https://www.facebook.com/101881468780859/

Talha Ahmad, London (2026)

19/10/2026

Every person keeps a ledger you cannot see.
Most advice is given without ever asking to read it.
Above a cash-and-carry on a busy high street, an old man keeps a kettle, a stack of cups, and a chair on the other side of his desk. He made his money long ago. These days, people climb the stairs to ask him what to do with theirs.
He has one habit. Before he says anything, he makes tea. And while it brews, he asks questions.
A young accountant arrives with an offer from a firm in Dubai. It pays double. Everyone has told her to take it. He asks who is with her father on the days he cannot manage the stairs. She goes quiet. Then she tells him.
A founder comes in with a term sheet and a plan to triple her business in a year. Her advisers call it a once-in-a-decade opportunity. He asks who works for her now. The answer is twelve women from the same few streets, on hours built around the school run. Growth on those terms would quietly end the very thing she built.
A man sits down with twenty years of savings and a scheme his friends swear by. He asks what the man would never do with money, whatever it paid. The answer takes the scheme off the table before the tea has cooled.
A young solicitor has been told by every senior she admires to leave her small high-street practice for the City. He asks why she chose it in the first place. She talks for ten minutes without stopping.
And a father climbs the stairs with nothing on paper at all. He has a son who has stopped speaking to him, and a list of things the boy ought to be doing differently. The old man asks when they last ate together.
None of the advice these people had already been given was foolish. Most of it was sincere, and some of it was excellent. On the adviser's own ledger, it balanced perfectly.
But every ledger carries entries that never appear on a payslip, a balance sheet or a CV. A parent who depends on you. A promise to the people who trusted you early. A line your conscience will not cross. A community you feel you owe. Advice that ignores those entries is not wrong in the abstract. It is simply addressed to a different life.
And people can tell. Beneath the words, they hear: I understand your life better than you do.
So the old man rarely tells anyone what to do. He helps them see what they already value, and then helps them pursue it well. The accountant goes back to her firm and asks for the role she actually needs. The founder grows more slowly, on her own terms. The solicitor stays, and learns to charge properly for her work.
Whatever matters most, he saves for the stairwell. When the visitor is leaving, with their coat on and half-turned towards the street, he says one thing. He says it lightly, so it is easy to take and easy to leave behind.
To the father, it is simply this: "Before you tell him where he is going wrong, ask him where he is trying to go."
In the boardroom, the client meeting, the investment decision and at the family table, the same rule holds. Sincerity is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Advice offered without respect for another person's reality lands as a verdict. Offered with it, it lands as a kindness.
Ask before you advise. Read the ledger before you try to balance it. And when you do speak, hand it over the way you would hand anything precious to someone you respect.
What is the best advice you were ever given, at work, in business or at home, and what was it about the way it was offered that let you hear it?

16/10/2026

On this day in 1905, Calcutta mourned and Dhaka rejoiced.
The same decree did both.

That morning, the partition of Bengal took effect. Seen from Calcutta, it was imperial vandalism: a viceroy cutting a people in two to blunt its politics. Seen from Dhaka, it was the first time in living memory that anyone in authority had looked east.

Both had reasons to see it as they did.

Bengal had grown into a province of nearly eighty million people, governed from a single city. The wealth flowed one way.

East Bengal grew it. Calcutta kept it.

The great estates of the east belonged to men who rarely set foot on them. They lived in Calcutta, drew their rents through agents, and spent them in the city. Their dues to the state had been fixed since 1793; whatever the land yielded above that was theirs. They made no effort to improve the lot of those who worked it.

Those who worked it were overwhelmingly Muslim peasants. They grew the jute and the rice, and they paid the rent. In return they had few schools, poor roads, thin policing and pirates on the rivers. They had no voice anywhere decisions were made.

Calcutta had the courts, the press, the colleges and the professions, and its propertied class held them almost entirely. East Bengal supplied the labour.

This was not neglect at the margins. It was an arrangement: one class prospered on the work of another it never had to meet.

Curzon's case was administrative. For a peasant in Mymensingh or Sylhet, the partition was the first crack in that arrangement.

To Calcutta's lawyers, editors, merchants and zamindars, a capital at Dhaka meant a rival court, rival newspapers and a rival port at Chittagong. To its educated middle class it meant something deeper: a deliberate wound to a Bengali nationhood just finding its voice. They mourned.

