How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

This song gives me the chills. I guess I end up reading too much into it like I do with everything else. I sit here, day in day out, listening to MCR singing their hearts out (Sing by My Chemical Romance is currently my new favourite song even though it's an old tune), closer to comprehending what it is about life that's evading me, only to forget about it the next instant. And I can't help feeling like I-make that we -have lost our way.  We surround ourselves with smooth metallic machinery, existing on the reliability of coffee and/or tea (depending on which continent we belong to) and branded things, believing only what we want to believe and tuning everything else out. I know it takes a lot of different people to make a world work, and that good and evil are inseparable, and anyway, most of us lie somewhere in the shady middle-ground between the two as it is, but what was this life really about before iPhones and iPads existed and there was no such thing as the i...

So I've been wanting to write on this for sometime now but I've always found it kind of hard to marshal ALL my thoughts on THIS particular subject:P Anyway, I saw a certain ad while watching TV the other day (I've posted it's video below), and it riled me up enough to (finally) blog about something that's been bothering me for the past-I dunno-how many years.  Okay so if you're like me and haven't bothered playing the video, I'll sum it up for you. The ad starts with a rishta scene typical to many Pakistani households; two families hanging out in the 'drawing room' for tea, aiming to set up their kids together, making awkward small talk while the prospective groom sulks between his parents, shuffling his feet, waiting for the girl to be trotted out for him to check out and deem marriage-worthy. Whoever came up with this creative ad had enough vision to include an irritating aunt in the scene who spews out a list of wonderful...

You know what worries me? That post-exam feeling I get once the semester's over and we're on vacation. I just feel so..useless. And confused about what I want to do with my life. I suppose it's because I'm focusing so much on passing all my courses during exam time that once they're over, the sudden feeling of aimlessness throws me off balance:P I hope I figure out what it is exactly I want to do by the time I finish undergraduate. And that I learn to live without the reliability of an educational institution someday in the future.

I dunno why I'm getting that end-of-year feeling these days. It's too soon. I mean, we've still got two whole months to go until 2012! And a lot can happen in two months. Maybe it's because exams are close, which means my 4th semester, my second year of engineering is almost over!! Wow, when did that happen? Besides, it's finally getting chillier-okay, just a little:P-in this perpetually hot city. At least, the nights are cooler and the fan feels irritating some mornings. Winter in Karachi is perfect. The only thing it's lacking in is snowfall.  Anyway, it's been a weird year. It'll probably turn out to be one of those defining years that I'll remember when I'm older. You know that feeling when you're in your final year of school? You're about to graduate and leave your childhood behind forever and you're in the senior-most class in the building which gives you unquestionable authority to boss around everyone else. In that year,...

The best thing about growing up in the Internet Age is that you're old enough to pick out the best parts of your childhood and replay them over and over again. For me, that was Sesame Street, PBS Kids Arthur, and Chris Van Allsburg books. I took a day off from university and spent my afternoon watching old Arthur episodes (which, suprisingly, still make me laugh) and listening to Sesame Street music videos. I also happen to be 21 and counting. : P Seriously, we all need more of this.  We all sing with the same voice, the same song. We all sing with the same voice, and we sing in harmony. I used to love listening to this back then, but I never understood how powerful its message was until now. Maybe because the world around me seems to be more intolerant than the one I remember growing up in? I remember Chris Van Allsburg's stories mainly because of the beautiful, unsettling illustrations. His stories were for kids, but there seemed to be a deeper, darker meaning l...

So, they tell me there are worse things in life. And somewhere deep inside, I know they're right. Hell, in this century, with countries vying with each other over nuclear warfare, and suicide bombers blowing craters a meter wide in residential streets, merely existing is an achievement. People get divorced, get cheated on, lose their kids to gang violence, have their houses robbed (sometimes five times over), get jailed for crimes they didn't commit. How many families have lost loved ones in airplane crashes? Yes, there's always somebody out there who has it worse than you. But does that mean that if a person doesn't fall in one of the above-mentioned categories, his or her problems aren't important enough? Their suffering doesn't matter because they haven't been hurt enough, is that it? I don't think so. Every time someone hurts, no matter how small, it matters. We're all human, and we're all equal, and when one of us hurts, it is a t...

Let's face it, as horrible as it sounds, religion is considered pretty old-fashioned these days. Fancy words like 'liberal', 'modern', and 'progressive' jump out at me every time I flip through a magazine or newspaper, telling me that there is a need for a reformed, secular approach to the question of human rights and civil liberties, that religion has no place on an 'enlightened' planet. I've got nothing whatsoever against human rights, but I've got nothing against religion either. After all, isn't the whole point of religion to further human progress, albeit focusing more on spirituality than materialism? Anyway, it got me thinking. How important is religion for human society? Can there even be a basis for right and wrong without a religion to follow? Can we separate morality and religion? My friend, Arsalaan Khan, who’s also studying Electronics Engineering from NED has got more to say on the subject. According to Wikipedia, mora...