Tag: Blogging Prize Shortlisted

The inner voice

“Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And more important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” – Steve Jobs. Discuss. Have you ever felt alone while walking through the crowded hallways of a school, that you never wanted to be at in the first place? Have

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X and Y: Nothing but Letters

“Denvers, Carl R.” “Magna Cum Laude!” At last. The chromatic dais reflects in my entire eyes and the incessant gaiety of hands seems endless. Lots of countenances are staring at me, grinning as they have one’s eye on my steps on a soft red carpet in the broad auditorium. “Congratulations,” uttered the guest speaker, Mr.

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Defining One’s Best Normality

Triggered by Albert Camus’s quote that: “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”, I wonder if the quote is completely true. Come to think of it, Camus was born 1913 and died in 1960 which means that this issue has been brought to light around a century ago. Rather than

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Big blue whale in an ocean too small

My childhood was spent with my parents and siblings in this tiny dot on our world map called Sitka, Alaska. I will have to admit that I painfully miss the freezing temperatures, the snowy landscapes, our small but warm red brick house and our chubby ginger cat named Honey. I never felt so attached to

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Culture not Costume

As a lover of travel and adventure, I have learned over time that every country, every city and every home has a culture of its own. The beauty of culture surrounds us consistently. Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, that’s up to us. There are many aspects of culture and each one roars

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The Tree Tale

Hi, I am a Chestnut tree. For many decades, I have been standing here. I have witnessed many changes around me, but what has not changed is the way we have been caring about others. I still remember the words of the biology teacher at the school, “Children! You just cannot imagine how much potential

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The Role of Education is to Broaden Our Minds

A popular Tibetan Proverb goes… ‘A child without education is like a bird without wings’. Many people view this as cliché, but we all know how true this is. Perhaps, the question that begs answers is: “Can it really be possible for us to fly”? This question was posed many years ago by Daedalus in

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‘Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character give him power

Indeed, the truth in the statement above cannot be denied. I totally agree with it. Before presenting my points, however, I would want to explain three key words in the topic: ‘adversity’, ‘character’ and ‘power’, for better understanding. The Oxford Advanced Learners’ dictionary defines ‘adversity’ as a state of misfortune or calamity. It also defines

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Education in the Laboratory

Education, when considered broadly as any process which involves delivering or receiving new knowledge or perfecting skills, is a rather delicate topic to deal with. Defined this way, words such as ‘uneducated’ cease to exist because everyone has received some new knowledge at one point or another. E.g. We all learned to speak. For specificity,

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Normality is an Illusion

What does it mean to be normal? In this modern age, normality seems to be an illusion when one looks at the mass globalisation and the mixing pot of cultures, languages and religion. I work in healthcare and our sector is obsessed with normality. Your cholesterol level means nothing to me unless I can compare

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Save the planet

In a world fixated on fossil fuels and revised economic systems, there’s no surprise that the individual comes first. However, is that truly more imperative than the world that mothers us? As humans we have a strong tendency to put our needs first; we always look for what benefits us. Ultimately this psychological mindset has

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A broader education for a more well-rounded student

What most easily comes to mind when we think about education is the academic stuff. For me, it’s a dark green board filled with equations; you know those long monstrous ones that look like they were invented specifically to torture non-genius minds? Those things give me the jitters. Yes, of course, academics are important and

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The paradox of arts today

Rajabu admired the Tuesday evening hustle at Posta. He was seated in the bus heading towards his university, and today he was glad he could sit by a window. People were crossing the road amidst buses, private vehicles and motorcycles in a dizzying frenzy, many heading home after a busy day at work in town.

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Sustaining the Inner Artist

Art is a subjective field. With that said, the world is a huge canvas. In whatever industry one is involved with, there is art within. We are all artists. We have always been right from our early years. In the words of the famous Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, “Every child is an artist”. However, he

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Painting as an art

Art is the painting of the old masters that hang in museums. Many people would never think of visiting such museums. A great number of people do not understand such old and new forms of painting. They do not understand that such old and new art forms are part of everyday life. It is all

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Love Is Like An Apple Tree

Tim lives at the end of a very long road, at the foot the Bluff, and a long way up the valley. His garden is overflowing with life – purple potatoes, green beans, and many apple trees. A rippling stream runs between the cottage and the weaver’s house. Everything Tim eats comes from his garden.

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A wonderful fruit

It’s written biblically about the forbidden fruit that our ancestors [Adam and Eve] ate. It’s always beating the religious leaders’ minds and even threatened to create public judgment on them, but it all comes to be cool when one says that the husband and wife enjoyed an apple. Apples are class s pupil-fist sized sweet

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