By NAVEED GILANI One of the many attractions of the C2C path is that the entire area is steeped in history; from the spot where William Wordsworth, the poet, said goodbye to his brother before he went overseas and died, to Shap Abbey founded in 1199, to the mysterious Hermitage carved out of a boulder… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI You must be wondering about the trailing part of the title of this travelogue. “Coast 2 Coast” is understandable as the whole purpose is to tell you about this expedition from one coast to another, however, “Maia O Maria”, I am sure, arouses curiosity. This is a ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ between… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI ‘The Way’ is a beautiful movie about an American father, played by Martin Sheen, making the pilgrimage to Spain’s Santiago de Compostela in memory of his son who died while attempting the same. The story is, of course, fictional but the pilgrimage is not. Known as the Camino de Santiago (the Way… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI My eleventh grade Chemistry teacher in Notre Dame College Dhaka, Fr. Graham, once advised us to always aim high. He said something like, “to reach for the top of the door you have to aim for the ceiling” – his way of making the 14/15-year-olds understand the point. The message stuck because… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle, she comes and goes as she pleases so that one is never sure whether she will come at all, nor for how long she will stay.” – Grace Metalious in her 1956 novel, Peyton Place That is how I was introduced to… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI Abbu’s epitaph reads: Say not in grief that he is no more but say in thankfulness that he was It is said that in the march of life it is not important where you are but how far you have come. Like a victorious soldier Abbu had come a long way from… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI We have all heard the phase; ‘behind every successful man there is a woman’. I don’t know how many of you from my gender agree with this but if I was to google that exact phrase I would find many additional affixes to this term that convey the worldly wisdom of my… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI Haven’t we all heard stories form our dads or grandpas of how hard it was for them when they were growing up and how easy it was for us “modern” kids with all the conveniences in the world; that, it really sucked for them; and that, we ought to be mighty thankful;… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI Aristotle in his treatise on a perfect life uses the term eudemonia (of course, a Greek word) as the ultimate end for which we do all that we do. This term loosely means ‘happiness’. It’s more accurate translation would be ‘human flourishing’ but for the purposes of this piece I will stick… Read more »

By NAVEED GILANI “Gham nadaari boz bekhar” was the Persian title of one of Patras Bukhari’s Urdu masterpieces. In the days of Patras, Persian had great influence on Urdu literature. The title simply means; “if you don’t have any worries buy a goat”. It was an amusing account of how the life of a simple… Read more »