Eastern Bengal's Muslims had been sceptical too. Nawab Salimullah called the first proposal "beastly." Then the fuller scheme emerged: a province with its own council and its own capital. There, a majority long kept at the edge would at last stand near the seat of power, with schools, offices and a hearing within reach. On the very day Calcutta mourned, Dhaka founded the Mohammedan Provincial Union. A year later, the Muslim League was born there.

Six years on, the decision was reversed, and relief and grievance changed hands.

The Qur'an names this rhythm: *wa tilka al-ayyamu nudawiluha bayna al-nas*, "and these days We alternate among the people" (Al Imran 3:140). Revealed after Uhud, it reads as caution as much as consolation. The day that favours you is no proof of your righteousness. The day that wounds you is no proof of your defeat.

What 1905 exposes is a habit we have never quite lost: we mistake our vantage point for the whole view. Calcutta saw a nation divided and could not see a hinterland neglected. Dhaka saw neglect finally answered and could not easily see what it cost a neighbour's sense of itself. Neither was lying. Each was incomplete.

In our politics, our communities and our families, we still ask whether a decision was good or bad. The more honest questions are harder. Good for whom? Seen from where? At whose expense?

On a Friday, of all days, that is worth carrying into the week.

Before we celebrate. Before we condemn. Before we decide we have seen the whole of it.

15/10/2026

Some of the best parts of my day were never planned.

Most weekday mornings, the school run has an awkward gap in it - one child dropped off, then a long wait before it’s time for my daughter’s drop. More often than not, that gap ends at Chaiwala, with a cup of chai and a few unhurried minutes.

It started as a way to fill time. It has quietly become a routine I look forward to.

Sitting there this morning, it struck me how much has to be in place for a moment like this to exist. Children well enough to be in school. Schools close enough to reach. A car, some flexibility in the working day, and the means to buy a cup of tea without thinking twice about it. None of that is small, and none of it is guaranteed.

Plenty of parents do the same run with no gap at all - straight from the school gate to a shift, a bus, or a commute that began before the children woke. Some would give a great deal simply to have a child to drop off. And for many families around the world, a safe road to a school is itself out of reach.

It is easy to treat these mornings as ordinary. They aren’t. They are blessings dressed up as routine, and the routine is exactly what makes them easy to miss.

So today the chai came with a little more gratitude than usual. Alhamdulillah.

What’s the small, ordinary part of your day you’d miss most if it disappeared?

24/09/2026

Didn't get my usual seat yesterday. Two lovely ladies got there first.

Silly, really. But it unsettled me more than it should have.

That is what routine does. Sit in the same spot often enough and it stops being just a chair. It becomes part of how your day is meant to go. When it's taken, even by the nicest strangers, something feels off.

So I found another window at the Nature Discovery Centre in Bedfords Park.

And the view was better.

A sunny, crisp day. Benches across the grass, full of parents and grandparents with little ones. Older couples at the outside tables, dogs at their feet, chatting over tea. The deer strolling at their own gentle pace. And beyond it all, a view right across east London and into Kent.

I'd never seen any of it from my usual seat. It was always there. I just never looked.

Researchers even have a name for this. They call it status quo bias, meaning we stick with what we know simply because we know it. One well-known study looked at staff choosing health plans at a university. New staff picked up a better-value plan. Longer-serving staff mostly stayed where they were, even though the same option was open to them.

Same offer. Different choice. Familiarity made the decision for them.

Most of us do this far beyond coffee shops. We stay in a job a year too long because it feels safe. We follow a career path because it's the next step, not because we've chosen it. We keep doing things at work "the way they've always been done". Businesses do it too, holding on to what worked yesterday while someone new builds what works tomorrow.

So here's a gentle challenge.

Don't wait for someone to take your seat. Sit somewhere different on purpose. Take the other route home. Ask the newest person at work how they'd do things. Small changes you choose keep you ready for the big ones you don't.

And when change turns up uninvited, as it always does, give it a fair chance. The first feeling is usually about what you've lost. The second look is where the view is.

My usual seat will be free another day. I might just keep this one.

What's a change you didn't want that turned out to be a blessing?

18/09/2026

On Tea, Tongue, and Taken-for-Granted Things

Two weeks in Andalucía, and my family loved every bit of it: the light, the food, the architecture that still whispers of a shared civilisational memory. And yet, somewhere in the middle of that trip, I found myself quietly unravelling over a cup of tea.

