5. Tortellini 2025

https://www.globalvillagespace.com/civil-servants-barred-from-speaking-on-social-media/ An addicting platform and application—social media, the world’s most modern loop of connection, influence, and distraction. Every day, millions, if not billions of people log onto their Instagram, TikTok, or even Facebook accounts to chat with their friends, scroll through endless short videos, and learn surprising facts or news about the world around us. Although social media has integrated itself into being a major part of our lives and has proved to be one of the most powerful resources of the century, especially for our generation, the immense power it has to unite peers and strangers, control what information we see daily, and make people hooked on the platforms is undeniable. The power social media has to bring people together, whether they are your peers and friends or strangers you’ve never met, is honestly remarkable. Any question or thought that you have could be immediately sent and recei...

Have you ever stopped to think about how powerful nature is or can be? Nature is all around us, it's the trees, the flowers, the animals and the sky. It's also in the mountains, the oceans, and the desert. It's not just a roaring thunder or the swinging waves, although those are pretty impressive.  I have been a huge gardening enthusiast for a while now. I love planting new trees, growing veggies, fruits, and exotic plants. While gardening, I always think about a tiny seed, which looks so small and fragile but on the inside holds the power to grow into a giant tree that reaches for the sky. Where that tree can withstand storms, provide shelter for animals and even help clean the air we breathe today, that's the power of nature. I mean like, think about a small flowing river. It might start as a small stream but over time (like 1 to 2 years) it has the power to carve another stream of river. That's how nature shows its strength to us, or imagine a volcano eruption se...

  If power were a person, it would be the most dominant force in our lives—the one we can’t live without, the one that controls everything yet rarely gets acknowledged. Electricity doesn’t just support modern life; it is modern life. It’s in the walls of our homes, the batteries in our pockets, the invisible current running through everything we do. And like any force that holds power, it dictates the terms of our existence without ever needing to announce itself. Our relationship with electricity is one of complete dependence. We wake up to alarms powered by it, cook breakfast with it, drive cars charged by it, and work in buildings lit by it. It connects us to the world, stores our memories, and entertains us when we’re bored. But for all that it gives, it also can take everything away in an instant. One power outage, and suddenly, the world feels frozen in time—silent, uncertain, vulnerable. That’s the kind of grip electricity has over us. Like any dominant force, electricity do...

“With great power comes great responsibility.”  I’m sure we’ve all heard that quote at least once, seeing as it’s included in every single Spiderman movie, but in case you weren’t familiar with it, it’s what Uncle Ben tells Peter Parker before promptly being killed off. And every time, the combination of the quote with Uncle Ben’s death teaches Peter Parker some sort of lesson through the consequences of neglecting his responsibilities as a person with fancy superhuman abilities, prompting him to become the vigilante hero known as Spiderman. This quote clearly holds up in the cinematic universe, but how applicable is it in the real world? Now out in the real world, I’m sure none of us have actual superhuman strength or agility like Spiderman, so the most appropriate metric for this “power” that brings responsibility with it seems like wealth. Billionaires hold so much power in today’s world, as they pretty much have the ability to influence whatever they want. Need a favor done? Th...

I have seen the movie Inside Out many times and each time it never fails to leave me in both tears and awe. Watching the five emotions work hard to give Riley a seemingly normal life never fails to amaze me. Although, the thing I always find most intriguing is the memory orbs. The endless number of them that we keep inside of our heads is certainly astonishing to me. These simple yet complex memories that are created every second of our lives hold much influence over our daily lives. Not only do they hold control over our character but also the very essence of who we are. Our memories hold more power than we give them credit for. Even something as simple as memorizing terms for a test requires our memory, and it is its level of strength or power that can determine if we pass or fail. The preservation of bits of experiences that have occurred over the course of our lives determines our identity, no matter how big or small. It forms the beliefs and values that guide us throughout our li...

  The power of performing. I have been dancing since the age of two. It definitely took me a while to find my true passion in dance. I started off doing ballet, then jazz, then bharatanatyam, then hip hop, then contemporary, and now finally Bollywood. I experimented with slow and graceful styles, and realized after several years that my expertise lies in the fast-paced moves of Bollywood dance. I started Bollywood dance twelve years ago when I lived in India and it was an eye-opening experience for me. I feel an incredible rush whenever I dance and even though I normally hate physical activity, the sweat from dancing is always worth it because of the joy I get while performing. I will never forget the first solo performance I did at the age of five in front of hundreds of people on the large stage. I had been practicing for seven months beforehand and it all came down to the final day when I put on my cute red tutu and blouse and performed "Disco Deewane". After my dance was ...

  Photo Credit:  Samuel Corum, Getty Images Last week, on Monday, the United States experienced a peaceful transition of executive power known as Inauguration Day. A president leaves, and another president enters. It isn’t just the government itself that changes, but the tone of politics itself. As we react with mouths agape with the fast-moving news cycles that characterize Trump’s leadership style, I wanted to reflect on the previous administration—the four years of sleepytime led by a Sleepy Joe between two radically norm-breaking Trump administrations. I don’t see Biden as a bad president. A former Senator, he was adept at working with Congress and garnered an impressive record of legislative accomplishments during the first two years of his presidency. Although his foreign policy was mixed , being tarnished by a disastrous pullout from Afghanistan, Biden successfully unified countries around Ukraine during Russia’s invasion and helped negotiate a ceasefire between Israe...

