It seems obvious that knowledge is more powerful than ignorance, that facts are preferable to fallacy, and that truth is a matter of patient empirical investigation.

One late night in August 2008 I was enjoying dinner at the home of a college friend in Tehran when I received a worried phone call from my research assistant. Mehdi was breathless and wanted to know if I was ok.

I’m writing this sitting alone on the eighth floor of the Can of Ham. You may have guessed, even if you don’t keep up with the vernacular names of the latest office towers to sprout in the City of London, that yes, it’s a building.

This is a history of forgetting, of my father’s unravelling mind, the memories blanketed by a fog of emptiness, but also of the willed forgetting that each generation of Turkish Cypriots have enacted, erasing and retelling the path as they attempt to forge a new identity that will enable them to survive as a community.

Poems by Miran Gulzar.

Jagadish Vasudev, better known as Sadhguru, is an Indian spiritual guru of international renown. If you listen to him enough times – as I have – you come away with the impression that spirituality is the only sensible alternative to the regressive and old-fashioned belief in religion.