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Marriage, The Iranian Style
Every time I attended a wedding for a reason, I noticed that despite all prior talks and agreements, the wedding ceremony was again carried out with great difficulty, and the couple endured many troubles to be able to get together. It was not because of not having a home and a lack of income, or due to the legal age for marriage, but the customs of the time, the condition of parental consent and their meddling in their child’s future life, or even the influence of the bride and groom siblings, were the main reasons to lead the simple routine of marriage in a bumpy and misled way, and even prevent it from happening.
I’d already written about my cousin in a family context in my diary. After reading it again, I realized what interesting and surprising, and at the same time painful, points there were during their marriage. For this reason, I decided to write about this event, which might be considered as a sample for other marriages, in a separate book in detail, called Marriage, The Iranian Style, so that the unpleasant parts can be reflected on.
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Money, Power, Dominance
From the telegram to Instagram, western culture has undergone drastic changes in the way individuals communicate with one another. Steven Kuhn details how these changes have progressed and the consequences these innovations have had on our culture. Hugh Heffner and Gianni Versace have proven themselves to be influential titans in utilising mass media. They have changed the western concept of femininity by building on the print media created by Hollywood and moulding the ‘super model’. Heffner would go on to pioneer reality television in a way which continues to influence twenty-first-century programming and vanity-driven social media platforms. Long after Hollywood in the 1920s and the rise of the internet from the cold war, social media was born, exacerbating the culture of sexualisation and dominance competition which had always existed offline. From Piczo to Tik Tok, Steven Kuhn shows where our electronic culture is heading in the future.
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Mother’s Love
Mother’s Love is a series of essays about social issues. I say that my readers know my essays are good for them like broccoli, but the jokes throughout are sort of the cream cheese that makes the essays tasty. I started writing them in 2014 and then picked up where I left off in 2021. Some of the best essays were written while travelling to Brooklyn in New York in 2021. The other more notable essays were written after long beach walks where I would empty my mind out so when I started writing I would only have a heading in mind and then let the rest flow directly out of my subconscious. I often say that my life is sort of a circus that my essays are based on but the Dalai Lama says circuses are fun.
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My Mother was a Woman
Gender equality should be top of the agenda of discourse on human affairs. There is no rhyme nor reason for the status of women to be languishing below the male ranking. The ‘weaker sex’ label must cease forthwith. Women are strong, resilient and always unbowed. Moreover, women conceive and populate our world with all the talents the human race celebrates from time to time. Women deserve to be ululated and rewarded. The current status demeans women and denies the human race the chance to scale the heights it has the potential to scale!
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Pass On My Greetings to Jenny
There is a very deep sense of gratitude that I have kept in my heart, a gratitude that I cannot describe in words. I promise in my heart that someday I will come to meet her, to convey my gratitude and I really want to repay her kindness. Now I have been waiting too long, for seven years, but there's no chance to meet her and that hope is only stored in my heart, I don't know for how long. One morning when I woke up from my sleep, I stood in front of the mirror. I saw there was one grey hair and I realised that I was old. Then I asked myself, if today I die without the slightest amount of time to fix anything, what would I regret the most? My answer was; I will be sorry because I haven't had the chance to meet Jenny to convey my gratitude. I wrote this book, because I did not know when would I meet her. If I would never have time to express my gratitude to her, at least through this book I have already conveyed it. Jenny is a beautiful old woman who helped me that night, the night I was struggling. Not even one person was by my side, even I could not help myself. Thank you, Jenny. If you were not there, I might have had a miscarriage, or I might had died.
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Pieces of a Larger Mirror
“If anyone believes they are religious and does not bridle their tongue but deceives their own heart, this person’s religion is worthless.” James 1:26
Not to be read in isolation, or necessarily in order, walk side by side with the narrator as she opens up on issues of childhood experience and race, upbringing and relationships, schooling and culture through a unique lens intended to be merely the beginning of your journey upward, outward, inward. Are you ready to look into the mirror?
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Progress, What Progress? Britain on the Skids
Technologically, Britain is moving forward in leaps and bounds. We can buy everything we could possibly need online from Tesco, Amazon or a plethora of other outlets – and have the goods delivered within hours. Words like gigabyte and Netflix are as familiar to us as tea and coffee. We can talk to our friends on the other side of the world, at no cost, in real time, fully visible and stark naked if we like. Everything’s on tap, 24/7. But is downloading a blizzard of smartphone apps and consuming Deliveroo-ed pizza just because we can, making us appreciative, happy souls – or turning us into arseholes?
