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...

Last time I tried reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, I didn't get past more than twenty pages because it was late at night and all the talk about magic and rituals was making me jumpy. And I should probably be sued for not ever finishing The Alchemist even though I've had it since February.   But that night, I found a passage in The Witch of Portobello that struck me for its simplicity and truthfulness, and because it expressed in words what I've been trying to say for some time now. It has stayed with me since: Edda (one of the characters in the novel), talking about women 'If a man we don't know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we're quite capable of going to bed with him that same night, feeling relatively in love. That's what we women are like, and there's nothing wrong with that -  it's the nature of the female ...

At this point, I think I should give a little more background on Indus Valley, NED, and education at the university level in Karachi, specifically.      Indus Valley is a fascinating institution. If it squeezes money out of its students, it repays them in double with the amount of experiences it has to offer them. While I was introduced to Physics and Chemistry (again, might I add; I thought I'd seen enough of Physics and Chemistry in school, apparently not) in my first week of First Year of engineering, Indus Valley students went on a tour of Karachi. Most people would laugh this off since Karachiites have seen practically everything there is to see in this city. But my friends got to take a boat ride through the mangrove forests that border our coastline! That was clearly just the beginning. So while my fellow classmates and I attended class after class on analyzing transistor circuits, and water sanitation (that was in Applied Chemistry, btw), o...

One of the great (or terrible, depending on how you look at it) things about being in an engineering university is that you're surrounded by like-minded individuals. Everyone's interested in Math and solving homogeneous differential equations, arguing whether 1st order differential equations are easier than 2nd order (2nd order wins hands down, man). It seems like we're forever talking circuits, resistors, micro-controllers and assembly language and how our NERC projects are getting on. That's all you ever hear about. And the funny thing is, you don't even realize how deep you've been sucked into the engineering whirlpool until you meet up with your old school friends only to find out that you're definitely not on the same page anymore, hell, you might as well be in different books.  That's what it felt like when I met two of my friends from school, who're currently doing Architecture Engineering from Indus Valley School of Arts and Archite...

When I started this blog, I promised myself I'd post as regularly as possible. But then my Second Year, First Term exams came around and I realized just how close to failing I was about two weeks before the first one. There are lots of things I've learned about myself this year, like the fact that I've got a one-track mind, and despite being a girl and consequently being blessed with twelve thinking centers (I think), I'm not very good at multi-tasking. The only thing I was concentrating on the past two months was not failing, which meant that I wasn't thinking much about blogging or poetry or reading good fiction (that's pretty much the extent of my interest in the arts). Anyway, exams are OVER. I managed to do decently in all of them, well, except for Electronics. Which is embarrassing since it's my major. I'm doing Electronic Engineering, for crying out loud, but I'll spare you my diatribe on my awful studying habits since I don't want to pu...

I  close my eyes and I see him so clearly. He stands on the cramped stage; everything about him the image of perfection. Dressed casually-white t-shirt emphasizing his toned arms and faded-in-all-the-right-places jeans, he holds onto the microphone like it's his lifeline. He raises his shaved head, rubs his scratchy three-day stubble, and looks right at me as the opening strains of the song he's going to sing play.  He sings for me. He sings with feeling. All my life I've waited for him and the moment lives up to my expectations. The crowd titters. It's an old song. Not something you'd perform in a concert. Does he care? No. When he's done, he reaches out, pulls me up on stage with one fluid motion and before my thoughts can catch up with life, he's kneeling in front of me on the dusty floor of the stage. His jeans are smudged. 'Classic' I think as he reaches into his back pocket and pulls it out-unmistakably a ring, and asks me to have him, if I wi...

The engine whirs on, but smoothly, quietly, not like the trains back home we're accustomed to. Everything sways in time to the train's rhythm; the seats, the luggage rack, the floor. And outside, it's started raining. In Malaysia, when the sky wants to rain, it opens up and rains with all its heart. My window is speckled with huge angry streaks of water. It's quite cozy like this, watching the landscape flicker past and the sky turn a stormy grey, from the comfort of my seat. The train slowly pulls up at a station. This one's smaller than the others. The building is a faded yellow, plaster peeling off in places, with one central room serving as the waiting area. This must be what the real Malaysia's like, stripped off of all the embellishments that have been used to promote tourism in Kuala Lumpur. Judging by the size of the station, we've stopped at either a small city or a large town. The people grouped around the platform are all so interesting-looki...

I promised myself I'd never enter its premises, let alone actually study there. Friends and teachers back in A levels had warned me about it, and so when I finally graduated from school-Hallelujah!-it was never on my list of universities to apply to. But that's the thing about life. We plan, fine-tune details, and plan some more but we often end up where we least expected to. That's life's sense of humour. Fate's way of putting us in line. (Yes, I believe in destiny.) And so I ended up in   NED , Karachi, Pakistan. The first thing I realized was that I was wrong about this place.  A year's passed since that first day in this university. And during that time, NED has grown on me in ways I could never have imagined. Of course, there are days when I do hate it. Days when I would like nothing better than to get on a plane and beg MIT, or any other foreign university for that matter, to take me. But those have become less and less frequent with time. And ...

I facebook too much. Signing in every hour, hoping for a shiny, red '1 new notification' (or inbox message if I'm lucky)-arghh, I'm going to HAVE to sign in right now!!-is facebooking too much. Feeling like an idiot when you haven't got any new notifications or inbox messages or friend requests or event invitations (application requests don't count in my book), and then logging out in disappointment, vowing to never visit the darned website again (WTH, it's been four whole hours and she STILL hasn't replied to my wallpost but she's had time to like all his pictures) is facebooking too much. Thinking about your next status update while you're supposed to be cramming for your C-language test is definitely facebooking too much. I hate it. But I can't stop. Sometimes I wonder if this is what being a smoking addict would be like. Going to bed promising to never ever EVER do it again, and in the morning you're still strong, but as the hours...

I'm sitting in my verandah right across from that big, beautiful neem tree, anticipating my favourite time of day in this city. Karachi is lovely in the afternoons.  When I'm in my balcony in an ugly plastic chair, or upstairs on the roof where the view is blocked by rows of apartment buildings, leaking sewage and other by-products of domestic life, and especially, yes, ESPECIALLY when we're driving towards Malir (preferably Cantt) or just heading towards the airport, and the sun hits everything in exactly the right place making the buildings look like they’re going up in rosy flames, I feel like I'm on top of the world. Literally. The world can't possibly be more beautiful than this. And all the ugly hatred, all the bitterness of this century is forgotten. I only see glorious, ancient Karachi. And I feel tremendously nostalgic. I guess, 20 years of this life are enough to look back on and I'm nostalgic for each one of them. For all the places I've ever b...