If someone had told me a year ago that I could participate in a performance art event, I would have been at least skeptical. I had always looked at avant-garde phenomena with a strange fascination, but this very feeling set boundaries. After having recently attended some of the events of the Month of Performance Art
Two Loves
We spent the whole of last term talking about love and the many different ways it strikes us. Coming from the East, I was introduced to a whole different set of values associated with love and its manifestations. A very basic observation is that in Eastern cultures when people fall in love, they avoid public
Eurovision Song Contest 2011 (Or what does Europe want?)
Although I promise myself, each and every year, that I will stop watching the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), this annual moment of laughable grief (meaning that the initial enthusiasm that accompanies some of the songs is ultimately destroyed by the final results), I always end up doing the opposite. 2011 couldn’t have been the year
Welcoming Stefan The Chef (Or Culinary Tales and Theories My Mother Taught Me)
“You better learn how to cook or your life will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” was what my mother’s advice sounded like four years ago before I left home for college. Despite being a big fan of Thomas Hobbes, my mother prepares the most delicious food known to man. Her food is not
Postcard From New York
Dear ECLA, This is to proudly share I graduated from Columbia this weekend. The ceremony was outstanding, with an inspiring speech by Kofi Annan. The speech is here. I would like to thank you for my time at ECLA before Columbia. While I have undoubtedly learned a lot this year, it all fell in place
Think Aloud Or Debate
The art of speaking is hard to master. I began my debating career almost three years ago in Pakistan. Slowly and gradually I climbed the ladder of public speaking. It was right after I had achieved a big break in debating that I came to Berlin and found myself in one of ECLA’s seminars, dumbfounded
“God Is Dead.” Long Live God? The “Future of an Illusion” Foretold
On good authority, I know that many of the people who came to attend Julia Kristeva’s lecture (“The forces of monotheism confronting the need to believe”) at Haus der Kulturen der Welt on March 8th, did so me more for the speaker than for the subject as such. And how could you not get excited?
A Trip To Remember
One of the biggest attractions of the academy year program is the Florence trip, which takes place every year before the spring term starts. The trip to Florence promises a very extensive education on Renaissance art and architecture interspersed with a glimpse of the political and historical ramifications of those works of art. When I