Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Myra MacDonald is a London-based journalist with Reuters and a long-time observer of South Asia. She tracks the turning points in Pakistan politics at the Pakistan: Now or Never. MacDonald is best known for her book on the Siachen conflict, Heights of Madness: One Woman’s Journey in Pursuit of a Secret War. Published in 2007, the research for the book took her to both sides of the conflict, on helicopter and on ground. She was bureau chief of Reuters in India in 2000-2003. She then took leave-of-absence to research the Siachen conflict, becoming one of the very few people to visit the war zone on both the Indian and Pakistani sides. She has given presentations on Siachen to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Amidst alarmist rumours that track-two parleys between India and Pakistan are urging India to ‘give up…

The root question of all philosophical inquiry is the big ‘why’ – why do we exist; why are we here, on earth, alive, conscious; why is there anything rather than nothing. Any answer to this why question leads to the second movement of human inquiry/ingenuity – the ‘what’ question. More exactly – now what? So, once we have established the philosophical basis of our existence we must decide what we must do with this. This how philosophy rears, feeds and forms politics. Religion, ideology, et al are all part and product of this movement from the why to the what.

Religion is, however, too limiting and ideology is too religious. It is best, considering our present stage of development, to be more or less scientific in looking for solutions to our major problems. A sort of proto-scientific answer to the why question was 19th Century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Fredrich…