend or a relative like cousins, and there was I am. My first crush was my classmate, and as a nine-year-old, I always bragged about how well I can read alphabets in front of her 😀 . One day when I finished reading alphabets, she turned to me and said ‘show-off’ at one instance my urge to seek her attention was fulfilled, but on the other, a new wave of feeling emerged for her – the feeling of Hate 🙂

Maybe the situation might go opposite but again, that shifting of an urge to ambition make things worse. Then there’s another powerful feeling that people have been lucky to experience a lot. Continue reading “How an Attention-Seeking Behavior Makes You Less Creative?” →

Why Is It Essential to Express Our Emotions Openly?

Posted on by Ahmad Amirali

Why Is It Essential to Express Our Emotions Openly?

In our daily lives, we often encountered certain experiences, either from a known person or a distant colleague, that we are afraid to share it with anyone or even talk about it. Sometimes we scared that people might take it wrongly or once we get started, we may not be able to stop, and that will be very embarrassing. Interestingly, it is not the experience or an incident that we afraid to speak of, but it is the emotions and feelings that generated from that experience which we afraid to express it to anyone. Being a teacher, I experienced such behaviours from my students as well when they don’t speak out their minds and even resist to share their opinions openly in the classroom. Upon asking, I hear the same old reason, ‘what if someone rejects or laugh at my point?‘ I always wonder, why sometimes it’s easy to feel, decide or think about anyone or anything inside our head. But it’s much harder to express it out loud? What happened if we resist our self to express and speak out our mind in front of others? Continue reading “Why Is It Essential to Express Our Emotions Openly?” →

How Do We see Autistic People in Our Daily Lives?

Posted on by Ahmad Amirali

How Do We see Autistic People in Our Daily Lives?
By Ahmad Amirali

Sunday is the day of relaxation for many people, including myself. So, I had nothing to do except surfing the internet this Sunday, and there I found a topic for this article. I was surfing randomly on websites where I found an interesting article on Autism. It was full of information and recent researches, and I found it fascinating. But after reading it, a random thought struck my mind, and I wrote ‘Autistic people’ in the google search panel. In Images, the very first picture I saw was Donald Trump (I laughed out loud). However, the very thing that made me question people awareness about this disease was the picture of a devil or a demon, and then I just scrolled down and found funny pictures about autism and autistic people. This made me wonder How we see Autism and Autistic children in our daily lives?

Generally, people tend to establish an opinion about autism with really specific ‘check-box’ descriptions. For example, autistic people are nonverbal, autistic people always like Math and science and nothing else, autistic people do not feel emotions, or they don’t know how to reciprocate empathy or love. However, the real picture is far more different than these ‘STEREOTYPICAL MYTHS’. I know many kids with autism who love being creative like drawing and painting (I mean serious painting), poetry, pottery etc. Long story short, many autistic people consider autism as an ability rather than a disability. Continue reading “How Do We see Autistic People in Our Daily Lives?” →

How Our Simple Habits Become A Rite of Passage for Later Life

Posted on by Ahmad Amirali

How Our Simple Habits Become A Rite of Passage for Later Life

Last week, my students and I engaged in an open discussion on rituals and habits that how habits and rituals are different and sometimes we start considering some of our practices as rituals. While the conversation went further, one of my students asked ‘Sir, why certain habits become so important for some people that they start taking them as a ritual?’ the question was valid at some points, however, I counter question him ‘Is it habits or the stories and feelings related to these habits which makes people consider them as rituals?’ Throughout our life, whether we follow any religion or not, we involve with many rituals individually as well as communally. For example, holding hands before dinner or saying specific prayers before meal etc. These habits eventually become a sacred part of our lives and even pass on from generation to generations. The question is How Our simple Habits become a rite of passage for later life?

The same question was asked by an activist and tech enthusiast, Bob Stein who has long been in the vanguard: immersed in radical politics as a young man, he grew into one of the founding fathers of new media. He’s wondering what sorts of new rituals and traditions might emerge as society expands to include increasing numbers of people in their eighties and nineties. Continue reading “How Our Simple Habits Become A Rite of Passage for Later Life” →