Category Archives: the blues and hues

You know you are getting older when the bends in the roads don’t stop you anymore and you merely turn with them instead of going straight…..

You have matured when the chill of the autumn winds starts making you feel tired and lethargic yet you get up wash your face and are ready to face the world with a big smile plastered on your face…

You have grown and matured when you start to feel for others besides yourself….Their smiles make your inside seem sunny and bright or their pain puts a tight noose around your hearts and constricts it….you know when you are able to think beyond yourself and your happiness and needs and desires…it is really the time when you have really arrived and are ready to live as it is ought to be lived…..struggling

…………….and getting immense satisfaction after the struggle is over…………. 

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This one is for a dear friend of mine who is on her way to realize her forbearance!

While I walked towards the bus stop on my way to home one day I could so feel the sun scorching my head and yet it was good to be brisk walking after staying put and confined inside walls for several hours at a stretch……That is when it hit me….the peace that comes with liberty…wth being free and not afraid to step out and jump, dance, shout, do whatever you want to…because this is your country and u have teh right to tread its paths and roads…

The trickling of America’s fight against terrorism across the borders is starting to get tiresome now….it pains me…it definitely must be paining you too…It’s infuriating and agonizing and that too so smoothly at the peak of such vulnerable and sensitive political plus socio-economical situations….

People say it’s been predicted that the map of 2011 will not show (God Forbid) Pakland as a unique, sovereign state on the map of the world…and it sends deep shivers of fear down my spine because sometimes  that seems more like a schedule that is bound to happen than simple prophecies……. I hope NEVER does that happen Amen!!

Was having a discussion with a friend of mine regarding favorite places and he pointed out a certain place in Islamabad and then he said that Pakistan in itself is very beautiful and indeed a land so blessed that we as a nation do not even deserve it!……..his last point made me think …maybe now we don’t deserve it but it really was the labor of love of the people who got it made…and since they wanted it for their future generations to know the joy of running free on the roads with no fear of the men in greens and browns therefore for their sake we desereve it….we do…if only we’ll learn to love it. And then again maybe…all we need is an external force to prick us to come together and realize that we are all standing on the same side of the line????

Who does america think it is to be going about being a busy body and spending its million of dollars on arms and taking lives of its own young men and everyone else’s people too when it should worry about the like of Ike s hitting its beaches and its growing rate of  unemployment…

Since when has war creatred peace???!!

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And it amazes me what cheek the american leaders have to be so sanguinly declaring that they ought to attack Pakistani basis…read this and this

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Note: Searched the pic from Google images and then applied some effects :-)

‘Ma!’….I croaked and curled into a ball as the feverish feeling tightened its clutches…

 ‘Jee Mera bacha, Meri Jaan’ My mother leapt up from her tired slumber to hold me tight in her warm embrace and soothe my all hurting and aching self….

 Comforted by the love of Mom’s arms and crooning of her soft voice…I fell into a deep sleep after some time….

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I was massaging my mom’s feet and then alternately pressing her legs and arms to bring down the pain that was shooting through her body. I pressed my forefingers of each hand on her temples and moved them in a circular fashion to do away with her sharp bursts of headaches….The little one held her hand comfortingly and my strong brother stood by ready to take her to the doctor if need be…..we were all their for her, with her….

 Writhing in pain she said: “Ma……”

 ………………. something went slicing through our hearts………………

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Note: Pic. courtesy of www.deviantart.com

    smiley.gifClichéd as it is, but life is certainly not a bed of roses. While you go through the atrocities and difficulties it tends to throw at you there are times when you at long last feel very tired and deflated of all energy….it is these times when you need some morale booster to lift you up and give you a shot of hope-a-line.

