Shahzad Talks

 There is a question that every writer, student, and thinking person is quietly asking in 2025: If artificial intelligence can write, why should I? It is not a paranoid question. It is a reasonable one. AI writing tools can now produce grammatically flawless prose in seconds. They can generate essays, articles, reports, emails, and stories on demand, at scale, at virtually no cost. They can mimic styles, synthesize information, and produce content that is, by many surface measures, indistinguishable from human writing. In this context, the question of why human beings should continue to develop and practice the skill of writing deserves a serious answer, not a defensive one, not a sentimental one, but an honest reckoning with what writing actually is and what it actually does. This article makes the case that writing matters more in the age of AI than it ever has before, not despite the capabilities of artificial intelligence, but precisely because of them. What Writing Actua...

It is the oldest question in human history. Older than any religion, any civilization, any written language. It was asked by the first human being who ever looked up at the night sky and wondered why they were standing beneath it. It is asked today by philosophers in universities, by teenagers in their bedrooms, by people lying awake at 3 AM with the particular kind of restlessness that no practical solution can resolve. What is the meaning of life? Philosophy has been wrestling with this question for more than two thousand years. It has not produced a single, universally accepted answer. It never will. But what it has produced through centuries of careful, honest, rigorous thinking is something arguably more valuable: a set of frameworks for approaching the question itself. This article does not offer a final answer. No honest article could. What it offers instead is a serious examination of what the greatest philosophical traditions have said about meaning, purpose, and the human...

 There is a question that every literature student, every bookshop regular, and every person who has ever been spotted reading Tolstoy on public transport has been asked at least once: "Why are you reading something so old?" It is a fair question. We live in a world of instant information, algorithmically curated content, and an internet that produces more written material in a single day than the entire 19th century managed in a decade. Why, in 2025, would any person choose to spend their time with books written by people who never experienced electricity, let alone a smartphone? The answer, it turns out, says everything about what literature actually is and what we lose when we stop reading it. What Is Classic Literature, and Why Does It Last? Before making the case for classic literature, it helps to understand what makes a book "classic" in the first place. A classic is not simply an old book. The world is full of old books that nobody reads and nobody sh...

  Imagine waking up one morning and suddenly, with absolute clarity, asking yourself a question you cannot answer. Why am I doing any of this? Not in a lazy, passing way. But deeply. Genuinely. With the full weight of the question pressing down on you. You go to work. You eat your meals. You make your plans. You follow the routines that structure your days. And yet, for a moment, the whole edifice becomes transparent, and you can see that none of it rests on any foundation you can name. This is what Albert Camus called the absurd. And he spent his life arguing that it is not a problem to be solved, a crisis to be overcome, or a darkness to be escaped. It is the fundamental condition of human existence. And once you truly face it, something remarkable becomes possible. Who Was Albert Camus? Albert Camus was a French Algerian writer, philosopher, and journalist born in 1913 in what is now Algeria. He grew up in poverty, lost his father in the First World War before he was a y...

  We live in the loudest era in human history. Every moment is filled with something: a notification, a podcast, a playlist, a scroll through an endless feed of other people's words and opinions. Silence has become almost contraband. We fill it compulsively, anxiously, as if stillness itself were a problem to be solved. And yet silence is one of the most powerful forces in human communication. It shapes conversations, carries emotional weight, reveals what language conceals, and communicates truths that words are simply not equipped to deliver. What do we say when we say nothing? Far more than most of us realise. The Language of the Unsaid Linguists and communication scholars have long recognised that meaning is not carried by words alone. Tone, gesture, timing, and proximity all of these shape what is actually communicated between people. But silence occupies a unique and underexplored position in this ecology of meaning. Silence is not the absence of communication. It is ...

  Some books entertain. Some books educate. And then some books reach into your chest, pull out something you have been hiding from yourself, and hold it up to the light. Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground , published in 1864, belongs to the third category. It is not a comfortable read. It is not meant to be. It is one of the most psychologically raw, philosophically challenging, and disturbingly recognisable pieces of literature ever written, and more than 160 years after its publication, it feels more relevant than ever. What Is Notes from the Underground? Notes from the Underground is a short novel, more of a novella, really narrated entirely by a character known only as the Underground Man. He is a retired civil servant living alone in St. Petersburg, bitter, intelligent, self-contradictory, and profoundly alienated from the world around him. The book is divided into two parts. The first, Underground , is essentially a philosophical monologue in which the na...

  What if everything you were told was just a story? Everyone has heard the word. Few can explain it. And almost nobody agrees on what it actually means. Postmodernism is one of those ideas that gets thrown around in university lectures, political arguments, and late-night debates, usually by people who are either deeply passionate about it or deeply suspicious of it. It has been blamed for everything from the collapse of objective truth to the rise of identity politics. It has been credited with liberating art, literature, and philosophy from suffocating traditions. So what exactly is postmodernism? Where did it come from? And why does it still matter in the world we live in today? Let us break it down, simply, honestly, and without the jargon. First, What Was Modernism? To understand postmodernism, you need to understand what came before it. Modernism was the intellectual and cultural movement that dominated the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It was built on a bold,...