1. Earlier this month, I turned thirty. The big Three-O. A couple of weeks prior to that, this blog turned ten. I figured I'd maximize efficiency and kill two birds with one stone so here goes.
2. I started the blog at the fag end of my teens, so for better or worse, it has served as a sort of chronicle for the third decade of my life.
3. As decades go, this one has been a mixed bag. There have been a number of truly dark days, the sudden, shattering horror of which I shall not forget till my dying breath.
4. But there have also been moments of such absolute, sunlit perfection that the passage of years has not dimmed their glow one bit. Most of these days have gone undocumented because of my perverse habit of keeping my sorrows public and the joys private.
5. I started this decade in Med School in Rawalpindi. The med-school years - the first one-third of the decade - fulfilled their basic function of turning me into a doctor and then some. The lifelong (hopefully) friendships and camaraderie far overshadowed the occasional bouts bureaucratic and administrative ugliness. In addition, the Med-school years provided me with one of the BIG MOMENTS of my life - my introduction to Qawwali.
6. I did my medical internship (House-job) in Lahore. I can safely say that very few people would have been able to squeezed as much activity into one year as I did. Despite living there for only one year, Lahore remains my favorite city in Pakistan.
7. Post-Lahore were my by now world famous "Three years in the Jungle" where I cavorted with snakes, dodged lightning strikes, lived in a hole in the ground like a Hobbit and suffered through a telecommunications detox so severe that the sight of a phone was almost alien to me by the time I had left. I can only summarize the three years by saying that they were not un-enjoyable times.
8. After three years of a congealed existence, the next two years were spent being shaken, rattled and rolled all over the country; from the deserts of Southern Punjab to the frozen far north to the unwelcoming western borders.
9. As if to complete the circle, the end of the second decade of my life sees me back where I started it, Rawalpindi. In another strange coincidence, I am once again engaged in an education of the medical persuasion; a specialty residency this time, and I'm once again surrounded by (almost) the entire bunch of friends and associates from my Med-school days.
10. In an effort to revisit (and repair) the memories of the last ten years of the blog, I've tried to resurrect all the dead links and remove all the horrible coding errors. Everything works (for now) and everything's pretty much the way I wanted it to be. In a happy coincidence, that also applies to me as I enter my thirties.
Cheers !!
2. I started the blog at the fag end of my teens, so for better or worse, it has served as a sort of chronicle for the third decade of my life.
3. As decades go, this one has been a mixed bag. There have been a number of truly dark days, the sudden, shattering horror of which I shall not forget till my dying breath.
4. But there have also been moments of such absolute, sunlit perfection that the passage of years has not dimmed their glow one bit. Most of these days have gone undocumented because of my perverse habit of keeping my sorrows public and the joys private.
5. I started this decade in Med School in Rawalpindi. The med-school years - the first one-third of the decade - fulfilled their basic function of turning me into a doctor and then some. The lifelong (hopefully) friendships and camaraderie far overshadowed the occasional bouts bureaucratic and administrative ugliness. In addition, the Med-school years provided me with one of the BIG MOMENTS of my life - my introduction to Qawwali.
6. I did my medical internship (House-job) in Lahore. I can safely say that very few people would have been able to squeezed as much activity into one year as I did. Despite living there for only one year, Lahore remains my favorite city in Pakistan.
7. Post-Lahore were my by now world famous "Three years in the Jungle" where I cavorted with snakes, dodged lightning strikes, lived in a hole in the ground like a Hobbit and suffered through a telecommunications detox so severe that the sight of a phone was almost alien to me by the time I had left. I can only summarize the three years by saying that they were not un-enjoyable times.
8. After three years of a congealed existence, the next two years were spent being shaken, rattled and rolled all over the country; from the deserts of Southern Punjab to the frozen far north to the unwelcoming western borders.
9. As if to complete the circle, the end of the second decade of my life sees me back where I started it, Rawalpindi. In another strange coincidence, I am once again engaged in an education of the medical persuasion; a specialty residency this time, and I'm once again surrounded by (almost) the entire bunch of friends and associates from my Med-school days.
10. In an effort to revisit (and repair) the memories of the last ten years of the blog, I've tried to resurrect all the dead links and remove all the horrible coding errors. Everything works (for now) and everything's pretty much the way I wanted it to be. In a happy coincidence, that also applies to me as I enter my thirties.
Cheers !!
