Listen to the programme

The Forum, the BBC World Service programme which boldly crosses boundaries: scientific, creative and geographic, presented by Bridget Kendall.

MEET THE GUESTS

Internationally renowned Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua on the ambiguous nature of the ties that bind us to each other, to our identity and nationality, and the power of the ties of marriage.

Neil de Grasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and President of the Planetary Society, explains why planets have such a hold on human imagination and why it's so difficult to accept new ways of thinking about outer space.

Farzana Shaikh, associate fellow on the Asian Programme at Chatham House, discusses how Pakistan's confused ideological past has played itself out into a dangerous present. She suggests that an ideology based on Islam was never going to be sufficient to mould a nation from a society as ethnically diverse as Pakistan and that the rise of global Islam is further blurring the country's fragile sense of self-identity.

Listen to the 60 Second Idea To Change The World

Each week one guest presents an idea to enhance the world. This week it's Farzana Shaikh who believes we live in a unipolar world with the US and its polices having a direct impact on the lives of many billions, and therfore it's time the international community was given a say in the election of the US president.