A Father's Letter: How to Travel Light

A 7½-minute English explainer of Imam Ali's letter to his son al-Hasan (Nahj al-Balagha, Letter 31). Source page: https://hekm.co/article/1242.

It follows Justin Sung's teaching style: big picture first, then a mind map that builds branch by branch, then a "redraw it from memory" task. The voice is a computer voice (edge-tts, en-US-AndrewMultilingualNeural). It does not copy his face or voice.

Structure

• Main idea: life is a journey you can't pause, so carry what helps and drop what weighs you down. The letter's two groups of travellers make this concrete.
• Branches: 1. The Anchor, 2. The Mind, 3. Conduct, 4. People. The video ends by linking them back to the main idea.

Files

• letter31-travel-light.mp4: final video, 1920×1080, 445 s, with an embedded English subtitle track.
• letter31-travel-light.srt: the subtitles as a separate file.
• slides/: one fully revealed slide per scene. links.png is the full mind map.
• build.py: makes the slides (HTML rendered by headless Chrome), the narration (edge-tts), and the video (ffmpeg). Each slide reveals its points in step with the narration.
• fetch-fonts.sh: downloads the Kalam and Amiri fonts (OFL) into fonts/. That folder is not committed.
• Narration script: ../../transcripts/letter31-travel-light.txt.

Notes

• The English is an original explanation, not a published translation. Each slide also shows a short Arabic quote.
• The letter has a short passage on women. The video mentions it only briefly and neutrally, as a debated passage.
• Some lines were left out to keep the video short.

Rebuild

pip install edge-tts
./fetch-fonts.sh
CHROME=/path/to/chrome python3 build.py            # writes the .mp4 and .srt here
CHROME=/path/to/chrome python3 build.py - preview  # only re-renders slides/

Temporary per-step files go to $WORK_DIR. The default is /tmp/letter31-build.