...On the 'March' of Time

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 !!

...Of Slow Suffocation

You know how when you're beginning to have an asthma attack ( I'm assuming for argument's sake that the gentle reader is like me, an asthmatic) and you suddenly realize that this breathing lark isn't as easy as everyone makes it out to be. There's a specific moment when something tells you that the simple act of breathing in and out is going to turn into an ordeal very soon. The attack begins with a rather melodious bout of wheezing, much like a fanfare announcing the arrival of the royal entourage in a historical epic.Your initial reaction is to tell yourself, "Oh boy, here we go again. Well, let's start by remaining perfectly calm shall we. We've handled stuff like this before, all we've got to do is keep breathing like we've practiced and it'll all be over before we know it" (Notice how the gentle reader uses the royal "we", pretty conceited chap isn't he). The initial self-imposed calm is short lived though, as the wheezing gives way to a weird dragging sensation in the lower chest and breathing begins to require effort. You look around for the trusty inhaler as you try to keep your rapidly increasing heartbeat in check, but very soon you realize that the inhaler was emptied and thrown out weeks ago.

That's when the attack enters its next and more serious phase, the stage where you have to sit up in your chair, place your hands on your knees and actually exercise your respiratory muscles so that you can receive oxygen. You wordlessly star chanting "I'm going to be OK, I'm going to be OK" to yourself as your head starts to spin, your heart beats loud enough to wake the people in the next room and a sudden thought fills your mind with dread,"What if this is it, the big one?". Luckily, that's about as far I've gown down the asthmatic route, stopping just short of the final, more sinister stage of an attack. That's when the instinct for self-preservation that has been coaxing the sufferer to try and keep breathing in and out in the hope of a let-off in hostilities is gradually overpowered by the deadly trio of muscle fatigue, a lack of oxygen and the deliciously narcotic effects of the carbon-dioxide flooding the brain. This dastardly trio gently distracts the brain, telling it "Why do you keep punishing yourself by taking these painful, pitiful breaths? Hasn't anyone told you, breathing's overrated. Why don't you let us take over and have a nice little lie-down? Don't worry, you won't feel a thing". The patient, who has pretty much given up at this point, waves away the final appeals of the ol' self-preservation instinct, puts his trust in the soothing thoughts filling his mind, and floating on a neurochemical high, hands in his dinner-pail.

The fact that I'm writing this is proof enough that I haven't reached the final, deadly stage yet. But I'm afraid that's more or less where I'm headed. Except for the difficult breathing bit, the palpitations and panic bit, the Carbon-dioxide high bit and the general dying from asthma bit. Let me explain.



A year ago, when I got posted to the jungle, a menagerie of horrors awaited me there. Does the gentle reader (provided he's still alive) dare to hazard a guess as to what was the most horrific attraction of this house of horrors? It wasn't the rather diverse, multiethnic and peacefully coexisting population of jackals, wild boar, porcupines, mongoose and lizards; it wasn't the unbearable heat or the stranglingly suffocating humidity, it wasn't the snakes who seemed to act like they owned the place (which let's face it, they did); it wasn't the fact that luxuries like electricity and running water were considered something that hadn't been invented yet and muslim showers were things you heard about in the fantastical stories told by travelers from faraway lands; it wasn't the leaky roof that ensured that a trivial thing like being indoors didn't get in the way of one's enjoyment of the weather; it wasn't the three mile distance between my room and the nearest human habitation, which meant that a simple task like having dinner involved jeep-rides over ill-maintained dirt tracks in the pouring rain; it wasn't the divers wasps and scorpions and mosquitoes and the unknown little insects that managed to send me into the ER at four in the morning with a severe allergic reaction and an unrecordably low blood pressure; it wasn't the weird composition of the water that miraculously accelerated my journey towards possessing a shiny bald pate before my twenty-sixth birthday.

The absolute cherry on the icing on the triple-layer of frosting on the cake was the fact that I had stepped into a communications black-hole.

No cellphone signals. Of any kind. No internet (obviously). No mailing address in case anyone, desperate to get in touch with me (the probability is very low, I know) would want to resort to snail mail. A very shoddy land-line and a complete absence of carrier pigeons. These conditions would have driven any normal person to distraction. For something like this to happen to me; someone who had won the Inter-district speed-texting championship for three years running, who had been kicked out of funerals for snickering at a text message, who had worn off the keys of one cellphone and had bought a rather expensive new one just weeks before being shipped off to Godforsakenland, who had made a career out of texting to the extent that keen-eyed readers would read friends of mine's  texts and say,"Hmm, this text carries shades of Neo-Expressionism mixed with a hint of Musab-ism". Like I was saying, for something like this to happen to me was the greatest irony of fate since Beethoven lost his hearing.

And this is where the rather shabbily assembled asthma analogy begins to emerge from the shadows and clears its throat as if to say, " What with the comparisons between the death of a person from a a horribly debilitating medical condition and being sent to a place where you can't text, I must admit I'm a rather flimsy analogy, but at least hear me out for a second".

When I had landed in the jungle and had taken stock of my situation, quickly tabulating the various drawbacks and annoyances and coming to the conclusion that staying in a communications black hole would be injurious to health, I calmly began devising ways of dealing with the situation. The first step was the most basic, an innate reflex found so commonly in sufferers of my malady that it seems to have been hard-wired into human brains as an instinct necessary for survival - wandering around the jungle with the cellphone held above my head, looking for signals. I was quickly rewarded with what ultimately turned out to be a deceptive sign of improvement. there were microscopic spots in the jungle where the heavens aligned just enough and the matter-antimatter interactions were occurring at just the right velocity to allow some cellphone signals to penetrate the black hole. This initial success was quickly negated when I realized that the signal hotspot was the regular meeting-place of the local serpentine population. A couple of near-brushes with my legless, slithery neighbors were enough to drive me back indoors.

Then began a desperate, rather pointless and in retrospect, quite pitiful search for solutions to the communications problem. A landline connection ? the exchange was too far away. Satellite internet ? The cost would be higher than the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa. Cellphone antennas ? Excellent at attracting lightning, not so much when it came to signals. Carrier pigeons ? A cursory census of the birds of prey flying above my room quickly put that idea to rest. I had to admit I was licked, for the moment at least.

Then came the brief but mild improvement that lulled me into thinking that maybe I was going to survive after all. I managed to procure a clunky old phone-like contraption from somewhere that somewhat restored my contact with the outside world. If the weather was just right and the earth's magnetic axis was perfectly aligned and the sprites and elves of the jungle were feeling particularly benevolent, I could catch a few signals and maybe call home once every few weeks. In addition, I was also able to access something faintly resembling the internet for a few minutes every day, but only I limited myself to opening the picture-less, flash video-less mobile versions of most websites. Still, something was better than nothing, or so I thought.

Pay attention gentle reader, for this is where the asthma analogy finally emerges from its cocoon, revealing itself to be a supersonic jet powered butterfly. With lasers. Just as I thought I was finally recovering from this communications funk, out popped a ferocious lightning storm and fried every electrical contraption in my room, including my phone. In a single flash, my endeavors were nullified. By this time, the beginning of the summer and all its accoutrements - snakes and insects and the lot - coupled with my increasing frustration with my attempts to establish communication, had begun to take their toll. Where once I had bothered the hell out of friends and relatives with barrages of texts and calls, I was now in contact with only my immediate family and one or two very close friends. The regular blogging and Facebook trawling was replaced with hour-long waits for the darned webpage to open, followed by hours more before it would display properly. The  rather tenuous bridges to what was an essential social support structure were getting harder and harder to maintain. And then lightning struck, literally.

