THINKERS, DREAMERS AND DOERS

Description

CONTENTS

Part One          World Literature

Part Two          Idiot Box and Silver Screen

Part Three        Book pride and Reviews

Part Four         News and Comments

Part Five          Media Curbs and Curves

Part Six            Footloose in other Worlds

Part Seven       Remembrance of Great Pakistani Lives

Part Eight        Remembrance of Great Global Lives

About the Author

Dr Arif Azad is a medical doctor with Masters in both public policy and public health from the UK and Sweden he holds diploma in urban management and participatory democracy for the Netherlands as well as certificate in tobacco control from John Hopkins University USA. He is an alumnus of the Avon Foundation creative writing course from the UK. As well as heading the network for consumer protection -a health focused NGO- between 2009-2011, he has consulted for a wide range of donors, INGOs and bilateral institutions such as DFID, UNDP, OXFAM, DAI and MSF. Dr Azad’s work has spanned UK, the EU, The Middle East and Asia. His work has featured in the Guardian, War and Peace Reporting, Index on Censorship, the BBC in the UK and Economic and Political Weekly and Tehelka, the Daily Star, Himal and the Straits times in the Asian region. He also contributed a chapter to an edited volume Creating Spaces for Freedom published in the UK in 2004 which included literature Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka and anti-apartheid activist Justice Albie Sachs as contributors. He has lectured at Bahria and Air University and Pakistan Institute of Trade and Development on public and development policy courses. Dr Azad has been a long-time member of the British Labor party and work with Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition leader in the UK, on his second leadership election campaign. He was also an active member of the writers’ organization, the English PEN between 2001-2007.

About the Book

This book explains why the works of a Polish poet or Pakistani sociologist must be far more important to us than the concocted tales of a tyrant who only happens to bear a Muslim name.  Thinkers Dreamers and Doers is a compilation of essays written over the years on a host of themes that encompass culture, film, history, literature, society and politics. The author has generously written about those who shaped his intellectual career, emotional growth, and political development as an individual. He has discussed ideas, ideologies, books, poems, cinema, poets, writers, critics, filmmakers, social scientists, thinkers and politicians. However, there is no disarray in the overall content. This book confronts the lopsidedness that has crept into the disciplines of knowledge and it succeeds in presenting us a broader picture of what we experience and what we endure.