What Is Opposite Of Loneliness? And Difference Between Loneliness and Being Alone!

‘The Opposite Of Loneliness” By Michael Knowles

The morning we graduated college, Marina Keegan declared her yearning for “the opposite of loneliness” in the commencement issue of the Yale Daily News. “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness,” she observed. “But if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.” In the wake of her sudden death in a car accident days later, the piece spread to millions across the country and has prompted Simon and Schuster to publish a collection of her essays and stories earlier this month titled, fittingly, The Opposite of Loneliness.

Marina gives us some guidance by describing not what the opposite of loneliness is, but rather what it is not. “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community,” she explains. “It’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s 4 a.m. and no one goes to bed.” The opposite of loneliness, she says, is not so fickle as a feeling, nor is it so static as a grouping, an arbitrary assembling of individuals. The opposite of loneliness is active, teleological even: committed to goals, longing in action.

For Pericles, the source of happiness is freedom. By Marina’s measure, conversely, the font of misery is loneliness, and with typically uncommon honesty she admits, “This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse—I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.” The scope of Marina’s worries in this line is quite limited, defensive rather than offensive, and unconcerned about future gain. Her fear is focused on the preservation of those institutions, traditions and goals in which she feels herself embedded. And what is loneliness, then? At its core, is it not simply a perversion of freedom? Is loneliness any more than an emancipation so extreme and complete as to transcend all pretense of society—individualism unhinged? If so, this definition goes a long way in explaining the bewilderment of modern sociologists as to the source of the growing loneliness among Marina’s classmates and comrades, steeped in a culture that axiomatically exalts the individual and the atomic –

Those familiar with Marina’s political inclinations and activities will find it fitting that the great liberal Athenian leader answers her question in a word. The opposite of loneliness is citizenship, freedom nobly perfected, advanced by courage and sustained by love. It is community progressing, engaged not by the weak pursuit of feckless comfort, in all its poisonous subjectivism, but by a virtuous longing for truth and honor. In the words of Pericles, it is free citizens “who, fearless of consequences, confer their benefits not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.”

Marina draws a distinction, as does Pericles, between loneliness and being alone. She describes arriving to look for her friends, mistakenly, at an iconic, empty administrative building. She recalls, “I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.” In Yale’s empty, neo-gothic castles, she feels the presence of her forbears, whose company she shares by the mere fact of her citizenship within a storied tradition – For full article click below.

http://thepointmag.com/2014/examined-life/freedom-from-loneliness

 Posted By F. Sheikh

Historic Monuments Of Pakistan

Wiki Loves Monuments: Top 10 pictures from Pakistan!

By Saqib Qayyum Choudhry  In Dawn

If you’ve ever tried looking for free photos of Pakistan’s cultural heritage sites online, you will know how hard it can be. Despite their large number, these sites have never been photographed under a free license.

This year, Wikimedia Foundation, the California-based non-profit organisation that runs Wikipedia, supported ‘Wiki Loves Monuments’ in Pakistan for the first time.

‘Wiki Loves Monuments’ is officially the biggest photography competition in the world according to the Guinness World Records. It documents all of the world’s cultural heritage under a free license.

Globally, the 2014 version of the contests saw more than 8,750 contestants in 41 countries across the globe, who submitted more than 308,000 photographs throughout the month of September.

From Pakistan, more than 700 contestants from across the country submitted over 12,000 photographs, all under a free license, which means they can now be re-used by anyone for any purpose, (even commercially), as long as the re-user attributes the photographer.

While the national and international winners are still to be announced, Pakistan’s jury has selected the country’s top 10 photographs to be sent over to the international stage.

Enjoy these mesmerising glimpses into a Pakistan steeped in culture and tradition, and architectural beauty.