Not ready to give up just yet, I gave it one final try, setting up a new phone to replace the fried one. The result is that I'm now in the third, premorbid stage of communications deficiency. I can call home, but I have to endure fleeting signals, long periods of radio silence and frequent disconnections; to the point where it's become something of a chore to even call home. The dozens of other people, friends and relatives, have slowly and gradually depleted in number to just the one or two, for the same reasons. I'm beginning to think if this staying in touch lark is actually all that it's made out to be. If the parties of the second part were eager to communicate, they'd call themselves. And besides, who needs friends anyway, I'd much rather just curl up and spend the entire day in a semi-catatonic state. All the blogs I used to read and Qawwali recordings I used to share and the videos I used to convert into MP3s, slowly they're beginning to feel less and less worth the effort. After all, why can't I listen to my own music and watch my movies and read my books without rushing off to the internet to blabber about them to the rest of the world. I'm sure someone else will do it much better than me. I'll just listen to this 45 minute recording of Qawwal Bahauddin Khan myself and forget about sharing it with anyone else.

One by one, these long ingrained habits are getting harder and harder and lesser and lesser worth my while to keep up. The numbing effects of being incommunicado are gradually beginning to take over and I'm afraid that unlike my old friend Asthma, I might not be able to resist for long the rather tempting overtures of what appears to be a rather unsplendid isolation.

...Winter Has Come

The year that started with so much promise is ending on the worst possible note. The untimely death of my Mamoo, followed in the next few days by two more untimely and violent deaths in the family has left everyone close to me in a state of profound shock and grief. We've all gone through our grieving rituals - the women by that exceedingly cathartic process that had caused Munir Niazi to observe 'Raunaqain hain maut ki/Yeh ba'in karti auratain', the youngsters by quickly and quietly changing their caller-tunes to Na'ats and Qirats, the men by surreptitiously putting aside family feuds for a few days and the small flock of the bereaved by slowly beginning to come to terms with the vacuum in their lives. Many lives have been irrevocably changed, including mine and my immediate family's. One of the effects has been the family's decision to shift from Lahore -temporarily or permanently - to the hometown, Sargodha, in order to help my grandmother and the bereaved family in trying to adjust to the uncertain future facing them.

For a person with my weird emotional circuitry - an unusual combination of empathy and the inability to display it, topped with a propensity for bottling up and retreating into a coccoon while at the same time longing for someone to communicate with - this has proved an especially trying time. The initial shock of the tragedy was of almost cataclysmic proportions - the way the news was broken to me will probably live as the single worst moment of my life and will haunt me for years to come - and trying to find closure has been hard. I cried - for only the second time in my adult life-, busied myself with the complex set of chores and tasks that surprisingly make up the bulk of the two seemingly disparate but eerily similar major events in Punjabi culture -'marna' te 'parna', and having returned to my place of duty after the completion of my emergency leave, actively remained in touch with most of my family back home via twice or thrice-daily phonecalls. Still, the black dog that has decided to camp outside my door refuses to go away, and frankly I don't blame it. Ultimately, Time will work its twisted magic and something resembling normalcy - or a cheap substitute for it - will return to everyone's lives, before the next seismic upheaval starts the circle once again.

Of the many things I'd planned for the conclusion of this year, one of the important ones was a series of posts on Qawwali, something which'll have to wait for a couple of reasons. First because along with everything else, my laptop -virtually the only thing keeping me sane in the jungle- went kaput three weeks ago and writing on a borrowed laptop (like I'm doing now) doesn't appeal to me. Second, I think I've temporarily lost my taste for music. In fact, the only thing faintly resonating with me and the only thing that I listen to, and I listen to it almost every day, is this ....

Maze Jahaan Ke Apni Nazar Main Khaak Nahi - Bakhshi Salamat Qawwal

...Of Five Weeks

It's been exactly five weeks since I came here from Lahore. "Here" being the place I'm currently ensconced in (I love that word) and the name of which I can't mention because of reasons too tedious to go into here. I had thought at the outset to write a journal. I thought I could overcome my natural laziness and get down to at least a cursory habit of regular writing, after all I had faithfully kept a journal for the whole six months I was at PMA. I kept at it for a week, writing in pencil because I'd been told that journals are best written in pencil, but eventually complacency interfered. The journal is now being used for jotting down stray thoughts that'll prolly be collected in a blogpost. It wasn't just complacency though. The fact that nothing ever happens where I am living contributed directly to the cessation of my pencilling. And when I say that nothing happens here, I mean just that. Here's a brief rundown of an average day.

Get up around 8.
Shower and such.
See the two or three patients that come to the clinic.
Play video games till 2.
Lunch.
Nap till 6(aka roll around in bed trying to sleep while fanning yourself with a folded up newspaper).
Go out for a bit of exercise (only the first week)/Watch movies/television shows/documentaries on The Dude* till dinner.
Drive two miles to where the inhabitants gather every night, have dinner, do the day's only bit of socialising.
Drive two miles back and go straight to bed.

*The Dude being my laptop, named after the person who's lazy footsteps I seem to be following, Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski.

It's not just my innate introversion and asocial tendency that's led me to spend my days as described above. It's a mixture of being miles away from other people, lack of access to electricity, the telephone, the tv, the cellphone, the internet and other similar modern abominations and yes, my innate introversion and asociality that's turned me into either a modern day Thoreau communing with nature or a slightly paunchy, mustachio'd version of Rousseau's Emily. Yes, mustchio'd. I've decided to keep a moustache in lieu of a pet and I can say it's proving to be a great companion. Many an idle hour has been spent twirling the edges of said fungus while lying on my bed staring at the ceiling. But gentle reader, I hope you don't get the impression that I'm living in a sort of Kafka-esque morass of utter despondency and boredom. There are distractions, a few every day, that help tide the day over and have helped me while away these three weeks.

There's the weather first of all, a weird abomination that seems to have combined the worst features of the weather systems of the Amazonian rainforest and Hell. We have the heavy rains expected in this time of the year, but they aren't just heavy. Every night it pours, turning the dirt roads into slush and making it impossible to leave the room. And inside the room is an entirely different matter. The drip-drip-dripping roof and the buckets on the floor to catch the indoor deluge were something I'd only seen on TV or in movies until now, but being a quick learner, I can now easily place buckets, mugs and glasses at strategic locations within five minutes of hearing the first distant roar of rainclouds.  It rains every night, usually accompanied by violent thunderstorms, and every so often as a special treat, we have gales that uproot trees and block roads. The rains are then followed by the most oppressive mixture of heat and humidity ever concocted by Beelzebub or whoever's in charge of the meteorological machinations in this part of Pakistan. A dozen glasses of Energile every hour are required to prevent oneself from dehydrating to death. I use to think Lahore's heat was bad until I got here. On the bright side, one doesn't have to worry about hygiene because at least seven baths are required every day if you want to save yourself from turning into human fly-paper.

Along with the weather, the fauna round here are definitely something to write home about. Apart from the usual domestic menagerie of cats, dogs and goats and the profusion of insects both great and small, In three weeks, I've seen jackals, deer, an ibex or two, baboons, wild boar (who seem to roam these parts in groups of upto 50), wild buffalo, hyenas, foxes and yes, that most common animal around here, snakes. More on the snakes later, I believe they require a separate account because of the special part they play in our social life. At least you can say this about the dumb chums, they really go out of their way to socialize.

