Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Moving the conversation forward: Armenian-Azeri dialogue

I just came across a new blog that I wanted to share with you. It's called "Global Chaos" and the name was enough to draw me in. Blogger Yelena (or Lena) Osipova's latest post is on "the other" — growing up in Armenia and being taught to hate "the other" (in this case, Azeris), a group of people whom Lena had never met but whom she had heard so much about.

This post was republished by EurasiaNet, which is how I found myself on Lena's blog. EurasiaNet published the post along with another article on the same topic: Scary Azeri's article "Sometime in my lifetime" originally published by Oneworld: The Caucasian Knot as part of their Overcoming Negative Stereotypes in the South Caucasus project (yay, Onnik!).

Apparently, another new article on the Armenian-Azerbaijani dialogue will appear on Oneworld soon: this one by one of my favourite journalists, Liana Aghajanian of the online magazine Ianyan. Look out for this and other stories on moving the conversation between Armenians and Azeris forward. Great work, everyone!

Thursday, July 1, 2010

On taking risks

Load the ship and set out. No one knows for certain whether the vessel will sink or reach the harbor. Cautious people say, "I'll do nothing until I can be sure." Merchants know better. If you do nothing, you lose. Don't be one of those merchants who won't risk the ocean.

- Rumi

(Thank you to a good friend of mine who reminded me of Rumi with this post of hers.)