Tomb of Jahangir in Lahore. —Photographed by Sohaib Tahir

Tomb of Dai Anga in Lahore. —Photographed by Muhammad Ashar

Tomb of Bibi Jawindi in Uch Sharif. —Photographed by Shah Zaman Baloch

Derawar Fort in Bahawalpur. —Photographed by Ali Mir

Faisal Mosque in Islamabad. —Photographed by Ali Mujtaba

Lahore Fort in Lahore. —Photographed by Rohaan Bhatti

Pakistan Monument in Islamabad. —Photographed by Abdul Baqi

Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore. —Photographed by Shagufta Karim

Noor Mahal in Bahawalpur. —Photographed by Muhammad Ashar

Shah Jahan Mosque in Thatta. —Photographed by Ovais Waraich

http://www.dawn.com/news/1140308/wiki-loves-monuments-top-10-pictures-from-Pakistan

 

‘Dangers of Eating Late At Night’ By Jamie Kaufman

ACID REFLUX is an epidemic affecting as many as 40 percent of Americans. In addition to heartburn and indigestion, reflux symptoms may include postnasal drip, hoarseness, difficulty swallowing, chronic throat clearing, coughing and asthma. Taken together, sales of prescribed and over-the-counter anti-reflux medications exceed $13 billion per year.

The number of people with acid reflux has grown significantly in recent decades. Reflux can lead to esophageal cancer, which has increased by about 500 percent since the 1970s. And anti-reflux medication alone does not appear to control reflux disease. A Danish study published this year concluded that there were no cancer-protective effects from using the common anti-reflux medications, called proton pump inhibitors, and that regular long-term use was actually associated with an increased risk of developing esophageal cancer.

To stop the remarkable increase in reflux disease, we have to stop eating by 8 p.m., or whatever time falls at least three hours before bed. For many people, eating dinner early represents a significant lifestyle shift. It will require eating well-planned breakfasts, lunches and snacks, with healthy food and beverage choices

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/the-dangers-of-eating-late-at-night.html?src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article

Posted By F. Sheikh

 

 

Mr. Modi & Hindu Nationalism

There was some hope that Mr. Modi , after a landslide victory, will be a changed man and will lead India into a great Asian Nation, but early indications are that his rule may not be any different than his rule in Gujrat as a Chief Minister. Some excerpts from article by Pankaj Mishra in NYT;

Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister and main ideologue of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is stoking old Hindu rage-and-shame over what he calls more than a thousand years of slavery under Muslim and British rule. Earlier this month, while India and Pakistan were engaging in their heaviest fighting in over a decade, Mr. Modi claimed that the “enemy” was now “screaming.”

“This is just the kind of retrograde 1920s-style nationalist dogma that is making a big comeback in India, especially since last year, when Mr. Modi, a close ally of Mr. Abe, overcame the taint of various suspected crimes to launch his bid for supreme power. Interestingly, it is not the R.S.S.’s khaki-shorts-wearing volunteers but rather quasi-Westernized Indians in the corporate-owned media and mysteriously well-funded think tanks, magazines and websites who have provided the ambient chorus for Mr. Modi’s ascent to respectability.”

“India’s recent economic travails and diminished international standing have frustrated these rising Indians’ sense of entitlement, provoking them to lash out at such handy scapegoats as “racist” and “Orientalist” Westerners and Indian libtards and sepoys. Typical of their ersatz nativism is a book entitled “The New Clash of Civilizations,” which gleefully heralds India’s hegemony worldwide. It was written by Minhaz Merchant, the Anglicized former editor of a defunct lifestyle magazine called Gentleman and now a self-appointed publicist for the prime minister. Many such “Modi Toadies,” as Salman Rushdie calls them, had Western tails once, like the Harvard-economist-turned-book-burner.”

“Such crude xenophobia, now officially sanctioned in Mr. Modi’s India, seems only slightly less menacing than the previous R.S.S. chief’s wishful thinking about one more Mahabharata against demonic anti-Hindus. Japan’s expansionist gambles in China and the Pacific in the last century and, more recently, Russia’s irredentism in Ukraine show that a mainstreamed rhetoric of national aggrandizement can quickly slide into reckless warmongering. Certainly, the ruling classes of wannabe superpowers have spawned a complex force: the ideology of anti-imperialist imperialism, which, forming an axis with the modern state and media and nuclear technology, can make Islamic fundamentalists seem toothless. One can only hope that India’s democratic institutions are strong enough to constrain yet another wounded elite from breaking out for geopolitical and military manhood.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/25/opinion/pankaj-mishra-nirandra-modis-idea-of-india.html?ref=opinion

Posted by F. Sheikh