The insects were the first to establish contact. One afternoon around three weeks ago, I woke from my nap itching all over. I thought a shower'd fix it but it didn't. A look at my arms and legs revealed that I'd turned a pretty pink, and not only was I pink, I had erupted in an effusion of large wheals and bumps. I realized I was getting an allergic reaction because one of the insects that inhabited my bed, taking completely the wrong view of my sharing the sheets with them, had decided that it was time for us to become more than just friends. I hurrried over to the tiny hospital that doubles as my office and got myself injected with the requisite mixture of steroids and anthistamines that ought've gotten rid of the unwanted effects of insect affection. The pinkness and the itching started going down and I breathed easy. But at around midnight, the itching returned with a vengeance, burning up my arms and legs. I bore it as much as I could, then decided i oughtta get a second shot of the medicine if i wanted a good night's sleep. I got out of my bed and immediately felt the ground give way under my feet. I grabbed at a nearby chair as my heart sank like it'd never done before. I realized that the allergy was worse than I'd thought, and when the sinking feeling didn't pass after a minute or so of horrid waiting, I made a dash for the hospital. Barely getting to the door, I woke up the poor nurses (male nurses dear reader, no need to look at me that way). Got my BP checked and just as I'd thought, it was down to 100/60. I got myself hooked up to an I/V line so that I could get some fluid in me and get my BP up, dozing off to an uneasy sleep only to wake up only an hour later feeling that the itchiness and the queasy heart-sinkingness were returning. A review of my BP revealed that it'd gone down to 80/40 and we'd officially entered scary territory. That's when I did one of the most surreal things I've ever done. Being the only doctor at the hospital, I made the decision that the patient's condition was now beyond my capabilities and that he should be evacuated to the nearest medical centre. I wrote myself a prescription accordingly and called the ambulance, which came a half an hour later and by 5am I was safely settled in a medical ward. The happy result being that my nurses now happily tell everyone who cares to listen, "You'll never guess who was the first serious patient doctor sahab referred? Himself!!"

When I got back, the first thing I did was to get a mosquito net and fix it onto my bed. I mean I was flattered by all the interest the insects were showing, but you have to draw the line somewhere, if you know what I mean. That's when the goats came into my life. There's a herd of mountain goats that can be seen prancing around my lodgings, and I hadn't paid much attention to them. That is until it was, as the writer says, a dark and stormy night. My room has tiny courtyard in front of it, with a roof large enogh to barely keep out the rain. I was sleeping while the tempest raged around me when I suddenly felt he bed shake. For the first week after I'd gotten here, I was plagued by almost nightly nightmares, probably a subconscious response to the change in surroundings. I thought this too was one of theose nightmares when suddenly, my senses were assailed by a curious smell. I thought, I've never had olfactory nightmares, what gives? Waking up and looking about, I realized that I was surrounded by goats, hundreds of them. They were all around the bed, they were under the bed, and one of the more adventurous ones was trying to get into the bed. They were fidgety, loud and smelly. Especially smelly. Still sleepy, I tried to figure out the reason of this hairy convention that had suddenly decided to congregate around me. I knew it couldn't be just my animal magnetism, and it was when I looked around that I realised that a rainstorm was pouring outside and the animals had gotten in around my bed to try to shelter themselves from the elements. I figured it wouldn't be nice to shoo the poor creatures away into the rain, so I pinched my nose and willed myself back to sleep, being woken once or twice again when one or the other of the members of herd got particularly excited. The goats, encouraged by my hospitality, have now become a fixture so that every rainy night, I have to accomodate a dozen or so hirsute quadrupeds around my bed.

The isolation has had its advantages as well. In fact, if it weren't for the weather and all the animal intrusions, I might've grown to like this place. The locals assure me that I've just come at a slightly importune time and if I'd arrived any time except the months of May-August, I'dve found the place heaven on earth, albeit still one overpopulated with goats and snakes. I've managed to do a lot in these five weeks, including finishing six books, one of which I had started thrice previously and had given up on because a)it's a rather difficult read and b) because there were too many distractions in Lahore. And having finished it, I can safely say that "The Confederacy Of Dunces" is one of the funniest, smartest books I've ever read, and one that has given me two of my favoritee fictional characters in Patrolman Angelo Mancuso and Ignatius J Reilly. I've also started brushing up on my Persian, doing it the only way I thought best, by reading Rumi's Masnavi verse by verse and then breaking down the accompanying translation. I've listened to music almost non-stop, to such an extent that my favorite pair of headphones finally decided it could take no more and handed in the dinner pail. Luckily I'd brought an extra pair just for that contingency (at the time of writing, these too have gone kaput) I've been listening to a lot of Jazz and marvelling at the absolute genius of Louis Armstrong, especially his recordings of the late '20s and early '30s. The mixtape a friend gave me before I departed from Lahore hs also been on constant play, as have been two or three of my favorite Qawwals. Lest anyone fear I've been shirking my duties too much, I must inform them that I haven't been tardy on the Qawwali front, having cleaned up and edited the sound on ten or so very rare Qawwali videos.I had also stocked The Dude full of movies and TV shows because I had a pretty good idea of the amount of boredom I could expect, and I'm glad I took that precaution. I can also safely say that Freaks And Geeks is one of the greatest, humanest TV shows I've ever seen.

My situation here isn't entirely an uncomfortable one, but I'm sure I can surround myself with a more homely atmosphere. That's why when I get home on my first leave, along with the requisite amount of catching up and reacquainting myself with such exotic things as running water and muslim showers, I need to do some shopping. Specifically a television and a DTH antenna. Maybe then I can give the Dude a rest and recapture some of my old couch-potato glory just in time for the football season. Who knows, with a couple of posters on the wall, a UPS, football on the telly and a goat or two by my side, I just might grow to like this place. Touch wood!

....Of Leaving Lahore And Long Overdue Admissions.

When I was in Med School, a yearly trip to Lahore was an almost sacred ritual. For a few days every year, spending a sizable chunk of my meager allowance/stipend, I'd grab a bus to Lahore, happily explore the city on rickshaw, meet the few friends I had there and get some shopping done. Summer or winter, I'd make it a point to visit Lahore, even if it meant using false pretences to goad out a permission from my parents. Even though I had lived a sizable chunk of my life in Rawalpindi and hadn't ever LIVED in Lahore, I considered it my , erm my spiritual home if you will. However, when my five years in med school ended and it was time to decide where I wanted to do my house-job, I was in a fix. My family was in Rawalpindi (they'd planned to eventually move to Lahore in a year's time) and I knew and liked the city, but somewhere in the back of my mind was the voice that said, "Go to Lahore!!"

In the end, it was the advice of a friend - a friend of otherwise highly dubious character traits - who implored me to choose Lahore, that, coupled with my parents' decision to bring forward their planned Lahore move ahead by one year, made me decide for Lahore. Looking back, it was probably one of the smarter decisions I've made in a rather checkered decisionmaking history. After spending one whole year in Lahore, I can safely say that I haven't regretted it one bit. I had come here primarily to do my housejob and that I did. It was the most intellectually rewarding one year I could hope for, even better than what most of my coursemates in Rawalpindi had spent. I got the chance to learn at the feet of some of the best teachers in the country and substantially improve my practical and clinical skills. On the personal side, I was lucky to have two of my closest friends -make that three, with the third a recent addition - living literally next door. That meant I was never too hard pressed for companionship.

