I used to play multiple sports
Ones that feel like carrying a cross
The more you play, the harder you fall

They bring out unwilling athletes among peers
Feeding dust to opponents that exist only in dreams
For a Sisyphean match of momentary illusions of esteem

They lure young girls into boxing rings
Where they reserve for themselves all of the swings
Because a busted face is proof of an athlete’s skills

All eyes on the ball and all minds in a thrall
Being a snap drowned in a sea of applause
You only ever score if enough people see you goal…

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a cautionary allegory on the uses and abuses of power. It illustrates a seemingly utopian revolutionary movement, which later reveals itself as a mere facade to a familiar deceptive face. Orwell introduces political concepts in the book through his short tale based on the Russian Revolution. The book tells the tale of a group of animals who rebel against their farmer and establish a community where all animals are free and equal.

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” I first encountered this quote in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals…

The many outdoor games we played as kids prove that we never really cared about losing or failing until life taught us to. We go back and forth in tripping and dusting off. Trying again was a mere response to not getting the results we initially wanted. As we get older, we strip off the fearlessness we once wore so proudly on our shoulders. We begin to fear the cruelties of life. Failures start to break our hearts. It was not as harmless as it used to be when we were eight.

The struggle phases of life often feel like…

Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs is an enthralling and discomfiting coming-of-age memoir set in an extraordinarily bifurcated world of Steve Jobs’ daughter that was once a myth to many. The book paints an intimate portrait of Brennan-Jobs’ empowering tale of overcoming a tumultuous upbringing in a dysfunctional family structure. It takes its readers into the mind of a child that is full of admiration, hope, and longing.

With greasy hands in an old truck, Brennan-Jobs’ mother Chrisann Brennan used to read her palm, explaining that the lines on it indicate a promising future despite her unfortunate circumstances. In her adulthood…

The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life by Robin Sharma is an imaginative allegory that exhibits the often-forgotten truth about personal optimization and how it marries hard work and success to each other. It follows the journey of two lost souls into a productive, prodigious, and influential life they once deemed unattainable, with the help of a billionaire mentor. Being semi-fictional, it also discusses Sharma’s insightful teachings, most notably the 5 AM Club concept.

This book has been a pleasant companion to my gradual transition into a more productive life, which I started as a New Years’…

Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking is a compilation of humanity’s greatest curiosities delineated in a comprehensive and scientifically rooted manner. With his admiration towards the world’s complexities and endless possibilities, Hawking presents both in-depth and general answers that provide his readers with an equal amount of satisfaction and even more questions from when they started his book.

Before you quickly stereotype Brief Answers as a nerdy snore-fest, I want to share how it provided me with more clarity — much like a eureka moment — to my personal biggest questions than I had anticipated. These said…

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer is a thought-provoking narrative on the great suffering behind factory farming and the ethics of meat consumption. The book explores the topic of omnivory across various perspectives that represent dominant institutional responses to our present system of animal agriculture.

I felt that going vegan would be such an extremely uncomfortable transition not just for me, but for everyone I dine with. Enjoying food prepared by a host is a form of gratitude, serving food that guests prefer is hospitality, and eating like everyone else on the table is humility. Stories are told around food…

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking is everything I wish I learned in high school. I know that an element’s atomic number defined its properties and that energy equals time multiplied by the speed of light squared. However, I never learned in a classroom what purpose scientific and mathematical equations serve in my life and why I should bother learning them at all.

It was not until I grew older and developed an interest in cosmology and astrophysics that I began to value equations — the language of the universe. The numbers that put humans in space; the…