In primary school days, when nobody thinks of their career in terms of amount of money or salary they are going to earn, I had done all my calculations. Based on the average height of my extended family I had mentally calculated how high I would grow and how big a garland made of ten rupee notes I can wear. Add to that the money filled envelopes I will get for my endeavours I would be raking in money while my classmates would be making pittance as doctors, engineers, or shop assistants etc. However, as I grew older and became more mature, I realized that with inflation as it was, this strategy might not work. I would have to wear a garland made at least of fifty rupee or hundred rupee notes…

But by the time I finished my school, three things changed. One, I became more mature. Two, the inflation increased. I calculated that at current rate, I had to surrogate up five-hundred rupee note garlands to maintain the lifestyle. Three, a change that shattered my dream, rupee note garlands became outmoded in the middle classes of Karachi. I was devastated. I might have gone into depression had I known what depression was. Because of naiveté, and not knowing what else to do, I picked the broken pieces of my dream. As sailors focus on distant objects when sailing to keep from feeling sea-sick, I decided to focus on a (superficial) career like everyone else, while turning the pieces into a flame and burying it deep inside my heart where reality can never extinguish it. Even dead bodies don’t remain below the sea for long and here dream was broken yet alive. Time and again, the dream would break to the surface. 

The current generation of young men has mapped objectives as milestones in their life such as complete higher education, find a job, make a career, earn some money and then get married. Being a non conformist since childhood I had no such road map. My top most priority was to get cultivate the shortest ways to derive instant cash whereas other objectives were secondary in no order or priority. When it came to money, Just Do It was my motto. 

Whereas during childhood fate had acted indirectly against me through rising inflation, changing fashions etc, now it had declared open war.

In my first year of my high schooling, I had a crush on a girl who was in second year. It was not that she was very beautiful. She was ordinary looking but the way she carried herself made her very attractive _ not in catwalk like manner rather in a very dignified manner. Those of you who can relate to Junaid Jamshed’s “Sahib-e-Dil” can understand what I am saying. When my mother came to know about it, she said the usual stuff about completing education, finding a job etc.

As the saying goes, first crush dies hard, the flame flickered on. Time passed, I finished my education and started looking for a job. Meanwhile, I got to know that she got married to one of the closest friends at my school. All the flames , that I had managed to keep alive for sometime, died down instantly. The job to which I had lingered on for some while, didn’t actually motivate me much,since it didn’t offer me the exact recipe of becoming rich.

Soon afterwards, I left to US for further studies as nothing was materializing on local front. When I had completed my studies in US…

I would rather call it a holistic combination of learning and debauchery at the same time. There were some people who would sacrifice their time and dedication for me: They taught me whom to trust as friends. There were several others who would have countless plans crazy buffoonery on the trivial moments of happiness: I learned from them how to remain content and be thankful to Allah for the little things you have. There were still who had a wonderful tendency to remain arrogant and conceited as they gained jobs/ power/ hold of a few trivial resources, despite being humble to them throughout the years: Actually they were the ones who taught me how gruesome and narcissistic life could be.

I don’t know whom to blame for this: the institution, the politics, the hierarchy or the people’s mindset. Whoever it may be, we/ our institution never succumbed to the fact of making better individuals/ human beings for people around us, but creating didactic pedants who could brag over their respective GPAs. If KUBS had one thing to offer, it was the unparalleled diversity of the students that we lived with: opportunistic, desperate, inspiring and selfish. Name it, and you get the individual of that sort. Nowhere else could I expect to meet so many idiosyncratic individuals within a limited population that KUBS caters every year.

But for all of us one thing was common: We would come out of our homes everyday: half dreamy, half serious, driven by the knack to get the graduation degree for our families and several countless monetary benefits associated with it. Somehow, none of us ever forecasted that our (B.S.) degree could ever fathom the susceptibility of being unacknowledged by the HEC itself. What we never realized was the fact how unpredictable life could be, with life overtaking you with the bitter reality of death before we could ever satiate our aspirations of our loved ones. (Please recite Surah Fateha for Ziad’s father and J.B’s mother, as well as for the deceased members of young parliament).

KUBS taught me various jugars of living within limited parameters. Devoid of the privileges of what private universities might have to offer, our life was an imbroglio of some true luxuries and tortures. When I say luxury I mean having teachers like Sir Atif Farooqui, Ma’am Saadia Owais and some others, from where you come out of the classroom with a completely new perspective about life and all its variables. The experience was simply beyond the definition a few words!

The bottomline of life at KUBS was simple: You have a brand, a USP, capitalize it and thrust ahead. For us, it is not really the institution that might have bolstered our career prospects, but our thinking perspective, our persona that lets us help to be at the position where we hope to be. I just hope that as time passes by, we remain together and advance with our career prospects.

Cheers KUBS!

Since the inception, I had always been an ambassador of “Be- Pakistani, Buy-Pakistani” notion, advocating it with several privileges and liberties that we have enjoyed in this rather “strong, independent, Islamic” nation. But as time has passed by we have been afflicted with counter productivity of this imbroglio.

