thirty second issue
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4. Bad habits: not your typical smoking rant. Bianca Bârsan
12. Are bad habits really
that “bad”? Sharon Tirado
16. backseat driver 22. THE PUNISHING SIDE madison melton
OF PHILANTHROPY Zareen Chiba
28. Getting absorbed in
my own thoughts Edgardo Schiena
bad habits
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Bad habits: Not your typical smoking rant. Bianca Barsan
Image: http://www.venturecamp.asia/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/7.jpg
Bad habits: not your typical smoking rant.
W
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Bianca Barsan
hen we think of bad habits, most of us tend to immediately mention smoking or drinking too much or even the amount of time we now spend on our newest best friends: our smartphones. However, if you came here to read about these little things, prepare to be disappointed; I am, instead, going to write about those annoying habits which I find more important and which, I think, are more easily ignored or not even perceived as such. In short, here is my *short* list of the bad (or worst even) habits I noticed when analysing myself:
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Not
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. n o i t n e t t a g n i pay
Since we are all busy people in an even busier world, it is easy to get absorbed in our own problems, deadlines and thoughts. We talk to other people about our difficulties in life, our plans, our ideas for the future and so on and we expect them to listen and actually care about what we say. But I have come to notice that sometimes I myself am not able to do the same for them. Sure, I hear them talking and I can make sense of their words, but most of the time I am not actually listening: “Oh, you want to do a marketing course? That sounds cool, I was thinking of doing a fashion course” - and there you have it. I find myself always going in circles from what someone tells me back to what I think for and about myself and my future. I am sometimes selfish, I do not pay enough attention to other
people, simply because I am “busy” thinking about my own self and talking about my own self and making sure other people know about my own self. In short, I think this is a bad habit which I am currently trying to work on, since I have realised karma is a pretty real thing and yes, you do get what you give. So if you want your friends to be true to you, maybe you should analyse yourself from this point of view, too; after all, the world has way too many selfish people roaming around - be the one to make a difference! Also, who knows? You might get to realise you have some pretty amazing persons in your life!
Bad habits: not your typical smoking rant.
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Bianca Barsan
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Image: http://www.venturecamp.asia/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/7.jpg
Bad habits: not your typical smoking rant.
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Bianca Barsan
o t n e h w g n i w o n k Not say ‘NO’. Having talked about paying attention to others, I feel the need to talk about paying too much attention, which is also not the best thing you can do. In the past few years I have been very self conscious about myself and grew to believe that if you are there to help everybody and put them first in your life, then you will have a lot of close friends who will be there to return the favour. Guess what? It turns out that always saying ‘yes’ to everyone’s demands and always being around to do them a favour does not, in fact, make you a good friend in their eyes; on the contrary, it teaches them that you, indeed, do not come first: for yourself and for them, too. From your close friends to acquaintances to your boyfriend or girlfriend, not knowing when to say ‘no’ can be quite damaging for your self-respect and self-worth. Basically, being a
good friend or lover does not consist of you always sacrificing yourself and your time and even your values or priorities in order to make someone else happy, at the cost of your own happiness. Yes, help your friend to move out, give your girlfriend a lift, let that person with only a few items in front of you at the till, but under no circumstances should you abandon your beliefs only to not upset people. Next time your friend insists on you giving them a ride and you have an important deadline to work on, do not be afraid to put yourself and your work ethic first. And the examples can go on, but mainly my point is, do not lose track of your goals and potential in order to always be there for others; saying ‘no’ does not make you a bad person and you do not always have to explain yourself when you do.
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e v i t a g e n g n about things. Bei
Since we are all busy people in an even busier world, it is easy to get absorbed in our own problems, deadlines and thoughts. We talk to other people about our difficulties in life, our plans, our ideas for the future and so on and we expect them to listen and actually care about what we say. But I have come to notice that sometimes I myself am not able to do the same for them. Sure, I hear them talking and I can make sense of their words, but most of the time I am not actually listening: “Oh, you want to do a marketing course? That sounds cool, I was thinking of doing a fashion course” - and there you have it. I find myself always going in circles from what someone tells me back to what I think for and about myself and my future. I am sometimes selfish, I do not pay enough attention to other
people, simply because I am “busy” thinking about my own self and talking about my own self and making sure other people know about my own self. In short, I think this is a bad habit which I am currently trying to work on, since I have realised karma is a pretty real thing and yes, you do get what you give. So if you want your friends to be true to you, maybe you should analyse yourself from this point of view, too; after all, the world has way too many selfish people roaming around - be the one to make a difference! Also, who knows? You might get to realise you have some pretty amazing persons in your life!
Bad habits: not your typical smoking rant.