The exploring/photographing bug bit me at just the right time as I scoured the backroads of Lahore in search of amazing places. If summer had delayed itself just one or two more weeks I'd have visited and photographed just about everything I'd set my sights on. Unfortunately the oppressive Lahore heat (probably the only thing in which Lahore loses brownie points to Pindi) and my tight schedule meant that I still haven't visited or photographed a few very important landmarks - Masjid Wazir Khan for example. Some other time perhaps. It's also been a year where I've indulged almost all my rather varied intersts. I've been to Qawwali performances by the dozens, watched plays and stand-up shows, attended concerts and conferences, and in what must certainly be the highlight of my life so far, met Yusfi sahab. And I've eaten, by God have i eaten. The extra tonnage that I've put on over the last year doesn't do justice to my culinary exploits. In short, I've lived it up - at least according to my definition of living it up.

My one year is now up, and it's time to leave. I'll be moving to a rather remote location in two or three days, as diametrically opposite to Lahore as you can imagine. Even though I knew that I was gonna have to leave Lahore at the end of one year, that still doesn't make the departure any easier. I may be able to live without the food, the exploration or the 'ronaq' but there's one very vulnerable chink in my armor, one that I don't usually let show to others,but one they might notice if they are attentive enough.

When we were completing our training, a newly graduated psychologist joined us for six months. The poor guy had to spend all day dealing with idiots who'd shout out,"Yo shrink, come here and tell me about my personality." And being the nice guy he was, he'd provide them with a rather detailed and unflatteringly accurate description of themselves. One day, when he and I was alone, he asked me why I hadn't ever bothered him with the usual request. i replied that I pretty much knew who I was and didn't need further analysis, thankyouverymuch. He said he'd still tell me one rather important thing he'd noticed about me over the course of six months, it was that I had a 'dependant personality'. I needed people, friends around me to function properly. Without a proper social support structure, I was constantly in danger of collapsing inwardly into a coccoon. I simply nodded my head in assent and left, slightly unhappy that he had discovered my most important weakness.

And that is the chink in my armor that must now confess to. I'll be going to a new place, with a new set of colleagues, which is something I would've been fine with were it not for the fact that the remoteness of my location might make it impossible to establish any contact with the folks back in Lahore, or for that matter anywhere else in Pakistan. Without my 'social support', I'd be a fish out of water, which is a rather frightening proposition. But what gives me some hope is that I've been in a similar situation before. Five years ago when I joined med-school, I was thrust into a group of strangers. It took some adjusting, but after spending five years, I count that group of strangers among some of my very best friends. Maybe this adventure'll turn out the same way too. I can only hope.

What my two year stay at my next port-of-call will lack in friends, it'll more than make up in free time. From people who've served in similar places, I've gathered that killing time is the most important problem one faces. I think I have that covered. There's the extensive study that I'll have to start in order to appear for my specialization exams, then there's the Truckloads of Qawwali recordings that I've been assigned to edit and catalog. There's 160+ gigabytes on my harddrive that I'll devote substantial time to; so that at the end of two years, I ought've listened to all 19571 songs I've accumulated (a daunting task). A trunkfull of unread books goes with me too, none of them related to medicine. With such ample supplies, I think I'm pretty much covered as far as killing time is concerned. And if all else fails, I can still write.

I'll end here, I don't know when I'll get the chance to write again, so readers can consider this another one of my temporary retirements from writing. Consider this also, whether they can read this or not, a thankyou to all the many people who have made this year the most special year of my life. And finally, consider this a thankyou to Lahore, for being so good to me.

....Of "The Sinews Of The Prose"

"A good historian will remember that the world is his oyster and that syllables govern the world. He will be read if he can carry the people along with him. If he has a perfect command of the language he can make the long sweep of events into a vivid, moving, pulsating piece of prose. Words should come like water bubbling from a silver jar. And each word shall take it's proper place in the sequence and order of the narration, to draw a scene, or describe the tumult of a revolution or the commotion of a riot, or emphasize the inner significance of an event, or paint the character of a personage. The vocabulary is large, felicitous and varied; and the words, particularly the adjectives and adverbs, stand at attention waiting to be summoned to duty. The sinews of the prose are supple and strong. The story spins itself out with unimpeded ease and lulling fluency. The fertility of phrase is such that veil by veil the mystery of events unwinds itself. Long sentences run with a natural effortlessness, with one clause following another in magnificent succession. The sifted purity of the prose idiom merges with the lyrical surge of argument. everything is clear, unambiguous, stark, meaningful. The reach is long, the descriptive power unruffled by the change of scene, the portrayal revealing, the analysis of motives penetrating and balanced, the impact shattering. In sum, a quick, glinting style like a stream over rocks; limpid, rapid, revealing, flashing, sparkling, hiding nothing, distorting nothing, making dulcet music out of history."

Excerpted from Prof. KK Aziz's monumental "The Murder Of History : A Critique Of History Textbooks Used In Pakistan".

....Of A Novel Approach

Stop me if you've heard it before, but I think I've finally worked out a way to cure my (now chronic) case of Bloggers' block. As a friend pointed out recently, this inability to write mightn't be because I'm starved for things to write about but because the opposite seems to be the case.I find myself with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to stories, photos, anecdotes and videos collected from all over Punjab over the past three months. It's the sheer size of the stash and the effort required in sorting, organizing and writing that has intimidated me into hibernation.

After having thought out a number of approaches, I've decided to take an obverse approach. Instead of starting from the beginning, detailing my adventures in DG Khan, running over the Great South Punjab Roadtrip, recounting the trips to Pakpattan and Qasur before finally ending on my recent photographing expeditions across Lahore, I'll take the opposite route. Starting from the most recent explorations, I'll work my way back to the day three months ago when i landed in Dera Ghazi Khan for flood relief duties. Interspersed with these photo-travelogue-rants will be the usual doses of randomness that populate my blog.

I've been known to lose commitment in a half-completed post several times in the past because finishing it would involve straying from what I consider (in my pretentiousness) the mot juste, or would require the extra cup of tea (yes, I'm a tea-drinker now. Yes,I'm ashamed of myself) or the extra hour of headache-filled wakefulness that is the crucial difference between the draft and the finished product. This time however, I'm trying to put some more mechanicality into the writing process. I plan to make a habit of writing regularly, with an aim to churn out one or two posts per week. If the quality(yeah, right) of the posts suffers as a result, I won't be greatly concerned. I don't mind a few sputters and stalls before the engine starts chugging again.

So, here's to a new, more methodical and more disciplined approach. Hopefully it'll cure me of the doldrums. If not, then at least I'll have the consolation of knowing that I tried. If my rag-tag bunch of readers decides to bear with me, I can promise an enjoyable ride, albeit a bumpy one.

Books Of The Week, "The Coffee House Of Lahore",KK Aziz, Rumi's Mathnavi in the Qazi Sajjad translation.
Movies Of The Week,"The Social Network", "Easy A", "Anna Karenina"
Music Of The Week,"Khwaja Khurshid Anwar's monumental "Raag Mala"

...Of An Unnaturally Long Hiatus

When I returned from my flood relief duty-cum-South Punjab exploration trip, I was raring at the bit. I had spent an extraordinary month working in the field as well as another phenomenal 5 days exploring every nook and cranny of South Punjab. I had returned to Lahore tanned and tired, but loaded with photos and stories from my month-long adventure. While I was there, I had even plotted out how I was going to go about writing down the various highlights of my trip; which subjects were gonna get a stream-of-consciousness Jack Kerouac treatment and which would be delivered in a more verite manner (not that I'm adept at either of these).

