Highlights from my favourite books-2

• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  I didn’t see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt. I didn’t get a chance to answer their question, ‘Who is Malala?’ or I would have explained to them why they should let us girls go to school as well as their own sisters and daughters. The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day. The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing the heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one.
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  There seemed to be so many things about which people were fighting. If Christians, Hindus or Jews are really our enemies, as so many say, why are we Muslims fighting with each other? Our people have become misguided. They think their greatest concern is defending Islam and are being led astray by those like the Taliban who deliberately misinterpret the Quran. We should focus on practical issues. We have so many people in our country who are illiterate. And many women have no education at all. We live in a place where schools are blown up. We have no reliable electricity supply. Not a single day...
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  In Pakistan when women say they want independence, people think this means we don’t want to obey our fathers, brothers or husbands. But it does not mean that. It means we want to make decisions for ourselves. We want to be free to go to school or to go to work. Nowhere is it written in the Quran that a woman should be dependent on a man. The word has not come down from the heavens to tell us that every woman should listen to a man.
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  As we crossed the Malakand Pass I saw a young girl selling oranges. She was scratching marks on a piece of paper with a pencil to account for the oranges she had sold as she could not read or write. I took a photo of her and vowed I would do everything in my power to help educate girls just like her. This was the war I was going to fight.
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  It was decided that the prize should be awarded annually to children under eighteen years old and be named the Malala Prize in my honour. I noticed my father was not very happy with this. Like most Pashtuns he is a bit superstitious. In Pakistan we don’t have a culture of honouring people while they are alive, only the dead, so he thought it was a bad omen. I know my mother didn’t like the awards because she feared I would become a target as I was becoming more well known. She herself would never appear in public. She refused even to be photographed. She is a very traditional woman and this...
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  One of the girls in my class did not return to school that year. She had been married off as soon as she entered puberty. She was big for her age but was still only thirteen. A while later we heard that she had two children.
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  Sir de pa lowara tega kegda Praday watan de paki nishta balakhtona O Wayfarer! Rest your head on the stony cobblestone It is a foreign land – not the city of your kings!
• Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
  

  LEAVING THE VALLEY was harder than anything I had done before. I remembered the tapa my grandmother used to recite: ‘No Pashtun leaves his land of his own sweet will. / Either he leaves from poverty or he leaves for love.’ Now we were being driven out for a third reason the tapa writer had never imagined – the Taliban.
• • • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      In Washington the government of President Obama had just announced it was sending 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan to turn round the war against the Taliban. But now they seemed to be more alarmed about Pakistan than Afghanistan. Not because of girls like me and my school but because our country has more than 200 nuclear warheads and they were worried about who was going to control them. They talked about stopping their billions of dollars in aid and sending troops instead.

    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      Rabab mangia wakht de teer sho Da kali khwa ta Talibaan raaghali dena Farewell Music! Even your sweetest tunes are best kept silent The Taliban on the edge of the village have stilled all lips
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      I think everyone makes a mistake at least once in their life. The important thing is what you learn from it. That’s why I have problems with our Pashtunwali code. We are supposed to take revenge for wrongs done to us, but where does that end? If a man in one family is killed or hurt by another man, revenge must be exacted to restore nang. It can be taken by killing any male member of the attacker’s family. Then that family in turn must take revenge. And on and on it goes. There is no time limit. We have a saying: ‘The Pashtun took revenge after twenty years and another said it was taken...
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      Women in the village hid their faces whenever they left their purdah quarters and could not meet or speak to men who were not their close relatives. I wore more fashionable clothes and didn’t cover my face even when I became a teenager. One of my male cousins was angry and asked my father, ‘Why isn’t she covered?’ He replied, ‘She’s my daughter. Look after your own affairs.’ But some of the family thought people would gossip about us and say we were not properly following Pashtunwali
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      Usually politicians only visited during election time, promising roads, electricity, clean water and schools and giving money and generators to influential local people we called stakeholders, who would instruct their communities on how to vote. Of course this only applied to the men; women in our area don’t vote. Then they disappeared off to Islamabad if they were elected to the National Assembly, or Peshawar for the Provincial Assembly, and we’d hear no more of them or their promises.
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      A famous poem was written at that time by Rahmat Shah Sayel, the same Peshawar poet who wrote the poem about my namesake. He described what was happening in Afghanistan as a ‘war between two elephants’ – the US and the Soviet Union – not our war, and said that we Pashtuns were ‘like the grass crushed by the hooves of two fierce beasts’. My father often used to recite the poem to me when I was a child but I didn’t know then what it meant.
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      I knew as we got older the girls would be expected to stay inside. We’d be expected to cook and serve our brothers and fathers. While boys and men could roam freely about town, my mother and I could not go out without a male relative to accompany us, even if it was a five-year-old boy! This was the tradition. I had decided very early I would not be like that. My father always said, ‘Malala will be free as a bird.’ I dreamed of going to the top of Mount Elum like Alexander the Great to touch Jupiter and even beyond the valley. But, as I watched my brothers running across the roof, flying...
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      In Pashto we love to sing tapey, two-line poems, and as she scattered the rice she would sing one: ‘Don’t kill doves in the garden. / You kill one and the others won’t come.
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      The worst thing that can happen to a Pashtun is loss of face. Shame is a very terrible thing for a Pashtun man. We have a saying, ‘Without honour, the world counts for nothing.’ We fight and feud among ourselves so much that our word for cousin – tarbur – is the same as our word for enemy.
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth tochildren.

    
    
    

    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
      

      Rather I receive your bullet-riddled body with honour Than news of your cowardice on the battlefield (Traditional Pashto couplet)
    • Tuba shared from I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb
    • It’s hard for girls in our society to be anything other than teachers or doctors if they can work at all.

Highlights from my favourite books-1

• Tuba shared from Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world by Prof Mark Williams, Dr Danny Penman
  

  You can stop the spiral from feeding off itself and triggering the next cycle of negative thoughts. You can stop the cascade of destructive emotions that can end up making you unhappy, anxious, stressed, irritable or exhausted.
• Tuba shared from Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world by Prof Mark Williams, Dr Danny Penman
  

  A flicker of sadness, frustration or anxiety can bring back unsettling memories, whether you want them or not. Soon you can be lost in gloomy thoughts and negative emotions. And often you don’t know where they came from – they just appeared, seemingly from thin air. You can become bad tempered, irritable or sad without really knowing why. You’re left wondering, Why am I in a bad mood? Or, Why do I feel so sad and tired today?
• Tuba shared from Mindfulness: A practical guide to peace in a frantic world by Prof Mark Williams, Dr Danny Penman
  

  Mindfulness is about observation without criticism; being compassionate with yourself.
• Tuba shared from And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
  

  A story is like a moving train: no matter where you hop onboard, you are bound to reach your destination sooner or later.
• Tuba shared from And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
  

  Abdullah turned his face up to the sky and wailed just as Pari came skipping back to him, her eyes dripping with gratitude, her face shining with happiness.
• Tuba shared from And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
  

  Nothing good came free. Even love. You paid for all things. And if you were poor, suffering was your currency.
• Tuba shared from And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
• I found a sad little fairy Beneath the shade of a paper tree. I know a sad little fairy Who was blown away by the wind one night