Image: http://revelwallpapers.net/d/3331754E5931334C75365F55696E6D447959 2D637A705F6575394F6165413D3D/glass-water-rain-drops.jpg
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Bianca Barsan
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Are bad habits really that “bad�?
Sharon Tirado
S
Are bad habits really that “bad”?
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Sharon Tirado
ociety has imposed us with time what is right or what is wrong to do. Independently from where you come from, there are some things that among countries and individuals do not vary and are accepted as “right or wrong”. Since you were a child, most probably your education was mainly based in showing you the differences between good and bad, black and white or what you should do and what should never (really, never.) do. Having bad habits does not necessarily mean that you are a bad person, nevertheless, in our society, the less bad habits, the better. The question is, how did we get to differentiate a bad habit from a good habit? We constantly receive information from magazines, news or television about things like “How to stop smoking in 1 month” or the famous “how to lose weight in 6 weeks”. Also, we have seen things like “How to stop drinking coffee but start drinking tea”.
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Despite of what we have learned when we were kids, there are some habits that might not be as bad as they seem. Also, despite the fact that there are some habits that are not well received in our society, they might even be good for you.
shown in a study by the university of Harvard Medical School that most of the women who drink coffee on a daily basis, are more likely to avoid depression and they have turned out to be more active in terms of physical exercising.
Taking an example, some people think that drinking too much coffee is a bad habit. Although it can be bad in big quantities, it has been
In other words, what we think is bad for us, might actually be good for you. Or in other terms, what you think is bad for your health could
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s/
Are bad habits really that “bad”?
actually be good for yourself. Some people have adopted bad habits throughout years when feeling nervous or anxious for instance. These reactions are maybe not as bad as they seem, since you are actually relieving somehow the tension that you have within your body. In these cases, independently from how you relieve your anxieties or fears, you are letting your body breath by doing another activity.
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Sharon Tirado
All in all, whatever you are doing, do not let society impose rules on you. You decide by yourself what is bad for you. Independently of what society says about certain habits, you should know the only one with the power to decide if its good or bad for yourself, is you. So, maybe you will find out that what you thought is bad until now… might actually be good for you.
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“
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F
or generations, the car has been a fundamental symbol of the values of freedom and independence that the United States for some reason believes it holds a monopoly over. This manifests not only in pop culture from the 20th century and the collective memory of this generation of grandparents, right alongside the Vietnam War, but in the practical realities of cities and lifestyle. When I was growing up in Virginia, people found the need to drive any distance further than about 200m, and as the closest shop to my homeÂŹ was a forty-five minute walk, there are many streets right in my surrounding area that I have never seen from the perspective of a pedestrian. In many parts of the world, a home so far from daily necessities and resources would be considered an undesirable urban location or simply a rural area. In the car culture of the U.S. we just call it the suburbs.
backseat driver
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madison melton
Backseat Driver
“An advanced city is not a place where the poor move about in cars, rather it’s where even the rich use public transportation.” – Enrique Peñalosa (mayor of Bogotá, Colombia; 1998-2001) Madison Melton As I began to venture out into countries that were not my own, I quickly became a firm believer in the virtues of public transportation. Life without a car is misunderstood by many Americans, but I believe that is only because many large American cities have missed the most important factors of its development: public transportation must be cheap enough to be affordable for virtually the entire population, yet it must be safe, clean, and efficient enough to be appealing to wealthier residents who might have a wider range of choices. Beijing, China is one of a handful of cities around the world that have nearly perfected this system. Until December 28, 2014 when a distanced-based fare system was introduced, the price for almost any ride on the buses and subway was .5 RMB (US$0.08) and 2 RMB (US$0.32) respectively. Of course, cars also clog the city’s ring roads, but the extensive public transportation networks make any point in the city centre or outskirts reasonably accessible, and as a result the stations are brimming with equal amount of activity to the roads. Pedestrian bridges that go up and over main streets take the place of crosswalks in many places and keep traffic moving and walkers and drivers comfortably out of one another’s way.