The stories were accompanied by photos, literally tons of them, taken with my trusty cellphone camera. I was justifiably proud of them and desperately wanted to share them with whoever wanted to see them. These I tagged, edited and sorted in anticipation of publishing them on my blog. Everything was set for a marathon blogging session when suddenly my brain stopped working. I sat in front of the PC for hours upon hours, trying to write but failing to do so. Sometimes it was due to tiredness after a long day's work, sometimes the failure to find the mot juste and sometimes just plain godawful ennui.

The photos I managed to upload on my Facebook, so it hasn't been a total exercise in sloth, but this inability to write has puzzled,disappointed and ultimately depressed me. I've hit writer's (bloggers') block before but this has been a month of absolute, utter barrenness. If what Thomas Mann said is correct and "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people., then I'm the Tolstoy of my age, because I've sweated hours and still not managed to write a single coherent sentence.

I hope to force myself to write from today onwards, even if it's at the rate of one paragraph a day. Here's to success in a grim struggle.

...Of An Alarming Change

There are thought-out, worked-upon posts and then there is hack work to keep the juices flowing. This is probably the latter.
        -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My weekends have changed.

In my five years in med-school, weekends were like pit-stops. We used to look forward to them, counting down the days and generally living a weekend-to-weekend existence. The whole work week was considered a tedious preamble to the really important stuff, namely the weekend.

Sunday was an almost hallowed day and I would go to great lengths to keep it that way. Saturday mornings at the college were spent dreaming up weekend escapades and any study or ward-duty was done grudgingly and with complete disinterestedness. Playing hookey (quite a dangerous exercise considering where I was studying) and trying to get home as early as possible was an accepted practice. Throughout my stay in med-school, I never stayed in the hostels for a weekend unless it was absolutely unavoidable, i.e there were exams or the weekend was -in official parlance- a closed weekend.

The fact that my family moved four times during the five years I was in hostel meant that going home on weekends was a rather tedious and,in hindsight, expensive task. Except for the two and a half years that the family was settled in Pindi , going home generally meant a taxi-cab from college to the bus station, a hundred kilometre bus ride, and another cab from the bus-station to home. This process was repeated in reverse less than 24 hours later for the return journey. This ensured that at least 8 of the possible 30 hours were spent traveling.

What I didn't realize or probably realized but didn't care about at the time was the obvious monetary cost of performing the same ritual week in week out in the face of rising fuel prices and bus fares. All in all, I may've spent in the neighborhood of 50-60000 rupees simply on traveling to and from home on weekends. But here's the thing; looking back I can safely say that the time spent away from the hostels was worth every penny.

Weekends at the hostel were usually mind-numbingly dull affairs with most of my dorm-mates either home or out about town and nothing but 8-10 hours of sleep to while away the time, waking from which I had to endure the hostel-food which descended to unthinkable levels of blandness on Saturdays and Sundays. An unhealthy gloom descended on me every time I knew I was going to have to spend a weekend in the hostels.

Weekends at home were a completely different story, with every hour utilized to its fullest. I wasn't (and still am not) a very sociable person in that I didn't make friends in whatever neighborhood we were living in at the time. Hence there weren't many social calls to pay. I usually stayed home, and if I went out at all it was probably to go to
a) a bookstore or,
b) the now deceased Sadaf CD Store

The lack of a social circle also meant that I could spend my time in catching up on my reading or writing, spending a few hours on earnest undisturbed study or painstakingly downloading the next week's supply of music (those were pre-broadband days). If there was nothing else to do, I'd spend hours upon hours in front of the telly, getting my money's worth out of the couch in the living room,oblivious to the world around me.

Sleep was strictly rationed to the bare minimum. I rarely slept more than 5 to 6 hours on weekends, preferring to sleep off all the fatigue on Sunday night when I was back in the hostel. Afternoon naps were eschewed even in the balmiest weather and it was usual for me to sleep at 4 in the morning and wake up 4 or 5 hours later.

That was then, this is now.

It's almost four months now since I started working on my house-job and there are precious few weekends left. Sundays are working days unless by a freak of nature my name is not on the weekend duty-roster. On the average, I get every sixth Sunday off, with a non-stop succession of workdays in between. Add to that thrice weekly night duties and I have my hands full most days of the month. I can't complain however. The workload isn't unbearable and the fact that I'm finally learning actively after years of passively imbibing knowledge means that I don't consider myself an overburdened drone.

I get around two to three evenings free every week, which is more than what I used to have in Med-school,especially during final year. It's the weekends that have dried up, and that's a tragedy of gargantuan levels. Still, things would be acceptable if the level of activity on those precious few weekends equaled if not exceeded the R&R of weekends past. If I could get a bit of reading, a bit of writing, a bit of listening and viewing done over the weekend, I'd be a happy man.

But the balance of R&R has swung from recreation to rest. Where once sleep was strictly rationed, it has now spread itself over the day to such an extent that I wake up on Sundays at the ungodly hour of twelve in the afternoon, most times only to grab a two to three hour nap in the afternoon. I've replaced Jeff 'The Dude' Lebowski the poster-boy for unshaven slacking. Downloaded music remains unlistened to, movies that were eagerly awaited and downloaded gather dust in the DVD rack and newest contents of my overburdened bookshelf go untouched for months. Most disturbingly, it's been almost three and a half months since I acquired a new car-my first car mind you- and I feel absolutely no urge to grab the keys and take it out for a spin and practice my driving on the only day I have time for it. The result is that even after 3 months of being a car-owner, my driving skills are cretinous at best.

This is an alarming situation and I'm worried over it. Strangely, worrying only makes me want to snooze even more. I can't put my finger on the cause of the blight that has descended on the holiest of days in my calendar. The only reason I can think of is that I unconsciously accumulate fatigue over the weeks and weeks of ceaseless work and the only time I have to unburden myself is a Sunday. Try as I might, I can't maintain the same levels of activity I used to produce in the preceding years. My friends and acquaintances ensure me that what I'm going through is actually a return to normalcy after years of what they consider fairly deviant behaviour. Weekends were meant for sleeping ,they say, congratulating me on the fact that I have finally seen the light.

The sad bit is that I slowly feel myself warming to their point of view.

...Of Death

Long ago, when the number of people I held dear who had either died or been injured in the almost daily acts of terrorism all over Pakistan became one too many, a hard-edged,cynical resignation overcame me.

When I was very young, I had tried to make sense of why people would want to murder someone who was not only innocent but the very antithesis of violence. I had tried to get my head around the assassinations of Hakeem Muhammad Saeed sahab and Prof. Ghulam Murtaza Malik among countless others. But the five traumatic years that I spent in Rawalpindi finally made me give up the futile effort. Literally every other week, there was a blast within two miles of where I lived. Me and most of my hostel-mates gradually got so insensate that we'd be nonchalantly prepping for our exams amid sounds of gunshots and explosions, popping off to the TV room every 5 or 6 hours to "catch up on the carnage" as it were. The focus shifted from whether there was any loss of life in the most recent incident to whether our exams would be delayed or, even more inanely, would we be allowed to leave the hostel for a night on the town or would the hostel gates be closed because of security reasons and we'd have to take a more, ahem, circuitous route.