  “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others” - George Orwell ( Animal Farm ).  My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is a children’s show that follows the story of a unicorn named Twilight Sparkle as she travels to Ponyville to make friends. As she does so, she discovers herself and her new friends (the mane six) represent the Elements of Harmony. They go on various adventures to save the world while utilizing the Power of Friendship. The world in this universe consists of the kingdom of Equestria, where ponies primarily preside—earth ponies, pegasi, unicorns, and above all, alicorns who have ultimate power.  Throughout the show, due to its target audience of children, the idea of kindness, equality, and, well, friendship is promoted. In doing so, many of the episodes’ themes include a conflict in order to get to the resolution at the end—the moral of the story. Many of these conflicts include power dynamics and imbalance. In the episode “Hearth’s Warming...

https://holistiquetraining.com/en/news/the-power-of-decision-making-why-is-it-important-in-the-workplace Everyday, we are faced with hundreds of decisions to make, including what to eat, what music to listen to, as well as how to spend free time. Although these decisions seem simple and may even just be part of our usual routines, they have great potential to shape our daily lives, influence our peers, and even eventually impact the society revolving around us. Sometimes, the decision of smiling at a stranger may seem trivial, yet it could bring a sense of connection and comfort for a person who is having a bad day. And who knows? Maybe the stranger will extend the act of kindness to others just because of the quick encounter that brightens their day. Acts of kindness, no matter how small, can inspire a chain reaction of positivity and have a larger impact than we could ever know. A couple of days ago, I came across a social media theory, the shopping cart theory , which suggests that ...

  “Name” (noun) - a word or set of words by which a person, animal, place, or thing is known, addressed, or referred to. A name is a label for which a being is.  With the evolution of the human race came the creation of communication between humans – various speech and language. It is not entirely clear when people began giving themselves titles for differentiation, be it before the development of writing or after. It simply began as a way to identify people. Names were derived from a set that were already in existence and it was short of variety or anything new. Eventually, these overused names began to carry meaning and have more purpose to them than a simple identification method.       Names carry years of history, telling what was found to be of value in cultures and societies of the past. In particular, names hold the history of a person’s family. Surnames, for one, are proof of a person’s ancestors and their existence. Even if someone’s e...

  https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/im-singaporean-tiktok-ceo-grilled-by-us-senator-repeatedly-over-china-connections-5040930  Some of our leaders are genuinely idiots.  One of the main events that sowed the seeds of this idea into my head was the January 31 Senate hearing about social media and its influence on children from last year due to the utterly ridiculous behavior of one specific person, that being Senator Tom Cotton.  I’m sure all of us have seen the clip but to summarize based on the transcript of the hearing, Cotton essentially tried asking the TikTok CEO Shou Chew the same question worded differently over ten different times (Hendrix et al., 2024). His questions all boiled down to the same thing: Are you Chinese? And every single time, Chew would answer that question the same way, that being telling Cotton that he was Singaporean and had no real connection to China.  Watching the clip felt like watching a child ask his parents “Are we there yet?” for...

Have you ever wondered what artificial intelligence is capable of in the next few coming years or how much it will develop in the next few coming years? We have all used AI powered assistance like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa, but these AI models are very limited and can only speak with us. When I talk about artificial intelligence I actually mean things like What Elon Musk just recently showed us in an auction. The Tesla robot which can talk and do human activities and Elon Musk himself said that AI is dangerous and if it gains full capability god knows what will happen. I have always been into discovering stuff related to AI because there is lots to be discovered if you think about it in a different way. It's a whole new era of designing stuff. In self-driving cars it predicts traffic patterns even creative fields, once thought untouchable by machines, are now seen in AI generated arts, music and literature also in medicine, AI diagnoses diseases faster than doctors now ima...

When I hear the word power, the first thing that comes to mind is the musical movie Barbie and the Secret Door. The film follows a princess, Barbie of course, who discovers a secret door in her garden that transports her to a whimsical fantasyland in which the antagonist is a ten-year-old girl attempting to steal all the magic in the land. She does so by kidnapping the mermaids, fairies, and other creatures throughout the kingdom and forcefully taking the only thing that gives them purpose meaning their wings, tails, horns, etc. This whole process is explained and shown in her showstopping musical number “I Want It All,” when she articulates perfectly what she believes power is, getting anything and everything at the drop of a hat. At the end of the movie, she not only loses all the magic she stole but is also forced to clean up the mess created during the final showdown in the castle. Finally, we find out her parents have been on vacation for the duration of the film and have finally ...

While growing up I had heard a lot from not only my parents but also anyone else I came across that I should keep studying as hard as I can. That always confused me and almost annoyed me as to why that was so important. During elementary school, I often saw school as something boring and unnecessary, not knowing the true importance of its value. I was often faced with big lectures on how hard schooling had been during my grandparents and even my parents’ time and so I should be grateful that it isn’t the case for me. These stories often evoked sympathy and made me realize the truth in their words for a temporary amount of time. I only truly began to understand the reason why it is so heavily emphasized as I slowly grew up and embraced a more open-minded view. Gaining knowledge can not only help enlighten individuals but can also further assist them in their everyday lives. Being more informed on the things that may be going on around you is a good way of achieving this. This was someth...

Image Credit: https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/hand-drawn-youth-day-concept_8726133.htm My thirteenth birthday was in March 2021. It’s strange, such a pivotal birthday during such an isolating period. A virus had brought the world to a halt. Economic struggle and political strife, learning loss and loneliness and despair—we didn’t ask for it, but it came for us, and we were helpless. We could lock ourselves in, stay six feet apart, and cancel any semblance of a plan upon testing positive; we could mildly mitigate the crisis, but the crisis would remain far longer than any of us could have hoped. This is the time when I became a teenager. I see adolescence as a time of simultaneous power and powerlessness. It is easy to feel helpless in the face of responsibilities that feel heavy, but I also feel more in charge of my life than ever. I turned thirteen during the pandemic, which definitely leaned toward the “powerlessness” end. But even when confined to my home, so many doors open...