Not being able to find a proper English breakfast tea, not being able to speak my own language without a translation app standing between me and the person across the counter. These are such small things. They shouldn't have mattered. But they did. There's a particular kind of disorientation that comes from losing ordinary comforts you never thought to count as blessings, because you never imagined their absence. I felt boxed in, cut off, almost suffocated by it, which sounds dramatic for a missing teabag, but that's honestly how it sat in me.

So we drove to Gibraltar. And the moment I ordered tea in English, and it came the way I know it, and the woman behind the counter answered me in my own tongue without a flicker of translation, I felt like a fish thrown back into water after being left gasping on the shore. Relief that fast, that physical, over something that ordinary.

Blessings are almost never visible while you're standing inside them. The tea in your own cupboard. The language that lets you think out loud without effort. The place where you belong without having to explain yourself. These things go unnoticed precisely because they're constant, until a border, a departure, or simply distance strips them away for a while and shows you what they were actually worth.

Friday carries its own version of this lesson. It's the day set aside for gathering, for gratitude, for pausing the week's noise to remember what's been given rather than what's still wanted. Gratitude isn't really about counting up the big, obvious things. It's about noticing the tea. The tongue. The ground you stand on without having to ask permission to feel at home on it.

Belonging isn't a place on a map. It's the accumulation of a thousand unremarkable comforts you don't have to fight for, until, briefly, you do. And when they're returned to you, even something as small as a proper cup of tea poured in a language that asks nothing of you, can feel like mercy.

16/09/2026

On the morning of this day, ninety-five years ago, Italy hanged Omar al-Mukhtar - a Qur'an teacher, seventy-three years old - in front of the men he had spent two decades trying to free.

He was already past fifty when Italy invaded Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, in 1911. A Senussi scholar and tribal judge before he was ever a fighter, he led guerrilla resistance from the Jebel Akhdar through four Italian governors, none of whom broke it. His forces never exceeded a few thousand ri**es - small mobile columns, striking outposts and supply lines, then vanishing into terrain the Italians never learned as well as he had. Even his enemies described him with something like respect: Graziani called him "endowed with a quick and lively intelligence," Teruzzi noted his "exceptional perseverance and strong will power," and the historian Angelo Del Boca called him the builder of "that perfect military-political organization" that held Italian troops in check for a decade.

In June 1929, at Sidi Rahouma, Mukhtar set his terms for peace: Shariah law recognised, Arabic as the official language, Islamic schools restored, political prisoners freed, Italian garrisons withdrawn from Cyrenaica. Governor Badoglio agreed - and, by more than one account, never meant to keep his word. Italy briefed the truce abroad as Mukhtar's surrender, while working to split the resistance from within: a rival Senussi prince was drawn into a softer, separate deal Mukhtar had refused. He denounced the whole arrangement in October 1929 and rebuilt a unified resistance from the wreckage, at a cost in men and animals his exhausted forces could not replace. Once Graziani took command in 1930, Italy abandoned negotiation altogether: it forced 80,000 to 100,000 people out of the Jebel Akhdar into coastal concentration camps - the anthropologist Evans-Pritchard, working in Cyrenaica at the time, counted 80,000 people and 600,000 livestock - wired off the Egyptian border for two hundred miles, and turned aircraft and gas on a movement one old man had built from a few thousand ri**es and a knowledge of the terrain no invader could buy.

He was ambushed and wounded near Slonta on 11 September 1931, tried within days, and hanged at Soluch - one of Graziani's own camps - on 16 September, before prisoners drawn from those same camps. His last words were the Qur'an's words for the dying: inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji'un - to God we belong, and to God we return.

Libya's own relationship with his memory has not been straightforward. The monarchy that won independence in 1951 largely let it be; it was Gaddafi, from 1969, who put Mukhtar's face on the currency, his name on the roads, and funded the 1981 film that carried him to audiences beyond the Arab world. In February 2011, Benghazi rose up against Gaddafi himself - and the rebels marched through those same streets shouting his wartime line back at the regime that had claimed him for forty years: we will win, or we will die. Three governments have tried to stand in his shadow. None of them fought his war.