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It was such a time when too many thoughts are weighing down your brain and even as you work on an urgent task at hand your train of thoughts tends to get off track, putting a strain on your nerves. It was elevenish on my computer clock infact 11:11 at which time surprisingly my eyes happen to fall on the time being reflected on the monitor since past three days…

smiley.gifI was slowly munching on a lemon biscuit after having gobbled up a small square of Cadbury’s Dairymilk, which, thanks to the people going to Middle East for deployments are being plentifully circulated within my office now a days. I was working at my leisure as some of my favorite  songs kept the beat up on my headphones ( thanks to the songs folders shared by my office mates) Apparently everything was at peace….but appearances can be deceptive. I was strained, a lot of thinking can do that with your brain…momentarily I took my eyes off the CTree commands glaring at me from the screen, pushed the back of my chair a bit to relax my muscles. As the drum beat picked up in the song my eyes fell on the tissue box sitting in the corner of my desk…..The big, sunny, glowing , yellow Smiley on it reflexively tried to push my lips upwards in a smile….it was just so adorable…so full of life and hope….bright against the stark black of the tissue box…..I felt my nerves loosening a bit….and every now and then I keep glancing at the big Smiley to replenish my spirit

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No wonder they say you should smile…it could sure make someone’s day !!

No, I know it’s not Winter and infact it’s not even in the air anymore….if anything, Winter has passed away with a chill and a wave….Even so I am hibernating….no! No! I haven’t shifted to Australia either …btw does Australia has bears????….I know the cute, cuddlyKoalas are there, though I’m not sure about their being cuddlesome…I’ve only seen Koalas on NatGeo and animal sticker sheets.

 So anyway I have totally digressed from what I originally wanted to say…I wanted to say that I have been and may even continue to be ‘hibernating‘ for a while….You know how they say if there is a problem then ’sleep on it!’ I’m literally trying to do that :) ….. and Ya besides lethargy being my lifelong friend I have , like other people, stuck the same bumper sticker on me: “Sorry I am very busy now a days”….(Whatever!!*!$)…

This last Saturday our company arranged for us to attend a Time Management session by one Dr. Hanif Mohammad….despite it being a Saturday a working day, the session went quite well, thanks to Samra, Preeyaa, Basit and Nida….and even myself for our continual quips and remarks throughout….However Dr. Hanfi said that if you are unable to complete your tasks within a given time frame then you must be slacking somewhere and that you should take each task as an ugly frog which you have to eat.

He said: “Suppose you have to eat a very big, extremely Ugly frog everyday….When would you eat it?”

Almost all of us agreed that it would be early in the morning…Bingo!! that was his point anyway….Our tasks are our toads and we must try to do away with them as soon as first ray of sun manages to fight itself into your eye…Oh man! wouldn’t Fear Factor guys would have simply loved this? One thing…infact two things which rung a bell somewhere in the remote depths of my mind (where there is certainly not a vacuum…or else I wouldn’t have heard the chiming) Two things were:

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     Brainstorm hard and think, what is that one thing that is most important in your life and that you want to achieve……Squeeze out atleast 30 mins each day to work on towards that goal!!
  2. Take out five to fifteen minutes each day in the morning and ‘prioritize‘ your tasks…needless to say start with the tasks that would fall in the category of ‘Urgent&Important’, synonymous with ‘Critical’…this way tasks that are left wouldn’t be that important anyway…..

Dr. Hanif also told us and we calculated on that, that each of us atleast waste an hour of our office working hour which when divided by out monthly salary and then multiplied by number of weeks in a year…gave the company a loss of atleast xxxmillion Rupees, God! that’s huge….which reminds me I should get on with the web setup of Iris (our company’s internet banking and much more ,utility)…I dropped by here while the Oracle10g Client is installing itself with me occasionaly clicking an option here and there..besides with me having the advantage of coming in early today :)

So anyways, what I really wanted to say was that, that I might be hibernating for some time and then again maybe not but even so, if this DayBreak seems to be taking a little longer than usual kindly do not think that I got lost in the dark somewhere…I’m BUSY :P

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in trying to find the land of the rising sun (metaphorically speaking :)

Warning: Quite a dark and a dreary piece of text ahead :)  

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The reality of life is simply ‘uncertainty’….one moment you are there and the other gone, vanished….turned to a mere cargo packed in a coffin being transported in the luggage compartment of a plane. The last two years have been portraying this ‘age of Aquarius’ concept to me. Blasts, fires, buildings falling down, suicide attacks, sudden deaths, deaths from drug overdose and what not…. Death is inevitable and try as we might we cannot deny it, but seeing the clutches of mortality tightening so blatantly makes living all the more surreal.

