About

eastwestmindset is a perspective — thought over, noted down and researched for years — turned into a website.

It sets out from a single concept, such as play, death, silence or shame, and examines it through the eyes of two worlds: East and West, the developed and the developing. It lingers on the different centuries of different cultures. Sometimes it touches history by tying the past to the present, working closely with philosophy. Everyday concepts, objects and feelings that everyone knows are read anew each time, from a different perspective and a different point in time.

The aim is to show how a single word becomes two separate universes across two civilisations, and to tell how those two universes connect to the personal, everyday matters of the world we live in today. I built this site to share with people who, like me, think deeply even about the simplest daily events and ideas.

How do I write these pieces?

I move forward within the frame of the notes I have gathered over the past years about these pieces and concepts. First I think, then I turn it into a sketch. Researching the subject, deciding which themes to take on, seeing where the concepts of the two worlds intersect, where they part ways and where they complete one another — that is the truly enjoyable part of the writing. The goal is not to prove one side right; it is to show how the same word takes on two separate meanings in two universes.

My mother tongue is Turkish. I write the pieces in Turkish and see them published adapted into twelve of the world's languages: Turkish, English, German, French, Spanish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Urdu, Russian, Hebrew and Arabic. These languages, much like the aim of the site itself, seek to offer a different focus of sharing across the alphabets of two separate worlds.

Who is S.K.C., the one writing all this?

I am someone born and raised in the East who has been living in the West for some time now. I take pleasure in thinking and writing about the differences in outlook I meet every day and the points where cultures brush against one another.

I have had the chance to be in places where people from different cultures, from one end of the world to the other, constantly sit down at the same table. I experience how a single question gives rise to entirely different answers in minds shaped by two civilisations, and how that becomes a source of growth.

I am not a cultural anthropologist or a professor of philosophy. I am a curious person who has spent years reading philosophy, history and art, and who delights in connecting the things he sees. This site is what those readings, and years of living between two worlds, have slowly settled into. I also try to write by folding in experiences and feelings drawn from daily life. My aim is no longer to share information — now turned into a commodity by artificial intelligence — but to build a literary site with the flavour of a blog, distilled through human experience.

I believe that tolerance and difference give rise to growth.

I hope you enjoy it. You can reach me by e-mail through the "Reach the Author" section on the site.