The wider Muslim and Arab world did not wait for governments to write him in. In January 1931, months before his capture, Muhammad Asad - the Austrian convert whose Road to Mecca remains one of the most widely read Muslim memoirs of the century - was sent into Cyrenaica by the exiled Grand Sanusi to see the resistance firsthand. He met Mukhtar: a man of average height, powerfully built, short white beard. Asked, in effect, to withdraw while he still could, Mukhtar refused - we fight because we must fight for our religion and our freedom, until we drive out the invaders or die - and Asad escaped back through the Italian wire, five companions killed on the way. Ahmad Shawqi, Egypt's "Prince of Poets," wrote Mukhtar's elegy within weeks of the ex*****on; its opening line still sits in every anthology of his collected works: they planted your remains in the sand as a banner, that rouses the valley morning and evening. The telling hasn't stopped: the Libyan scholar Ali Muhammad as-Sallabi, born in Benghazi three decades later, wrote his own biography of Mukhtar, still in print in English.

Gaza didn't wait either. While the fight in the Jebel Akhdar still raged, the city renamed its main street after him - the market street running from the port through the old city, still being reported, by name, as rubble in the winter of 2023.

An empire with tanks, aircraft and gas needed twenty years, four governors and a quarter of a region's population in camps to finish off a schoolteacher and a few thousand ri**es. What does that tell you about what wins these fights?

14/09/2026

I have an addiction, and I don't want the cure.

Every bookshop window is an invitation, and I have never once said no to one.

Last week it was Hatchards, on Piccadilly - booksellers since 1797, when John Hatchard opened a shop that would go on to hold a royal warrant, host the founding of the Royal Horticultural Society, and stay open through two world wars, closing only once, for Covid. Climb the staircase that spirals up through its five storeys and you are climbing the same stairwell that carried Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and generations of ordinary readers since.

The staircase itself is worth the visit before you have picked up a single book. It winds around a square well so that each landing looks straight down through the ones below it, dark wood railings and turned banisters catching the light at every turn, carpet worn soft by two centuries of footsteps. Look down from the top and the whole shop opens beneath you at once, floor stacked on floor, rather than being taken one room at a time.

I took my children, as I do most times I pass a good bookshop. They disappeared into it the way children disappear into a beach - chasing something they can't quite name yet, delighted simply by the size of the search. An ocean of books does that. It gives a child room to want something on their own terms, rather than being handed a recommendation.

What stayed with me longest wasn't the size of the place. It was the care in it: a dedicated room for rare and first editions, decades of provenance sitting quietly on a shelf, and, tucked into one corner, a small but rich collection of books on Islamic art.

Not every bookshop gets to be two centuries old. We left our last home about a year ago, and the Waterstones on the high street there was one we visited often enough that my children knew the layout by heart. Then one day it was gone - closed quietly, the way most closures happen, and we felt it more than I expected to.

That is what makes a place like Hatchards worth noticing rather than taking for granted. It has survived nearly two hundred and thirty years, but survival is never guaranteed by age alone. It survives because people keep walking in, keep buying, keep bringing their own children to chase something in an ocean of books.

What's the bookshop that did this to you - the one you still think about, or the one whose closing you still feel?

04/09/2026

Its Friday - and a story most of us know, but rarely take past the surface: the youths of the cave, in Surah al-Kahf.

A few young men, with no power to change the society around them, changed the one thing that was theirs to change: themselves, and where they stood. Before they moved, they said it to each other: leave this behind, and take shelter in the cave (18:16). Ibn Kathir calls that decision "the Sunnah, the way of all prophets" - leaving a place where you can no longer worship God, instead of staying and being worn down by it.

There's a principle in the Qur'an that this scene fits inside: "Allah will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves" (13:11). They didn't wait to be rescued, and they didn't stay hoping things would improve on their own. The one thing in their power - where they stood - they moved.

Then, once inside, they prayed:

"Our Lord, grant us from Yourself mercy and prepare for us from our affair right guidance." (Qur'an 18:10)

Think about what the cave actually gave them. No food. No clear way out. No guarantee they wouldn't be found. They knew perfectly well it wasn't a solution - it was as far as their own effort could take them. So the prayer isn't confident. It's an admission. "From Yourself" - min ladunka - means exactly that: not "help us find a way", but "give it to us directly, because we have nothing left to offer."

Two lessons -

One - if something is destroying your ability to hold onto what you believe, walking away from it isn't weakness. It's what these young men did, and the Qur'an calls it the way of the prophets.

Two - whatever you manage to do won't be enough on its own. They did their part, then asked for what wasn't theirs to secure. Know where your own ability ends. Ask Allah for mercy and protection to carry the rest.