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After spending several years living in places that granted me the freedom to travel far and cheaply—not in my own strange little moving capsule but in the crush and tangibility of trains, buses, and everything else—I moved back to a car culture. Like the U.S., public transportation in South Africa is limited, inefficient, and mainly restricted to travel within and between large cities. I’ve had to adjust to a car’s lifestyle all over again, and the immediate result is that I have become a loud and persistent backseat driver. This habit has several identifiable origins. The first is that I refuse to actually drive. I initially shrugged this off as simply my inability to operate the manual cars that are available to me here and being unaccustomed to driving on the left side of the road. I assumed that once these minor barriers had been surmounted I would happily take up this long-forgotten mode of transportation. Yet six months later my resolve is nothing but stronger. The second cause of my newly acquired backseat paranoia goes back to something my dad once told me when he was teaching me to drive. He always likened the movement
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backseat driver
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madison melton
to cars on the road to players in a fast-paced sports match. A good player—like a good driver—always knows where the others are on the court and can anticipate their actions and calculate the best response. However, no matter how well I could shoot a basketball, I rarely had the opportunity during games because the supposedly elegant, interweaving dynamics of the team were lost on me. So it is with driving. I can keep my eyes firmly focused on the road, but the decisions and actions of other drivers are eternally lost on me. Finally, I have developed a very keen awareness of the fact that driving is statistically far more dangerous than bungee jumping and skydiving put together. Four months ago I was crossing the street in Johannesburg and was hit by a small car. Fortunately I hopped away with no more than a broken ankle, but I can think of half a dozen car accidents or more that I have seen or heard about in just the few months since my own. No, I now see cars not as a symbol of freedom and rugged individualism but as screeching death pods that have somehow tricked the global population into believing they are a legitimate means of transporting oneself from point A to point B.
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backseat driver
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madison melton
The result is that I tend to panic. Not only do I distrust the other drivers, but I tend to distrust whoever’s in the driver’s seat of my own car as well, and my fear is most certainly palpable. I clutch the dashboard, I inhale sharply with each bump and turn, and whenever my resistance breaks for even a moment I begin shouting instructions and observations, “what IS that person doing?” “you should probably slow down coming into this turn, the road’s not as long as you think it is,” “what is THAT?” I’m usually wrong about everything except directions, which probably relates to the fact that I refuse to drive in the first place. As I acclimatise back to what was long ago my “normal” and adjust to depending on both acquiring a car for short-term use and a friend headed in the same direction, perhaps I will eventually reclaim the freedom that comes with the ability to move freely between destinations near and far. Yet I also know that cars are not the only way to achieve this, and people moving en masse in no way diminishes the independence of each individual passenger. In trains and buses the journey becomes an experience with the drum and bustle of communal life, and I believe it is through these mundane connections that we remain grounded in a place, and it is through this security that, at least when I’m a passenger, all stays quite in the backseat.
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THE PUNISHING SIDE OF PHILANTHROPY Zareen Chiba
WITH INCIDENCES NATURAL DISASTERS ON THE RISE, INADEQUATE TRANSPARENCY AND THE INCONGRUOUS NATURE OF HUMANITARIAN AID PACKAGES BECOMES PROGRESSIVELY HIGHLIGHTED AS A RECURRING BAD HABIT OF BOTH PRIVATE DONORS AND RELIEF AGENCIES
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THE PUNISHING SIDE OF PHILANTHROPY Zareen Chiba
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T
he Asia-Pacific region is no stranger to natural disaster. From the Sindh floods and Fukushima tsunami of 2011 to the recent Nepal earthquake, winds, waves and tectonic shifts have ravaged the region and heralded the notion that disaster respects no geographical bounds. The damages are economic, psychological, personal, and are often felt years beyond the incident. And with disaster comes aid, pouring in from global bodies such as the United Nations immediately, and a little later from the little person, perhaps a philanthropic soul who felt he or she could mitigate the damages one tiny bit. Perhaps they send in a cheque, invest in some bottled water and warm
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clothes and send them over, pat themselves on the back, and think no further of the deed. What many fail to consider is the logistic pipeline that comes after that package is sent. There is always a hope that the resources donated will find the victims most in need, but in reality, the laws of demand and supply simply do not work this way. In 1997, the Sphere Project was launched to generate
minimum standards to humanitarian care, and to prevent doubling of relief efforts in the same nature of aid such as food or sanitation. It coordinates relief work between NGOs, UN agencies and donating member states to result in less logistic chaos, and ultimately, less morbidity and mortality. In reality, however, there is little regulation on the delegation of relief aid
THE PUNISHING SIDE OF PHILANTHROPY
among non-governmental bodies, and consequentially there is limited transparency as to how this aid (or how much of it) is getting from the person donating to the victim on the ground. Certain contributing members such as the Red Cross recently received backlash for their China branch in its misuse of donated funds after the Sichuan Earthquake of 2008, with a significant proportion going to staff’s pockets and government
banquets. The tangible sum that eventually tricked down to the victims cannot be confirmed. Money is not the only issue. It is also the nature of relief materials that are booked and sent. In the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in 2004, the distribution and type of aid was not proportional to the damage and resulting deficit of affected countries to establish emergency
Image: http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02540/tsunami_2540396b.jpg
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Zareen Chiba
logistics and rebuild infrastructure. For example, Indonesia received 60% of the 6billion USD fundraised, not explicitly because of the direct damage of the tsunami, but because the region itself was previously already in conflict from civil clashes for almost three decades. In comparison, India and Somalia received a scant proportion of the aid money.