I think it's come naturally to me, this cold, indifferent attitude towards death. And it has been augmented, if anything, by my training as a medical student .I've been taught from the first day to think of death as a natural occurrence to be delayed as long as possible, anticipated, prepared for and then forgotten before getting on to the next delay-anticipate-prepare-forget cycle. This fits in perfectly with my attitude towards most of the things that I find troubling.

Lately I've begun to wonder if this strange apathy has been with me from the start, or have I gradually immured my senses. The first death that registers in my memory is that of a childhood friend. 'M' was a hockey player, which is saying something considering he was in 2nd grade. Our school was right next to the train tracks and he lived on the wrong side. I have many memories from back then and one of the most vivid is getting to school and just after the morning assembly, hearing the news that M had been run over by a train. Apparently a strap from his schoolbag had gotten struck in the tracks as he was crossing them and he couldn't disentangle himself in time.

Then there was 'A' in Sargodha who had a congenital renal disease that meant he couldn't come out to play very often and the only explanation his mum used to give us was,"Beta, 'A' beemaar hai." A year or two after we had moved to a new city,dad called up his father to ask how 'A' was doing, he got the shocking news that 'A' had passed away the previous month from complications of his condition.

Both these people had been more than mere acquaintances, being pretty central in my (even then) limited social circle, but I don't remember anything more than a passing sense of shock and a day or two of brooding before I'd relegated their passing to the very back of my mind.

Lots of my relatives have died over the years, from obscure distant relations to people very close to me, and apart from only one occasion,I don't remember myself shedding any tears or going into a phase of depressive remembrance. Such behaviour isn't completely strange because in the rural surroundings that I grew up in, a death and it's subsequent rituals are especially designed to distract (at least the male members of the family) from grief and the act of grieving.

In villages the paraphernalia of death serve as a great emotional buffer. The services aren't restricted to the funeral and the burial or even the 'Qul'. They may involve the 'Saata'(7th day), the 'Gyaarvanh'|(11th day), the 'Ikeevanh'(21st day) or the 'Chaleeyah'(40th day) depending on how long the local custom and the financial situation permit. These forty days aren't spent in ceaseless mourning, at least not by the deceased's next of kin. The formalities and rituals of death, from the thrice daily khaana peena with it's own peculiar rules about when to serve what to whom, to the management of the 'satthar' and the 'mukaan' where the men and women respectively are seated, to the 'bhaajis' and 'manjis' and what not, ultimately serve to help the bereaved family find closure gradually. They also provide the family's extremely reluctant youngsters ample opportunities to be trained in what my father calls 'the real life'.

Of course there is genuine expression of grief, with histrionics and screams and sobs and highly stylized 'baains' that may look very distressing to the casual observer but are essential in providing emotional release, especially to the female mourners. A quiet period of mourning just isn't consistent with our culture and these wails and cries are almost essential. As Munir Niazi sahab said,

رونقیں ہیں موت کی

یہ بین کرتی عورتیں

It's been two months since I've started my house-job, and almost every other day I see patients who are dying. Around half a dozen have died natural deaths on my watch. Death on the wards has it's rituals too. With each, there's a decision on whether to resuscitate or not, followed by the medical confirmation of death, the ahnding over of the dead body and the official paperwork. If I were to be a tad more emotionally affected by it, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to do my job properly. I've seen plenty of new doctors overcome by the sheer emotional shock of a person dying in front of them. And in all these cases the judgement gets clouded, the reflexes get sluggish and professional integrity is compromised.

Maybe this clinical hardheartedness of mine isn't such a bad thing after all.

....Of A More Circuitous Route

It's taken a night in a rat-infested, AC-less room and 24 straight hours of work to finally jolt my mind enough to make me sit down and actually write something.

I'd like to get something off my chest at the outset. The hullabaloo at the recent banning of a number of websites by PTA in response to the "Everybody Draw Mohammad" competition has made two things quite clear.

1) The polarity between the pro and anti ban camps is pretty wide, with very few suggesting any middle ground.
2)I am completely, utterly ambivalent about the whole thing.

Whatever the ultimate implications of the ban may be, I'm not going to use up a whole post on something that a lot of people have expressed themselves pretty eloquently about. A lot of people have asked me what my feelings are, and I can quote Rhett Butler to summarize, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!" I've been meaning to quit Facebook and rush over to *Diaspora for ages anyway.

It's been exactly one month since i began my housejob. It's an extremely encouraging sign that I'm actually enjoying my work and that, contrary to what I feared when I left PMA, I actually do remember most of what I learned in med school. I had received a lot of half-cynical,half-congratulatory comments when people found out that I was starting off on a "pwopah" job after 6 years of moseying around in med school, mostly humorous warnings about years of drudgery,clock-punching and Charlie Chaplin style hard labour hat await me; but if the initial one month is any kind of indicator, I might be on to something good here.There had been times when I had doubts about putting up Lahore as my choice for my housejob, but most of them have thankfully been resolved. Despite the heat, the distances and the initial feeling of alienation; I'm enjoying it immensely.

One thing I've noticed on the wards this past month that is quite frightening is that we have a full-blown Hepatitis epidemic on our hands. Patients of hepatitis B and C make up approximately 60-70% of the patients admitted in my ward, including quite a large number who are admitted for other diseases and discover they have Hepatitis during routine post-admission blood testing. And considering I'm in a female ward where most of the patients are married ladies with an average of two children each, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Speaking of working in a female ward, I was mockingly accused of sexism by a friend earlier today when I told her what I think is the main difference in dealing with male and female patients. The difference can be summed up in one word; somatization. Where a male patient with pain in his abdomen will tell me where it hurts, how long it's been hurting and how it has affected his daily activities, a lady with the same symptoms will complain about the pain for a fleeting moment, and then wander off to explore wholly different trains of thought wholly unrelated to the actual problem. the interesting thing is that the long stream-of-consciousness ramblings contain many subconscious clues about the actual complaint, but it's a more circuitous route to diagnosis.

Since this post is also a stream-of-consciousness ramble, I was thinking today of some things that really annoy me. I'm not prone to anger, preferring to simmer rather than boil over, but there are some things that really get my goat.I managed to write some of them down in no particular order as follows;

The soul-numbingly inane keyboards played in Pakistani music,especially where they're not needed.
Sahir Goshdarned Lodhi.
The stream of terrible news emanating from The-Place-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named.
The fact that people are burning tires close to where I live because apparently, that's the sanest, most logical response to somebody's house being burgled.

I'll cut this post short right here because there's something I need to get off my mind right now that doesn't quite fit in with what I've written here.

...On Leaving Pindi

Two days from now, I am leaving Rawalpindi. For good.

All in all, I've spent at least 8 years of my life here, and now me and my family are packing up and moving to Lahore. Which is something I've been looking forward to for a long while; Lahore being my favorite city. But still, it's not without a (very) heavy heart that I say goodbye to what has been my surrogate hometown.

We first moved to Rawalpindi when I was in 7th grade, and I liked the place at first sight. Our house was in Harley Street (which makes me a bona fide Harley Street medical practitioner now), and the place was quiet enough, with just enough kids to play with, just enough roof space to fly kites, and just enough of a lawn to sneak out into during the afternoon nap timings. School was 2 minutes walk away, and the thela-wala outside school accepted IOUs. The house next to ours was perennially filed with carpenters, so we indulged in custom-made cricket bats and wickets. My favorite places in Pindi were the Army Central Library, which I ransacked, and Bombeat on Bank Road, that sold John Denver tapes and fueled my early and thankfully short lived boy-band craze.