02/09/2026

My nephew started secondary school this morning. New blazer, new building - and, if the evidence is right, one of the most consequential weeks of his entire schooling. By the end of this week my own three will be back too, each starting a new school year of their own.

A good education gives a child strong results. A great one also gives them something wider: friendships that last, a curiosity that takes root, a sense of belonging to something bigger than a timetable. A school's real job is to shape future citizens as much as it is to produce students with certificates - and on the evidence, that second half of the job deserves the same deliberate attention as the first.

A national study of over 100,000 pupils across England, published by ImpactEd Group in May 2025, tracked how much children actually enjoy school through the year. Enjoyment scores average around 6 out of 10 in Year 6. By Year 7 they fall to 3.8. By Year 8, 3.2. More than one in four pupils disengage in that first year alone, and the same study found that once a child loses that engagement, they rarely regain it. Every school tracks a dip in maths attainment within the week it happens. Belonging is worth exactly that kind of attention.

That attention is worth building in early and keeping up throughout, not just around exam time. Professor John Jerrim's study of over 81,000 English secondary pupils (UCL, British Educational Research Journal, 2021) found that mental health difficulties rise steadily with age across the whole of secondary school, rather than spiking in Year 11 as GCSEs approach. NHS England's 2023 survey found a probable mental health condition in roughly one in four 11-to-16-year-olds nationally. Both point the same way: this is a whole-secondary-school matter, from the first week of Year 7 onward, not something to park until the exam years are behind a child.

A good academic result is an important part of school life. It works best as one thread in a wider fabric - friendships, clubs, discoveries, small responsibilities taken on and kept - that turns a school day into more than lessons, and a school year into memories rather than only a transcript.

A 2025 systematic review for the National Citizens Service Trust, led by researchers at UCL, found the most consistent protective effect on adolescent wellbeing came from music, arts and sport - ordinary clubs and activities. The evidence base is still developing, and the reviewers say so themselves. But it points the same direction: friendship, curiosity and belonging are part of what an education is for, not extras around the edge of it.

So here's what I'd ask of schools and parents alike this week - alongside the homework diary and the equipment list, not instead of it. Give the non-subject part of school the same deliberate structure as the subject part. A club joined in the first half-term, not left to chance. A friendship actively supported. A question at the door that sits next to "how did the test go" - "who did you sit with today?" - rather than replacing it.

Grades and citizenship aren't rivals for a school's attention. Give both the same deliberate care, and a child leaves with more than a certificate.

27/08/2026

News emerged today that Ratko Mladić has died at the age of 84 in a prison hospital in The Hague. He took his final breath far from the hills and valleys of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the country he so ruthlessly tore apart.

For the vast majority of the world, the name Mladić is synonymous with unspeakable cruelty. He was the chief architect of the bruising, four-year Siege of Sarajevo and the orchestrator of the Srebrenica genocide, where over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically murdered in the summer of 1995. To history, and to international justice, he will forever be the "Butcher of Bosnia".

Yet, the true measure of Mladić’s legacy is not found in a Dutch prison cell, but in the enduring spirit of the people he tried to erase. Thirty years on from the bloodshed, his shadow still hangs like a heavy, suffocating fog over the Balkans. It is a chilling reality that across a bitter divide, there are those who continue to idolise him, painting a convicted war criminal as a fierce patriot or a victim.

But in the face of this uncompromising duality, it is the quiet, unbreakable resilience of the survivors that commands our attention today. It is the mothers of Srebrenica, who have spent decades tirelessly searching the soil for the bones of their children, refusing to let their memories be buried. It is the citizens of Sarajevo, who rebuilt their lives and their city from the rubble of a relentless siege. Their survival is the ultimate defiance against an ideology that sought their annihilation.

His death does not bring back the dead, nor does it magically stitch together a society still scarred by the ethno-nationalism he violently championed. Today is not a day for celebration, but for sombre reflection. It is a time to hold space for a region still trying to heal from wounds that are too often deliberately kept open.

Ratko Mladić the man has passed away. But the dangerous myth that protects his memory remains stubbornly alive - just as the extraordinary courage of those who survived him continues to shine through the darkness.

Talha Ahmad

19/10/2026

16/10/2026

15/10/2026

24/09/2026

18/09/2026

16/09/2026

14/09/2026

04/09/2026

02/09/2026

27/08/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Sponsored

Share

Listing takedown request