How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

This is just part of a story I'm working on. Hopefully I'll get back to writing as soon as these exams (ugh) are over.  It's a coffee house; just another franchise that's about half as old as the country we live in. But this is Karachi and every time a new brand name opens up, whether it's a restaurant or a sporting goods store, Karachiites will faithfully flock to it in droves in hopes of discovering something-anything-novel. This one is no exception. Never mind if the coffee is drab and shockingly overpriced, the place is upscale enough to brag to your one-dimensional friends about. And it has some redeeming points. The parfaits. The ambience. The décor is perfect. If I were an architect, I'd probably describe it as a fusion of the classic and the contemporary, or something equally fancy. There's a wood-paneled wall across from me fitted with a bookshelf housing covers ranging from Charles Dickens to Herman Melville. I'm tempted to go over and c...

I shot for the sky, I'm stuck on the ground. So why do I try? I know I'm gonna fall down. Down - Jason Walker

It's that time of the year again. You know when the semester comes to an abrupt and sudden end, leaving you stranded in the midst of a flurry of notes and handouts at the photocopier's, wondering why your life's become the kind place where exams are always just around the corner? Yes, I'm on my study leave. Again. Well on the bright side, now I've only got 4 more end-of-semester study leaves to live through (including this one), and then I'll be done with undergrad! That's as far as I'm aiming right now. The future should be best left where it is at the moment. So I've been wasting a lot more time than need be. While reading about cache memory principles and bus interconnection structures and 32/64 bit computer architectures, I have managed to finish Season 3 of Gossip Girl (I know, Season 5 is out and I'm way behind), continue working on a story I'm writing, rediscover a David Archuleta song on my iPod, and well, blog. (Okay, so he ...

How can anybody sound so beautiful in real life? He sings like an angel.  I will always love The Fray. Funny how music is so universal. It takes so many colourful people to make up a world; we have different ideals and beliefs and phobias, we have our own dreams and our own unique way of looking at life. I guess in the end, it's just the emotions and feelings that are able to encompass all the diversity and transcend all these man-made boundaries. And music is simply a medium for human emotions. You can be anywhere on this planet going through a shitty time and feeling entirely alone until you turn on the radio and listen to a song and think to yourself, 'Man, this song was totally written for me!'  I know that's why I love music. It translates all the emotions bursting inside of me into words. More often than not, we don't even KNOW what we're feeling until we listen to a song that hits all the notes in there just right. Sing!

I wrote this poem on behalf of my mamu (my mom's brother for you non-Urdu folks:)) in December 2010, for a friend of his who'd been diagnosed with brain cancer a while back. He'd been my mamu's roommate during his graduate years in Purdue University and from the stories I got to hear about him, he must have been a force to be reckoned with. Bursting with life, exceptionally bright; he'd bagged the best of both worlds. He was in love with football and all things sporty, and he was also a brilliant student. He got married, he started a family, but it seems to me that life's got a taste for melodrama. The next thing you know, the doctors found he had a brain tumour. And it only got worse from there. Cancer is such an ugly disease. I don't understand it, it's always the last thing you expect, you always think you're immune to it but just when you're least expecting it, it rears it's head and strikes. His cancer had spread too far and wide to ...

Humans are one clever species. Having spent about two million years on planet earth, I guess we've managed to pick up a thing or two on living. Like how to justify everything life throws our way. If things are going the way we want them to, then we tell ourselves we deserve it, no doubt about it. And if something bad happens, we find a thousand and one reasons to assure ourselves that it was ultimately for the best, or to use Dumbledore's words, that it must have been for 'the greater good'. But the question is, was it really? Are we ever really in a position to judge what could have been better or worse for us when we don't even know what never happened?  The other day, my cousin was talking to me about parallel universes, about how each of us has got a double living in some alternate dimension who does the exact opposite of what we do in the real world. So if I go left when I'm walking down a street, my double goes right in his world. Okay, so as cool as th...

Abbu and me - USA 1994 I'm learning to live with my dad again. As much as I've loved my father, for some ironic reason, I've ended up spending that much of my life away from him. When I was about 3, he went away to America for his PhD. I obviously don't remember much from that time but my mom tells me I used to cry in my sleep because I missed him so much. We eventually moved to the US a couple of years later and basically the dozen years or so we spent there together were the only uninterrupted ones I got with him. Man, did I look up to my dad. He was everything to me, and I wanted to be exactly like him. I wanted to do engineering, get really good grades, and earn a doctorate degree. When my mom got mad and yelled at me, I'd go running to my father. He never hit us and he never raised his voice. Sometime later, he started work in Saudi Arabia and we came back to Pakistan. It's only been a year since he-finally-came home, and it's been the bes...