Image: http://www.syntagmamedia.com/wp-content/Tsunami.jpg
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Similarly, in the recent Nepal Earthquake, due to immense volumes of poorly labeled, sorted or entirely inappropriate aid materials flooding into the country, airline companies and local aid workers were forced to divert their manpower to the sorting and distribution of viable aid products. As a result, borders are now closed to further aid packages, and for those that manage to squeeze through, a hefty tax (up to 100%) are slapped onto
| Issue 32 Sep 2015
their net worth by local police. Currently, tarpaulins and tents are exempt from such an “import tax”, the Nepali government’s crude way of informing international aid circles that this is the resource they demand. This is a prime example of local systems, already under stress from poor infrastructure and perhaps inherent poverty, suffering the extra weight of displaced and inappropriate humanitarian aid.
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g
THE PUNISHING SIDE OF PHILANTHROPY
The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, or OCHA, a UN body charged with what the name suggests, has no official jurisdiction on how relief work is conducted in NGOs, and perhaps this is a contributing fault to existing aid failures. Hopefully, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, a new document outlining the groundwork for aid preparedness, and which was adopted in the third UN World Conference in March 2015 will permit member states to better prepare their nations for future natural disasters, to gauge resources needed, and to become more transparent in aid distribution. This article is not written with the intention of discouraging you, the reader, from sending aid
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Zareen Chiba
in times of humanitarian need with good intent. After all, more than half of the 6billion USD of tsunami aid in the Indian Ocean disaster came from private donors. This is a pledge to not act impulsively, to research into relief bodies you hope to contribute financial donations to, and if you choose to send relief materials, ensure that you are providing resources that are truly in deficit and compatible to the cultural context of the geographical zone. Not everyone needs the same food packet.
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Edgardo Schiena
E
very time I get to think about the amount of people that our planet is populated by, I ask myself how this is even possible; 7 billion people, everyone completely different from one another, everyone with their own background, their own history, ethnicity, age etc. As soon as I meet someone new, I always try to concentrate and discover as much as I can about their personality, their habits and their way of living. Above all when they come from different countries around the world especially the ones I know really little about. I strongly believe that from somebody’s personality we can understand a lot of who someone is, especially from their habits, which can be divided into good habits and bad habits. Having bad habits is something that characterizes all of us. All of us during the process of
Getting absorbed in my own thoughts |
Edgardo Schiena
growth develop some habits that differentiate us from other people. It happens to me to talk about people, friends or family, and just remembering them for their bad habits. It is like a mark or a sign that people find really difficult to forget and sometimes it is also used as an excuse to create negative and never ending gossiping. But who can decide whether a habit is really a bad habit? As I said before, each and one of us on this planet has his and her own habits; some people like to expose them to people that surround them whilst others prefer to keep them as untouchable secrets. But do we really have the power to judge and decide what is right or wrong? In my opinion, we all have the right to expose our opinion and people have the duty to listen to them with respect. Somebody can think that a certain type of habit is
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acceptable and others unacceptable. The only aspect that I would like to strongly establish here is that there is no right or wrong. In order to explain my opinion I would like to take myself as an example. I have realized that I have many and many habits that I developed throughout my life. Some of them in the eyes of my mother are habits that in her opinion I should get rid of as fast as I can. For example, my mother strongly believes that I am paranoid and I enjoy spending my time mulling over everything. I have to admit that I really spend a lot of time thinking and thinking about situations causing a negative mood and signs of paranoia. In the eyes of other people this could seem unacceptable, but to my eyes this is a quality that I should preserve throughout my life. Scientists throughout various experiments
have determined that pondering a lot might be correlated with intelligence. I really enjoy spending my time laying down in bed and losing myself in the infinite universe of my thoughts. I like to analyze them, see all the possible outcomes and let myself to be guided by them. I believe that wondering is a strength I have, and it helps to understand and expand my view of the world. It makes me feel alive, it is something that I really understand and get the best out of it without the influence of other human beings. I like to spend time by myself and calm down. Despite the fact that my mum believes that this will be a weakness in my life, I am not planning to change this habit that characterizes me. In many occasions it gives me strength and the possibility to make difficult and complicated decisions, no matter
Getting absorbed in my own thoughts |
their outcome. So to all the people out there that are having doubts and are scared about the judgments of other people about their own habits, please do not panic. Nobody has the power to make you change what you believe is right for yourself. People will always criticize you in many different ways but the most important things is that you keep following what you believe is right. What is strength in your eyes can be weakness for some other people. Always be yourselves!
Edgardo Schiena
Getting absorbed in my
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