How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

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...