Nida Farid
Author Website
Today, I am excited to introduce you to the main characters of my book, “The Extraordinary Life of Riz”. You may have noticed them on the book cover, too. The illustrations are by my sister, Sama N. Izhar, who is an animator in her day job, and has worked on countless animated movies and TV shows. 🙂First, let’s meet Riz. After learning about his parents’ story from his Uncle Qasim, Riz has always stayed away from the females of his species. He is happy as long as he has Uncle Qasim and Big Al by his side. But deep down,…
Today I am very excited to reveal the final book cover for “The Extraordinary Life of Riz.” You may have already seen this in some of my social media posts. But if not, I wanted to inform you of the progress in this blog, as well. Thank you to all of you who voted in the poll for the book cover contest. You made the decision very very clear for me. 🙂 Here’s another view of the cover, which includes the back cover and the description. Hasn’t the designer, @anja.arho, done an amazing job? The character illustrations are by the…
When I lived in the US, everything was “awesome” and “amazing” and “perfect” and “mind-blowing” and “incredible”. Or it was “awful”, “horrendous”, “criminal”, “terrible”, etc. “It’s fine” meant that one didn’t really like something. Even saying “it’s good” meant it wasn’t good enough for one’s standards. It took a stint in Europe to start tempering and measuring my words. “Good” finally became good again. “It’s fine” started to mean “I’m comfortable. Don’t worry about it”. It came as a shock that complaining about my food was considered bad manners, unless there was something horribly wrong with it. “Horribly wrong” by…
The car rolled over the hill, and a hundred shades of green unfolded before her. Her heart and breath stopped. Every part of her body was focused on the view before her. The valley below could be called agricultural land by those without a heart. But there would be very few who could remain unaffected by the sight she beheld. Rows of green corn in varying shades of ripening gradually merged into banana trees. Large patches of lush green grass alternated with the corn fields, brightening the scenery. A muddy red stream cut through the greenery, disappearing into the distance.…
A regular dose of awe is good for our mental health, according to experts. Being in nature has always been known to have therapeutic effects, but awe has a separate therapeutic effect from nature itself. It may be because of the humbling effect of awe. We suddenly realize how tiny we are compared to the vastness of the Creator, his Creation and the Universe. We wonder, if in the grand scheme of things, do we even matter. And that allows us to take ourselves a little less seriously. The things we were stressing over just a few moments ago, seem…
The hermit crab froze. His ivory and orange striped pincers suspended mid-step in the air, as he looked at the crow in front of him. The crow continued poking at the bush in front of her, trying to see if there was a dead branch it could use for her nest. Then she went back to poking at the broken branch she had dug out of the dead creamy corals that had piled up along one side of the beach. When the crow finally flew away, the hermit crab continued on his way along the white sand, his perfectly shaped…
The Need to be Right controls us much more than we realize. It affects us many times a day, making a tiny argument bigger than it needed to be. Suddenly, we are arguing over what the right price of a product is with a shopkeeper. Or we are debating the right way to clean the dishes with our spouse and children. AT work, we feel threatened when our colleague says something in a presentation that questioned a statement we made earlier. And then we walk away from those arguments with our heart racing and our stress levels elevated. It takes…