The second time I moved to Pindi was as a cadet in AM College, and for the next 5 years, Pindi's been my homebase even though my family's shifted homes thrice. I can't even begin to count the number of miles I've clocked walking to and from Saddar, Murree Road, Tench and my hostels. Sadaf, City Hut, Bunny Chowk, KFC, Namak Mandi, Cinepax and Variety Books; i've probably spent more time here than in my dorm room.

And then there's Islamabad, every time the weather was benign, I could always count on three or four people to bunk their wards and head off to Pir Sohawa or the lake or Daman-e-Koh or just about anywhere. The "Lake View Park Fiasco", the "Quaid-e-Azam University Saga", the "Affair Of The Pizza Hut" are just some of the stories that I'll be recalling with my friends decades from now.

Even though, or maybe because Islamabad is a "planned" city, I've always manages to get lost in it. The sectors are confusing, the roads are all alike and the signboards all point the same way. Maybe that's why I like it so much, it lets me wander freely and in the end always leads me to where I want to go. The drives along Kashmir Highway, 7th Avenue and the Murree Expressway were and will remain memorable.

I've written somewhere earlier about the fact that moving house every two to three years precludes any long-term friendships and makes it easy for social retards like me to lose contact with all my friends and acquaintances of the previous city. But Pindi's finally got me. The friends I've made here, especially in AM College, are the don't-you-dare-lose-touch-or-ELSE!! kind.

And I sure as hell ain't planning on losing touch. Both with my friends, and with Pindi.

Books Of The Week, American Pastoral, Philip Roth. How To Be Good,Nick Hornby.
Movies Of The Week, Alice In Wonderland, Shutter Island, The Hurt Locker, Clash Of The Titans.
Songs Of The Week, The Wallflowers Discography, Karen Dalton, Mehboob Qawwal.

...Of Slight Surreality

 The Race Course jogging track here in Pindi is right next to the Army Graveyard, and right next to them is a huge bare piece of ground where at least 50 different groups of kids are playing cricket from sunrise to sunset. I usually jog there for half an hour every evening in a futile effort to lose some flab. The jogging track has at least twenty odd speakers hung on trees, all piping out meant-to-be-soothing Muzak that I'm blissfully unaware of thanks to my iPod.

 I don't think I need to tell anyone that The Big Lebowski is one of the best films ever made, and whoever put out the entire audio track of the movie out as a series of mp3 clips is a friggin' genius. I usually listen to the film as I jog. Today as I was coming out of the jogging track, with the last few minutes of the film playing in my ears, one of my favorite bits of dialogue came on ;



“Well I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time"

 At that I took off my earbuds and saw a scene that might have come straight out of Lebowski. The jogging track speakers were blaring Muzak at full volume as a funeral was going on in the Graveyard. Just then one of the many batsmen at the cricket ground hit the ball high into the air, falling right onto the earthly remains of the deceased, lying on a charpaai in front of the congregation. 


.....Well, I guess that’s how the whole darned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons, across the sands of time.

.....Of Nothing in Particular

 I saw Khalida Riyasat on TV today.

 She was laughing, but her eyes weren't.

 I miss Khalida Riyasat.

…Of A Secret Memory

   It was eight or nine years ago, on a trip to my Jagoka, my maternal village. I was past the age when Jagoka used to be a Mecca for all the kids in my family, but was still in love with the place. My Nana bawa and Nani ammaan were of course the two people I loved the most, the daily rituals were still there – the mandatory tablet of sweet Simco that we got from Nana to chew on, the early morning visits to the “Khooh”, the afternoon ‘70’s Indian movie in Nana’s room, the strange concoctions of Masala and milk that we had for lunch with leftover rotis – and all the kids were home for the holidays.
  Life followed a brilliant pattern there. Waking up early in the morning as the whole house was being swept, breakfast in the smoky, cavernous kitchen with Nani ammaan sitting at the stove and shouting her way to the start of the day, the post breakfast lull, the semi-proper lunch of questionable culinary origins , the uncomfortably warm afternoons in the summer and the mini powernaps in the winter, supper exactly at sunset with a choice of sweet warm milk or plain cold milk at the end.
   It was on one such visit that me and Nana bawa were resting in his room and the talk got around to Gramophone players. When I say talk, I mean another one of the various Q&A sessions that we used to have. From falling stars to caterpillars to ghosts to snakes to boar-hunting to farming, these talks were the perfect answer to the terrible curiosity I had back in the day. And as me and Nana bawa were lying in his room, staring at the ceiling and talking about Saigal, Bioscopes and other such stuff, suddenly Nana stopped as if suddenly remembering something.
   We were quiet for a while, one of those wonderful silences we used to have, and then suddenly, he started singing.
  I had never heard him sing before, and almost jolted up as his wavy baritone voice grew louder. It was an old song, a lullaby. One that I’d never heard before, and one that he was obviously recalling with some difficulty. I have never listened to anything with more attention, my ears straining to pick up every word, every attempt at recalling the tune and every breath that he took midway between the verses. Lying supine, fearful of turning my head towards him lest I break the magical moment, goosebumpy all over, I just lay there. Still.
  He finished, there was another silence, and then he told me where he’d heard the song. Apparently, in the ‘50s, he had gone to Lyallpur to see a film, the name of which he couldn’t recall. The only thing he remembered was that it was an Indian film, and Lata had sung this lullaby in it. He had heard it only once, and now had sung it to me as much as he could remember 50 years later.
  Our talk ended, our trip ended, and four years ago, Nana passed away, taking his one song with him and leaving me with my most personal memory. I had kept the few snatched words and the ragged melody of the song in my mind all this time, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Intensively searching every archive I could get to, I just could not find the song. I had gotten slightly worried now, worried that my secret memory could fade if I did not find that song.
  And then, suddenly, I found it. My secret memory is not secret any more….

....Of Mourning

How do you mourn for someone ?
Someone you met barely once or twice,
But wished that you knew all your life.

How do you mourn when your senses have been shot ?
And your eyes,unaccustomed to tears,
Suddenly gush forth in silent agony.

How can you cry,when you know you can't ?
When your resolve is all that stands between;
A shattered friend and his tears.

How can you grieve for Father ?
For his children,your brothers and sisters,
With their eyes empty,yet o'erflowing.

How can you reconcile your mind ?
When you know there won't be any closure,
When your heart will never accept it.

How can you comfort a brother ?
Whose burden is much worse than yours,
And yet you can't imagine anything worse than what you feel.

How can you keep the nightmares away ?
When all you see is your own flesh and blood,
Irrecognizable in the fog of your fevered mind.

How can you banish the Black Dog ?
As it snarls,as it slinks,sinks down in your heart,
And you know that it's going to be a long spring.


In Loving Memory.....Lt. Gen. Mushtaq Baig,may he find eternal paradise.
May Allah grant Imran and all his family the strength to get through this horrendous time.

...Of Me And...

Although it will be a kick in the rear for my procrastrinating self,but it has to be done.It's been a long while since I've been blogging,intermittently at best,but with a consistency that surprises me.I have been thinking for a long time to write pieces (if you can call them that) on people,things,cultural artefacts et al that have affected me.


