Leaving on a jet plane

What is it with the recent escalation in the number of PAF airplanes crashing almost every month these past 6 months? Just now while listening to the FM I heard about yet another plane crash in Rajasthan area with Alhamdulillah the pilot being safe.

A plane and a fighter plane at that, is worth multimillion rupees while the pilot and copilot are priceless….losing any of the three is not a small setback…it’s a catastrophe. My Chacha who has now resigend from PAF used to be a fighter pilot on ‘mirages’ too and he has had two ejections while preparing for the airshows of the 23rd March’s march pasts. I know what follows is not easy…the moment between the cockpit opening and the seat throwing the pilot out and then the moment between the jumper tries to open his parachute and tries to keep his thoughts from  looking at the hard ground approaching him fast…these moments are full of anxiety and yet the strict interrogations later on, can make the person want to jump out of a plane anyway…

However the question here is this that we all know that machines are unreliable and may bail out on you anytime but does this mean we need newer and a bit more reliable vehicles? And say, that even if there is some overlooking on the side of the engineers and the aviation crew even then maybe there is just as much effort as they can put in a badly depreciated and frequently flown plane?

Everytime a jewel falls down from the crown of PAF, new reports are opened and new investigations are started but the point is that how many chances are one too many?….God bless the hawks that guard our skies and make us proud of them!! 

Black coats and pink gowns

 It had to be the love at first sight…. I was totally floored…all goo goo eyed and gone bonkers over the sight of the beings in majestic black tail coats…..the absolutely adorable penguins!

Today as I visited the Al Ain Zoo I got lucky enough to stumble upon the display of penguins in the bird house. These penguins are kept in quite a large glass room created to imitate their natural habitat of Antarctica complete with clear water and rocks jutting out to create a beach side area, as well as the corals scattered about the ground to give it that special flavor of authenticity. The walls were painted to create a smattering of the evergreens to reflect whatever little fauna there is during the time the thaw sets in, in the poles…..and totally making the scene picture perfect were the dozen or so little penguins, tottering about.

Their black coats were brilliantly shiny and since they kept on coming in and out of the water, their hair or was it fur or scales? Were slicked back on their tiny heads making it look as if they had just gelled them back to make themselves fit for a soiree. They went pit pat on their webbed feet, picking up a pebble from the ground in their beaks and then stepping down into water and cutting through it with such deftness and so swiftly as if some motor boat’s submersible blackish white blade was sluicing through the aquamarine waves.

We had a good 20 to 25 minutes with the dwellers of the frozen world, photographing them, tapping on their glass windows and simply standing and staring at them. I was exultant because I had always wanted to see the little black tail coated creatures in reality, other than in the reality shows only and to top it off was the visage of scores of pink flamingoes standing flocked together at the far end of a narrow strip of a water channel at the exit from the zoo. I wish I could transfer the pictures from my movie camera but that’s such a lot of work…( at 1:30 am in the morning I turn into the biggest couch potato in the world )

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So besides the horses that I soooooooooo badly want to own (Horses have to be the one of Allah mian’s most graceful creations) I would really love to have penguins too….only if someone else would look after them and I could go and hug them every once in a while

The NOBLE Nobel!

 Of the many forwarded mails that I don’t read, I read this particular one because its subject caught my attention: “Pakistani Scientist in Nobel Team”.

When I was but just a kid my Grandma used to tell me how Nobel Prize was this most prestigious award to be received by any scientist ( well she only told me about science award at that time) and I remember telling her that someday I shall win a Nobel prize for her….!!

Now when I had a chance glimpse of the Yahoo! News claiming Al Gore for winning the Nobel Peace Prize I did not pay much heed to it since from whatever stunted knowledge I had of the man I remembered him to be the one who lost the presidential elections of USA…. uh last year? And then he was the one who worked in this semi documentary…An inconvenient Truth! But nothing more…however it wasn’t until I visited Mr. Chris’s blog that the news of Al Gore winning Nobel…THE Noble Nobel prize actually registered with me…it wasn’t a farce…coz up until this day I had believed Nobel to be given to people who have done painstaking work, to make this world a better place…..

I had once started to read this book from my library which unfortunately I did not complete, it was about how a book becomes a Nobel prize winner. Though the book only focused on one part of giving away Nobel prizes but I’m sure some of the aspects of the process could be true for other areas as well….For instance the  writer had written that some of the greatest writers in the history who were like German or Asian were not given Nobel prizes because there was no one in the committee who could understand these languages….Yes, I had thought why not Allama Iqbal??  The writer also got this from very reliable sources that sometimes the Nobel was simply denied to a deserving nominee because someone or the other had some personal grudge against the person….!!

So much for the Nobel prize in Literature, but since I did not read the book till the last and since I can’t really say about the authenticity of it either therefore I won’t press for the information being entirely correct however I could sense the grains of truth in it. But this thing about giving Peace prize on a movie was like throwing away of money….maybe it’s not just for Al Gore it’s for the ENTIRE movie team, the concept makers, cinematographers, the dialogue writers etc ? THAT could make a little sense since people say it is actually a pretty OK movie. But why all the limelight on the Presenter on the front? This was disturbing quite a bit…until I read the forwarded email I mentioned…..

According to the issue of October 14th of DAWN This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is being shared by Al Gore AND IPCC, Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Changes and of which Prof. Adil Najam a Pakistani is an eminent member…the Convening Lead Author actually.

 This IPCC is a team of climate change experts who issued their report called AR4(I did not read this report though) this year and ended up getting half of the prize money and they deserve EQUAL, probably even a little more respect for bagging the honor. Oh and btw the Chair of this team is Mr. R K Pachauri who is an Indian. So Congratz to the subcontinent for having some glory reflected on us

I wish to bring another Nobel home soon but I sure cannot forget Dr. Abdul Salam the first Pakistani ever to bring the Nobel home in 1979 and for physics nonetheless. 

According to a source he won the prize for his “theoretical unification of two fundamental forces of nature.” 

Unfortunately our treatment of the man himself had not been very commendable according to the sources I read from while researching to write for this post….but this isn’t on religious grounds that I side with those people but as a Pakistani who thinks even in Muslim ideology there is a lesson of patience, respecting other school of thoughts and protection of minorities…I don’t care if Ahmedis are Muslims or not…but Dr. Abdul Salam was a Pakistani Citizen and he did us proud…and so did Dr. A Q Khan…I wish if I could ever meet Dr. A Q Khan, I’ll tell him that how proud most of us here are of his achievements and genius…if only!!
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Anyways if anyone is interested maybe they should visit this blog to see an interesting take on Al Gore getting the peace prize..

Also here is another interesting read I found while browsing for Muslim Nobel Prize winners.

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Perhaps John Nash is one of my favorite Nobel laureates probably because he is the only one I know a little about, but basically because he fought against all odds… because if anything his mind’s ramblings were anything but beautiful!

However watching the movie had also made me realize that sometimes you have to work all through your life to get a glimpse of your destiny…Like Marie Curie, …sometimes you just have to wait and see………………..