by Quinn O'Neill

In a recent advertisement for Nike athletic shoes, basketballer Kobe Bryant gives us some pointers on how to achieve new extremes of success. He reveals his system for over-the-top success before an elite audience, including rapper Kanye West and billionaire Richard Branson, at an event that's like a hybrid of a Masonic ritual and a TED Talk. “How do you know when you're in the Kobe System?” Bryant asks. “Look at your feet.” Naturally, they’re all wearing Nike shoes.

So you’ve got prestigious awards, you’re a Chinese megastar, and maybe you own outer space – certainly, that means you’re successful. But perhaps we should keep in mind that success depends on accomplishing whatever goal we set for ourselves and not whether the goal is worthy or not. Some of the most brutal dictators in history could be considered successful in the sense that they were effective leaders, but they’d hardly deserve to be placed on a pedestal. The pinnacle of success, I think, is achieving the worthiest goal, not the most elusive.

If owning outer space isn’t the worthiest goal, then what is? I think it might be health, in a very broad sense, like that suggested by the World Health Organization: “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” I think this is really the best any of us can hope for.

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by Hannah Green

Everything starts to look like Urdu if you spend enough time staring at Urdu words trying to get them into your head. The script is fluid. Some letters can squiggle tightly or stretch long, sometimes letters stack on top of one another and sometimes they go side by side. It is this fluidity that makes Urdu so enthralling to look at, but also very difficult to learn to read. I’ll find myself squinting at a word in one of the more artistic fonts, wondering if a dot should attach to the loop on its right or the notch on its left.

Of course, the reason that I have these difficulties is that, for me, the language learning process is backward. Someone whose mother tongue is Urdu would have learned the vocabulary before trying to learn to read it, so they’ll know which interpretation of a dot makes a real word and which makes one that doesn’t exist or doesn’t make sense. Urdu writing also only includes about half of vowel sounds, and I ache for the native speaker’s instinct to know what these missing sounds are just by looking at the text.

At the same time, Urdu’s capacity for multiple interpretations, visually as well as semantically, makes it all the more compelling to me. I sometimes wonder at my motivation for learning this language. I had been interested in Urdu since I started to learn about the history of Islam in South Asia, and I also started to learn Hindi while studying abroad in India. (In everyday speech, Hindi and Urdu are nearly the same. The main difference is the script.) However, I don’t think I picked up an Urdu textbook until I saw the movie Dil Se and heard the following lines in a song. I would try to translate them, but I couldn’t do it succinctly and keep the ambiguity that they contain about an unidentified beloved.

Yaar hai jo khushbu ki taruh
Jis kii zubaan Urdu ki taruh
Meri shaamraat, meri kaynaat
Voh yaar hai mera sayyaa sayyaa

The song is Chaiyyaa Chaiyyaa, with lyrics by Gulzar and music by A.R. Rahman. It was a career maker for both artists, and is one of the most popular songs ever written, although I didn’t know this when I first saw the video. The video is a dance sequence shot on top of a real moving train in Tamil Nadu, India. The rhythm of the train gives a soulfulness to the dancers’ movements like nothing I’d ever seen. I still love this song and associate it with Urdu, but I sometimes think that I’m over-romanticizing the language.

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