Posts tagged : "Culture"

Kourosh Ziabari - Stony Brook Independent: Cinema is a thriving industry in Iran. It has always been a platform for the artistic dissemination of thoughts and ideas that cannot make their way to the state TV, be summarized in articles in newspapers or discussed in one-sided talk shows. Iranian cinema has been punctually winning a sad and dejected nation honor and pride in difficult and taxing days. It is well-known in our part of the world that good work and reliable products sometimes emerge under intensities and difficulties. Iranian cinema is no exception in being an industry, which has often made progress under pressure, restrictions and limitations. Junk cinema Despite boasting of names such as Asghar Farhadi, even Iranian...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: April is a month in which children have many reasons to celebrate and many reasons to expect to be listened to, taken care of and treated more respectfully, fondly and amicably. April 2, which was last Monday, marks the International Children’s Book Day, which is an International Observance. Then many countries such as Bolivia, Haiti, Zambia, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Palestine and Hong Kong, Taiwan mark national Children’s Day to celebrate children and discuss the important things that relate to their welfare and wellbeing, mental and physical health, and raise public awareness of their needs, including the need for a robust, frank and unaltered dialogue between children and their parents without any...

Kourosh Ziabari - Centre for Journalism: What is Nowruz and how does it exactly work? It's a question asked in many different ways and many different responses have been given to it. To sum up, Nowruz (translated verbatim as "new day") is the name of the Iranian New Year and feasts and festivals associated with it. It's celebrated by some 300 million people worldwide, including in Iran, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Turkey and by Iranian diaspora in Europe and North America, Australia and elsewhere. Nowruz is the day of the vernal equinox and marks the beginning of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It usually falls on 21st March, which is a special day, because in 1970, the first Earth Day proclamation was...

Kourosh Ziabari - openDemocracy: Nowruz has always been a very special occasion for me; a time of year when my heart beats faster than usual, when I'm more inclined to see everything through more romantic eyes. It is a time when I think about the importance of nature and why it should be preserved at the dawn of spring, while food packaging companies, nuclear power plants, oil tankers and coal mines don't agree with me; why families entrap themselves in unnecessary clashes and skirmishes throughout the year to finally use Nowruz as an opportunity for reconciliation. Nowruz, for me is an opportunity to contemplate, to ask unanswered questions and sometimes create some of my best works of journalism and writing. It is also a chance to...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: A Canterbury Tale is arguably a typical example of 20th century British cinema. The 1944 film co-directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger tells the story of three young people who are in search of their destiny on separate journeys. Their paths cross in a small Kent town on the road to Canterbury. They include a British Army Sergeant called Peter Gibbs, a US Army Sergeant named Bob Johnson and a Land Girl, Miss Alison Smith. Inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s collection of stories The Canterbury Tales, the film revolves around the theme of pilgrimage, promoting Anglo-American wartime friendship and collaboration. The coming May marks the 73rd anniversary of the screening of the...

Photo by: Laura Garcia @lauragrb Kourosh Ziabari - The Huffington Post: Christmas heralds the beginning of the New Year for those who celebrate it. There are millions of people who observe Christmas, not necessarily because they follow Christianity. They sometimes mark this occasion because of their cultural and hereditary ties to the festival. But it’s an unfathomable fallacy to say that Christmas is only dear to Christians or people living and celebrating it in places, which are geographically considered to be part of the ‘West’. Even in Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, there are Christians who happily observe Christmas, and there are non-Christian Iranians who joyously join them in celebration. Shops put on...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: The last thing a tourist would anticipate to unearth in Cartagena de Indias in northern Colombia is a mosque in the middle of an unthinkably impoverished, underprivileged slum on the outskirts of the city close to the beach bordering the Caribbean Sea in La Boquilla. To understand the notion of being an absolute minority, one can compare the population of Colombia of about 49.8 million to the country’s Muslim citizens: minimally no more than 15,000! So, for a city like Cartagena with about 1.2 million residents, you might need a magnifying glass to detect the Muslims. Joaquin Sarmiento/FNPI The only mosque in Cartagena is situated somewhere that even many locals residing here for...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Colombia is captivatingly emblematic of Latin American traits that everyone associates with the region even without visiting it: a football fervor that paralyzes life and business nationwide whenever Los Cafeteros are playing; a liquefying Amazonian humidity; and a culture of public sanguinity that hardly ever fades away. The journey to get here is unrelenting. Long flights and numerous stopovers totaling some 27 hours finally took me to the city most commonly associated with the late Nobel Prize laureate in literature Gabriel García Márquez. As Colombia’s national icon, Gabo, as he is nicknamed, set some of his major novels, including Of Love and other Demons and Love in the Time of Cholera,...

Kourosh Ziabari - The Huffington Post: The countdown has started for the arrival of Nowruz. For starters, Nowruz, meaning “new day” in Persian, is a festival that marks the beginning of solar New Year, and is celebrated by around 300 million people in the Middle East, West Asia, Central Asia, Caucasus and parts of Eastern Europe, even though the Iranian Diaspora enshrine and observe it wherever they happen to be, whether in New York and San Francisco or Paris and Amsterdam. Nowruz is celebrated by the people of Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and other countries, but it historically hailed from the Greater Iran and continues to be its foremost national holiday. Nowruz is an ancient...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: The Middle East sits on a keg of gunpowder. Sectarian tensions, armed conflicts, violent extremism and foreign intervention continue to undermine the security of a region long coveted for its energy resources and geopolitical importance. Looking at the larger picture of regional developments, one can conclude that the Middle East is in dire need of peace and reconciliation before the worrying crises send it spiraling out of control. Even though the situation is so tense, the rest of the world cannot claim that it is impervious to the challenges and woes of the turbulent neighborhood. In a region marred by division and conflict, there is a unifying festival that has the potential to bind nations...

Kourosh Ziabari - Huffington Post: Iran's vice-president and the head of Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization has recently given an interview to The Associated Press, where he presented eye-opening statistics on Iran's tourism sector, promising that the country should get ready for a "tsunami" of foreign tourists in the coming months and years. Like almost every aspect of Iranian life and economy, tourism was also hit hard by the tormenting sanctions that the United States and the European Union slapped on the country over its contentious nuclear program. Traveling to Iran had become an aching challenge as many European airliners had suspended their flights to Iran's major cities, the hardline government of...

Kourosh Ziabari: As Iran’s tourism industry grows steadily, the corporate media’s stereotypical portrayal of Iran becomes unpopular and sometimes ridiculed by the Western citizens. With the influx of foreign tourists into Iran, especially from the European countries, more people are getting familiar with the unseen face of Iran as a country with an ancient culture, civilization and several natural and cultural magnets unknown to the world. An Italian journalist and photographer, who has traveled to Iran in the recent years three times, says the media’s clichés about Iran are obsolete and tiresome. Angela Corrias believes that Iranians are civilized and educated people and hospitality is a significant part of their culture and...