Report: Thinkers' Club Session 8

Session # 8
Date: 28th September, 2014
Attended by: 14 participants
Report Written by: Fatima Salman

Today’s session was a lot more fun and interesting than the previous ones. We started with a round of names, although there were no new members. Then, we began our discussion.

Two words were written on the board; Fashion and Beauty. We discussed on forms of human beauty, which makes anyone look beautiful.

Human Beauty

• Behavior
• Smile
• Mood
• Talk
• Facial expressions
• Tone

A member described two forms of beauty very precisely, inner beauty and outer beauty. Inner beauty is being kind to others, respectful and caring. Outer beauty is what we look like. We then discussed about what makes a place beautiful. Someone answered that the Flora and Fauna of a place makes it beautiful. Flora is the kind of plants or greenery found in a place. Fauna is the wildlife.

Then, we discussed on how beauty is different from fashion. Beauty and fashion are two totally different things. Fashion keeps changing, beauty doesn’t. Often, the thing that is in fashion doesn’t even look good, but people are doing it because everyone is doing it. An example is ripped jeans, or keeping hair in spikes. Several people have lost their sense of beauty doing things that are in fashion but do look good.

Our home task was to do some writing or art work on symbols of beauty and symbols of fashion.

Then, Manzar Imam did an activity with us. He said a list of words and asked the class to repeat the words. Then, he asked some people to say the list of words he had said. It was a memory activity.

Then, he told us some of Aesop’s fables. One was about a man and his son going with a donkey and then people laugh at them. Here is the full story.

Another story he told was Who will bell the cat? In that story, a group of mice do a meeting to plan what to do with a cat, which came quietly and ate several mice. A mouse suggests that they can put a bell on the cat so that they can hear it coming. But no one is brave enough to bell the cat. The lesson is to only suggest things you can do yourself.

Then, our last activity began. This was what made the session fun and interesting. The class was divided into three groups. Each group was given a stack of old newspapers and they had to make tower out of it. They had fifteen minutes to do it and the tower had to be taller than the tallest person in their group. It was fun making the tower. All the groups made the tower, but only one was strong enough to stand without any support. Here is a picture of the tower with the group members. 

In the end, there was nothing but a great big mess! But the activity was really fun. After the session was over, several members stayed back and worked with the newspapers. We wrote Thinkers' Club with rolls of newspapers.