What happened to our green and pleasant land – or is it more colourful and lovelier than ever?
From politics to parenting and schooling, the honours system to the state of our national game (football), from the way we build our housing estates to how we behave at horse races, Progress, What Progress? offers up a wry and humorous commentary on what it means to live in 21st-century Britain. Is this a country we can be proud of and feel safe to live in? Has social media been our saviour, or has it set us on a course where, in a few years from now, the art of conversation will be lost forever and we’ll barely be able to string a sentence together? As long as you can still read, see what you think…
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Receiving Your Personal Truth
Our contemporary world is experiencing a crisis in facts and truth. Conflicting messages or fake news bombard us every day, about religion, politics, and COVID-19 and vaccinations. The daily newspaper, internet news, websites, and social media all compete for our attention, and quite often each insisting on their version of the facts. Made-up news and distorted information, create confusion and a distrust in various religious and political institutions.
How do we know what is true when watching the news, listening to elected officials and religious leaders, or using social media? Who is telling the truth? How can we know? What can we do?
In Receiving your Personal Truth, you are taken on a journey where you experience what is truth for yourself. Practical ways of receiving your truth are suggested. The skill of awareness and self-critical thinking enables us to understand what is true and what is false. In observing that we are one with oneness of it all, we act with compassion towards everyone.
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Sheeny Shadow Narratives
Quantum computers are on the doorstep and artificial intelligence has already entered our living rooms. Research breakthroughs determine the latest company’s stock values. Reasonable investment volumes and financial funding frameworks are in place. This signals that profitable applications are within sight and the pace of development is increasing rapidly.
Corporate business and governments are powerful drivers, offering personalized products for users, entertainment for followers and safety for all. Global communication is at our fingertips. Intuitive robots act in tandem with factory workers, artists, and scientists.
But services “for free” come at a price. Revolutionary technologies will soon disrupt markets and shake up societies. Individuals will pay with a loss of privacy and personal autonomy. Intuitive algorithms will challenge artistic creativity. Unlimited computing power will call art and science into question. We have no clue yet how a mesh of quantum computers (QC) and swarms of artificial intelligence (AI) will fundamentally change art and science.
Yet we mostly ignore a debate on our cohabitation with novel technologies. Could artists resist the domestication by intelligent robots? Just now artists and scientists erratically meander to escape the inevitable. Are we ready to enter an informed public discourse? We experiment with burning answers in our encounter with cold machines.
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Spirits of Severn
The River Severn is Britain's longest natural waterway. It rises in mid-Wales, where it is known as the Hafren. Both these names stem from that of a river goddess, known since prehistoric times as Sabrina. To stop anywhere along Sabrina's course, or on either side of her beautiful estuary, is to risk becoming absorbed and transfixed by her ever-moving, yet timelessly repetitive progress. Throw a net across Sabrina, from side to side, and you might catch a fish, but the body of her stream will pass straight through the mesh. Can words possibly convey the elusive majesty of her current, or adequately describe its multi-stranded sacred story? In Spirits of Severn, artist and mythographer Michael Dames - whose acclaimed work includes The Silbury Treasure, The Avebury Cycle and Mythic Ireland - brings the river's illusive legacy to the surface, while tracing her progress from her pair of sources to the furthest tips of her Mor Hafren estuary.
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The Aftermath
After a decade of graduate studies in the US, he returned to a homeland transformed—not for the better. The once pristine landscapes were now marred by environmental degradation and polluted waterways. With water becoming a scarce resource, the rural communities who depended heavily on fuelwood stood at a precarious juncture. Urban centers, once bustling with life, now languished in squalor. More disturbingly, he observed a pollution of the mind: those who should have been stewards of the earth were either indifferent or alarmingly unaware. They failed to see the broader implications of their actions. Determined to make a difference, he began advocating for the earth’s restoration, emphasizing its vital significance. After all, the earth is our shared home, and neglecting it risks the future of us all.
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The Diaspora Dilemma
The African diaspora have been subjected to oppression for decades since the end of the transatlantic slave trade. In recent times this oppression has been most visible in the form of live killing and murder executed by law enforcement officers. However, the extent of the problems that face people of colour in the West are not limited to police brutality; the challenges are much broader spanning across every area of society: from politics and law to health and housing to economics and entrainment. Not only are the challenges wide-ranging, they are often interconnected.
Following the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, for the first-time people from all walks of life in the West stood up together to push back against racial oppression. This book provides an overview of the key challenges facing the African Diaspora, how things can be improved, and how they are related.
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