F.P. Report
ISLAMABAD: President Dr Arif Alvi on Friday shared a list of his 10 favourite books, out of 35, read during year 2019, saying the purpose was to encourage reading habit among people of the country. “Despite tough times, being faced by our people, it is only through knowledge that we can break the shackles of ignorance and misery,” the president wrote in a tweet which he termed as “the most dear” among his other tweets. Dr Alvi expressed gratitude towards his late mother “for instilling this habit to read and learn”. “It is the responsibility of parents, then of society to appreciate the need, and finally for the government to ensure access,” the president said.
The serial-wise list includes names of books with brief description in brackets by President Alvi as under:
1) Tajalli by Shah Balighuddin Ahmed (a good collection of Hadith and stories from Islamic history);
2) Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab (We in Pakistan must understand and quickly adapt to this new era);
3) AI Superpowers – China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order by Kai Fu Lee (The epic battle to become leaders in Artificial Intelligence);
4) Deep Medicine by Eric Topol (On the paradigm shift that is taking place in health, an era of digital learning, emerging symbiotic relationship between human body, data and computers);
5) The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross (The kind of jobs that will be available in future and how we should prepare for that);
6) Beyond Weird by Philip Ball (On quantum physics, quantum superposition, a multi-dimensional universe and quantum computers);
7) Who Rules the World? by Noam Chomsky (On U.S. as superpower, its history of hegemony and neo-colonialism); 8) Brief Answers to Big Questions by Stephen Hawkings (On science, philosophy and on future of mankind with strong fear that the human race may not survive);
9) Factfulness by Hans Rosling (On our tendency to accept fake, bad or alarming news. A serious threat to society); and 10) The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (On when we are exactly at the point of change as we in Pakistan are today).
