Abro

  Hello, everyone. I want to start by challenging one of the most fundamental stories we tell ourselves about human history. What is the traditional story of domestication? The traditional narrative is simple: it’s a story of human mastery. We imagine ourselves as ingenious architects who consciously selected wild species, bent them to our will, and transformed them into compliant crops and docile livestock. In this view, we mastered nature in order to build civilization. But evolutionary biologists and anthropologists increasingly show that this narrative is, frankly, too simple. It overlooks a far more complex, bidirectional relationship. Domestication was not a unilateral conquest. Instead, we should ask a more provocative question: Who domesticated whom? As we will explore today, domestication was a co-evolutionary dance—a process where both humans and our domesticates profoundly shaped each other’s evolutionary paths, often without either side fully understanding the...

  Good afternoon, everyone! Look around you. You are the future of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and beyond. You will be the CEOs, the District Magistrates, the corporate heads, and the politicians. Now, let's start with a scene you all know too well. Imagine you’re stuck in gridlock. The heat is sweltering, the rickshaws and chingchis (qinqis) are crammed together, and horns are blaring. Suddenly, a sleek, black Land Cruiser appears, tinted windows, maybe even an illegal siren, and it swerves straight into the wrong lane. It bullies autorickshaws and pedestrians out of the way. The driver assumes the road belongs to his father (road uss ke baap ka hai ). You know this figure. We call them the 'VIPs,' the 'Big Shots,' or the 'Sahibs'. We shrug it off and say: "They are powerful, so they must be arrogant." ( Ameeron ki bighri aulaad ) Right? But what if the causality is completely reversed? What if the very experience of having power phy...

  The Glory and the Glamour (The Success Illusion) Good evening, everyone. I want to start by asking a simple question: If you could choose one moment in history to guarantee future failure, when would that moment be? Most people would say a major defeat, a huge disaster, or a crisis. But history suggests the exact opposite. The most dangerous moment for any leader or organization is not the point of greatest weakness, but the day after the greatest triumph. Our story today begins in November 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal. The world watched in awe. The Empress Eugénie of France steered the imperial yacht through the newly opened waterway. Fireworks lit the desert sky. At the center of it all stood Ferdinand de Lesseps—hailed as “the greatest Frenchman”. He was a diplomat, not an engineer, who had just achieved a miracle. The Scale: The canal sliced the journey from Europe to Asia by nearly 4,000 miles, turning a 20,000-mile odyssey around the Cape ...