It is cultural artefacts,after all,that I count among the most important baggage that you take along with you in life,the most reliable indicators of personality.I'll take a lead from the wonderful "High Fidelity" (another cultural artefact) where John Cusack's character says out loud once and for all that self-evident truth.That it's not the personality,the attitude or the outlook that so defines a person as is the little go-betweens; his favorite band,his most prized book (if he/she reads at all),the music,the books,the movies,the idiosyncratic trivialities that form the basis of future relationships.Of cours I may be wrong (though I'll be the last to admit it)..


So,in an attempt to define myself on the basis of these trivialties,I'll try to recall all the touchstones of my past,from my initial introductions to the long and winding road that I've travelled with them.It'll be an effort,I'll have to rouse my lazy self and get these words on to the keyboard.It'll be an achievement indeed if I succeed...


Song Of The Week,None,goddammit.My discman's broke
Movies Of The Week,"Wild Strawberries",1957 "Rosemary's Baby",1965
Book Of The Week,"My War",Andy Rooney

...Of Censorship and Kisses And Exams

Rarely does my weak ego get a kick in the rear that sends it sky high.But the recent blocking of blogspot by the Pakistani government had me flyin' to the moon.The reason? The reason was that my puny 'ickle blog was also blocked along with all the rest.And this awoke a sense of pride in me.Pride at the fact that I too can be counted among the few whom the government deems worthy of censorship,but my general feeling was that of ,how shall I put it,indignation.My heart bled for the millions (yeah,right) who hung on my every word,anxiously glued to their PCs .waiting for my next post,as I imagined their looks of dissapointment and ominous mutterings,unable to fathom the cause of my disappearance...Did I mention I had a flimsy ego ???

Anyway,I've been thinking of kisses,movie kisses to be precise.The old fashioned kisses,to be more precise.The kind where Errol Flynn climbed up the castle walls to be with Olivia de Havilland and stole a beautiful,tender ten second peck,while cheesy romantic music played.Not the modern variety,which looks more like a contest to determine who can finish off their partner's tonsils first,and get a bit of epiglottis for good measure.Seriously,back in those days,a kiss was just that,a kiss.William Holden and Nancy Olsen in Sunset Boulevard,one of the most romantic scenes ever.Bergman and Bogart in Casablanca,sublime.Even Brando in On The Waterfront...But now,sheesh !!

I've been through a lot since I joined my college.It's an Army institute,and I've had my fair share of physical punishment.In fact,more than my fair share.I've been made to stand,dripping wet,outside on a cold winter night.I've been made to crawl on asphalt till my knuckles bled.I've been made to do push ups all day long,while fasting,and with only three hours of sleep per day.I thought thhat was as tough as it could get,but that was before I encountered the biggest terror of them all....Exams.Believe me when I say that I would willingly,nay gladly go through all that physical regimentation crap twice over rather than sit for exams.And unfortunately that's just what's about to happen.From onday,I'm gonna be caught in a vicious cycle of exams that'll end on 24th of June..Hope I come out alive.

Movie Of The Week : Royal wedding
Song Of The Week : The Ballad Of Hollis Brown
Discovery Of The Week: I'm in love with Bette Davis !!!

.....Of Pain

Every one has their own waking up rituals.Some just jump off the bed,fresh as a daisy.Others lie there,waiting in vain for a miracle to turn back the clock just one more hour so they can snooze some more.With me,it's just a quick stretch and I'm off.Never again am I stretching after today !!!
Woke up today with no premonition of the coming agony.Was just stretching a bit when out of the blue,something went Pop in my right ear!!.Suddenly a whacking great flash of pain shot up from my toes upto my neck,and stayed there.I couldn't move my neck one bit and all I could do was shout out HOLY CRAAAAAPP !!!!.And a fat lot of help that did.I had sprained one of my neck muscles really bad,and it was hurting like the dickens.After a lot of swearing,wheezing and hefting,I managed to sit up straight,one arm supporting my neck,with the elbow jutting forward like a rocket launcher or something.I called up a friend,woke him from sleep and asked (yelled at) him to come and take me to the hospital.
Now I've been acquainted with pain from my earliest days.After having been shot twice while out boar hunting,bitten by a snake,putting my finger in a meat grinder out of curiosity and having it's tip chopped off (i was seven,for pete's sake),you'd think I would take this minor misfortune in my stride.But each kind of pain is different.Sometimes it's that slight sweet pain you get when you've got a light fever,a little flu and lot's of ovaltine to keep you company.Sometimes it's that horrid,mysterious pain that comes out of nowhere and forces you to stand utterly still and hope you've not busted you're guts or something.Sometimes it's that silly niggling pain that just won't let you play football.This was of a new kind.The kind where you are completely paralyzed and each slight movement is rewarded by an electric shock putting you back in your place...
Well,holding my head at an ungodly angle I headed out to the hospital,wincing at each speed breaker along the way.The doctor at the trauma centre took one look at me and decided that I was bluffing,so he decided to confirm.A simple F%^%&^%#@^%!*$^*%& !!!!!!!!!!!! radically changed his views,and taught him never to touch my neck again.With a vengeful look in his filthy,leering eyes,he handed me a prescription,all the while muttering "That'll teach you". An injection,aah well,I was expecting it.So I uncovered my arm and braced for the needle.But no,I wasn't getting off that easy."Lie down",said the sadistic doctor,and I reluctantly lay down with a horid premonition as he applied his needle to you know where.
So,as I write this,i find myself in the singularly unenviable position of simultaneously having a pain in the neck,and a pain in the a**e !!!

Song of the Week ;Diamonds And Rust by Joan Baez
Movie Of The Week;Gigi (perfectly horrid)

....Concerning Pity

In my last post I put forth a strange proposition.If anyone's got a sharp memory,they'll recall that I was propoundin' my views about pity and I said that my pity goes to the faded star...

In explanation i'll recall to mind Coleridge's Kubla Khan:
'For he ,who on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise...'
That's how i characterize celebrities and anyone who's ever been in the Public Eye.Once you've tasted that moonshine,the taste lingers.public idolation's a heady drug,and the high stops the moment people move on to the next Big Thing !! And where does this leave Mr. yesterday? ....hung in the limbo of part fantasy,part realization that things sure ain't what they used to be,and part plain shock!!We all know that artists,or artistes if you prefer,are sensitive folk and this hits hard,real hard.

Remember Alexander and the Fountain Of Life,remember the weary,aged destitute wrecks who had tasted it in their folly,doomed to live for eons.Remember Sunset Boulevard,that eerie,horrific reminder of the ill-effects of celebrity and the lengths an appreciation starved mind can go to,to preserve any vestige of the Glory Days.Remember Mae West,with her face held up by copper wire,surrounded by paid gay hombres just to show the world that men still drooled over her.

Don't have to go far,the Land Of The Pure's self-sufficient in crumbling artifacts of celebrity,the people that time forgot! Remember Pathaaney Khan,Roohi Bano,Mujeeb Alam,Allan Faqeer anyone ??

That brings me back to my original rant,the Oscars.I was searching for the new object of my pity,the person who'd have his one chance at immortality and see it slip through his fingers,just to join that long list of "Guest Appearances By:" actors.Surprisingly,my eye set on Peter O' Toole.Now I know he ain't a Noboby,but the old lion didn't win even after his eighth nomination.With films like Lawrence Of Arabia,Lord Jim etc. behind his back,he's almost gauranteed legend status(something that's fallen into overuse these days).But I could see the longing,the hope and the ultimate dissapointment in his devilishly Irish(but faded and grey) eyes...

Song Of The Week : Talking Dust Bowl Blues,Woody Guthrie

Film Of The Week : It Happened One Night