The Hussaini Suspension Bridge: A precarious rope bridge in Northern Pakistan — Joy rides are not for me. Joy rides do not give me joy — they give me nausea. But if you ask me to bungee jump from a steep cliff face or zip line from one mountain ridge to another or cross one of the most dangerous bridges in the…

A Young Astronomer’s Dreams — I am the wide-eyed child who scales the rooftops to reach the skies. The rafters tremble beneath my feet; I am engulfed by mist and city lights. Where have all the stars gone? I am the lone traveller who follows the constellations to strange lands. …

What the media won’t show you about Pakistan’s Northern areas — When I first came to Pakistan for my undergraduate degree, I knew nothing about how breathtaking its landscapes were. I, like most people, was fed the usual propaganda from the media — that Pakistan was…

The fantasies of a university student learning to live away from home — After a whole year spent withering away in my bed, consuming books mindlessly just to feel something in the middle of a pandemic, and unconsciously blocking off all thoughts of my future, receiving the acceptance letter to study at one of the most prestigious universities in Pakistan jolted me awake…

Up the winding stairs of Sri Lanka’s Ambuluwawa Tower — I went home for the first time in two years during the summer of 2022, with a wanderlust not easily quenched, having come to the painful realisation that I had, in fact, explored very little of my home country. Sri Lanka: a small breathtaking island shaped like a teardrop off…

How an age-old question spanning centuries was answered by a poet — At first glance, the question seems trivial. The night sky is dark because there is no sun to give off light — and that’s obvious. …

This is how the vibrant nebulae and galaxies will look like if we venture into the cosmos — In our mind’s eye, the universe is strikingly beautiful; it is breathtaking — an image no less accentuated by the fact that the recent photographs released by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) were even more stunning. Astronomy enthusiasts spent hours dissecting every image, finding remarkable features, discussing with the…

A warning for physics students and science enthusiasts — There are things that are cemented facts in our subconscious. There are things we take to be true without question — things that are ingrained into our very beings that we cannot possibly imagine them to be otherwise. When we dive into science as students, we are taught what we…

Where are all the aliens? Is the cat alive or dead? Which twin is older? — Physics, for most of us, has always been about solving numerical problems and analyzing questions that are light years away from what we’ve actually been taught. How often do we truly look at the world around us and try to figure out the mechanisms behind ordinary phenomena? How often do…