In the current wake of gruesome and gratuitous murder of SarfarazShah near one of the most critical places of Karachi, and that too at a point black distance is itself widely reviled. As if to aggravate the things further, the “operation” was conducted by the widely dreaded Rangers who have been supposed to be pretty viable in the wake of effete policemen.

Those who have had sympathy with them have justified this (heinous) act by proclaiming that the accused was liable of carrying a fake weapon. Whatever he was, he could have been trailed and consequently punished for the offence he had committed. But in a paradoxical nation embedded with ironical laws a just trail appears pretty evitable. After all, nobody knows once a recognized assassin and kleptomaniac; tomorrow he might be a President!

The Pakistanis question about what he gets after sacrificing thousands of indigenous men, women and children, both in the civil and militia wads, ever since the 9/11 fiasco, and the consequent war that was imposed upon us. This is not the first time we have succumbed to the vicious plans dictated by the foreign authoritarians. Be it the London bombings, Mumbai attacks or any other calamity hurting any part of the world, the tandem somehow tends to chain it with Pakistan, damaging it sovereignty and respect and consequently drowning the mass into the pangs of unrequited woes.

The bottomline is to convey the fact that it is hard time for us to learn from our past and fortify our avenues for the future. Instead of making ourselves the subject of overwhelming humility repeatedly (as a terrorist/ failed/ banana nation), we need to fend our objectives, and portray the inside out of ourselves as a civilized nation with unparalleled talent pool of individuals waiting to get their natural endowment to be unleashed.

We are an ill-reputed national organization, known for ditching its reputed players (at the pinnacle of their careers, as well as at their retirement), and for having a lunatic head as its chairman. Coincidentally we have BUTTS in all cases.

Career Openings:

Now, as a part of contingency plan to  satiate our avarice and serve the appetite of a cricket crazy nation, we are looking forward for 11 potential candidates who can fix the damage (by winning the Cricket World Cup 2011) for the nation.

The ideal candidates should possess the following traits:

• Must have an immaculate  agility, competence, fitness and sportsmanship spirit to pulverize the Indian eleven, such that it casts an exemplar impeccable damage for the generations to come.
• Must be able to work in team (and individually), both as a batsman and bowler, or least either of these.
• Must be able to catch with both hands. Those having ability to dive and catch shall be preferred. Candidates whose names start with “Kam..”, kindly shouldn’t bother applying.
• Pacers having the ability to shackle the stumps and break partnerships would be a privilege. Recent retirees may also apply.

How to Apply:

Those matching the above criterion may forward their applications to:

Hurry, the deadlines for accepting applications is March 29, 2011.

Where my “barricade” lay on an askewed way

I rummaged for a familiar face,

In the department where I’d spent some good ol’ days,

But all I could see were those perambulated veils,

And walls daubed with distemper, paan and “A+R” tales,

And oft loitered those impudent souls,

With swarthy skins, bushy mustaches and protruded bowels,

Dubbed as mules, braggarts, and bitches of vice,

Who can never imagine student welfare is by any means nice,

Sangfroid of the strains of the people who are mean,

We dabble around the university’s canteen,

We drool, taunt, mock and retort each other,

For this is the way we ensure integrity with our every brother.

Unlike their subcontinental national anthems where I can only surmise empathy trodden school kids mumbling the misconstrued musical composition under the bare, scorching sun, I am intrigued by the idea how the Dutch, Canadian, American and other “white nationals” might feel as a pageant, opera star would sing a thought in front of them. Subversive, yet just a thought.

Not many people know about my brimming levels of misogynist nature. Women wane, make things complicated, and tend to mess up things most of the times. For any mundane guy, the ultimate consequence is pangs of recruited woes.

Yet despite all such grudges, I have held a contemporary philosophy for them. They are unique in their own way, with contrasting nuances abridging a complicated nexus of personality paradigm existing within. They are like coins, radically two faced – one of them is for the world, which has an amazing ability to debauch the most virtuous, as well as rise the most downtrodden. The other one is what she is in private, intimate and versatile with myriads of affairs that run in her mind at all times. Both the sides constitute an inevitable degree of unpredictability. One may hardly guess what runs through her mind even in the most subtle and comprehensible situations. What one fails to realize is to see beyond these two faces, the multidimensional sides existing between the two major sides, and that’s where complication arises. But those who decipher those “codes” are men of true intellect. As for me, they would always remain obstreperous creatures of aldrich.

Its an old tale of one odd boy,
Its one shadow that revolves in his mind,
Its just one lovely queen of his thoughts,
Its just one lost battle that he has decided to fight,

The story ended as the outcomes surfaced,
The story ended as the lies surfaced,
The story just ended as her need ended,
The story just ended as her attitude changed,

Everything ended and got back to place,
She got in love and I was left,
With everything unjust,
Everything happened before mush damage was done,
but left me broken before I got to know,
Everything ended, Everything ended,
And Everything surfaced….