During my junior year at university, a sophomore guy got killed by his own gun in the class…. I had not known the guy, but my brother did and many other people did too….for them he was a live, walking, talking human and for me merely a name…yet his death intermittently haunts me especially now when I think that this would have been his final semester and that his parents would have proudly told everyone that their son was going to be a ‘Telecom Engineer’….I got to be one, but he never did. Another guy died when a football hit him hard on his heart during a friendly game and yet another senior of ours died of a brain tumor. And he was an only son, that too of elderly parents. 8 people were incinerated in the horrifying Berger Paints factory inferno few days ago and an Airforce plane crashed in the GIKI campus killing the pilot, co-pilot and a gardener tending to the little plants carefree of all the cares in the world. Heath Ledger, one of my very much admired, actor died of a drug overdose…

I remember how mesmerized I was by the movie “Final Destination”….Being alone, I had watched it in rapt attention forgetting the assignment I had been working on. It’s been like 4 or 5 years since I watched it but after that it often comes to how thin a border exists between breathing and getting a straight line on the cardiogram…….Last year I had gotten addicted to this song by ‘Junoon’ and I had listened to it almost in a recursive loop, it said:

“matti main mil jayen gay

Bhoolo na, bhoolo na

Geet hain jo teri meri saanson main

Khwab hain jo teri meri ankhon main

Saray mitti main mil jayen gay

Bhoolo na …bhoolo na…..”

And yet we wonder why the smell of the wet earth attracts us so. The other day my friends pointed out a building burnt to black soot during the 27th December riots and upon looking at it I had instinctively said “Wow!”…it really wasn’t a piece of art  but come to think of it, what a stark combination the brilliant raging fire is to the black and grey it leaves behind. Some place which  pulsates with the mirth of bustling activity is turned into ashes…becoming history in a matter of  little time….such is the ‘uncertainty’ of the coming moment….unless we break away from the ties of gravity and mass and see the future itself..

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According to the essay that I had read about the “age of Aquarius” during my high school years…this era in itself marked the penetration of anxiety, dissatisfaction …..’Uncertainity’..since it was being ruled by the water

…Water, the magical element is fluid, never stops, doesn’t know its own shape, it flows wherever it finds an opening….and we are caught in between the troughs and crests of its waves….highs and lows…yet always being swept away from one point by the flow….

 It’s just plain ironic….kinda unbelievable…..just yesterday while looking at the news flashes going at the bottom of the screen on Geo I read that BB was condoling the mother of a deceased member during the 18th October incident, I thought….death doesn’t comes to the mighty and rich, did it?…..God smiled at my utter nonsense….he sent a quick response…..now I wish I hadn’t hoped that. No directly I never said I hoped it but thinking this, in a rather obtuse way I did hope didn’t I?

This is the way Allah (SWT) talks….subtly, silently and solidly….and then whoever understands, Quran Karim states in an ayat:

“….aur iss main nishanian hain aqal walon kay liyay.”

And there are signs herein for the people of thought (or people with intelligence)

BB dies when she gets in the car which is not only bullet proof but bomb proof as well….death calls…it called her out from the sun roof….nothing can defy what the Higher power does….I am sick of Musharraf and his disarrayed policies but do I wish for a similar fate for him….I thought for a moment after this news….my heart went cold at what my mind’s eye saw….a sudden death of a leader, how weak he may be, with no one else to take the charge….means crash of a system….crumbling of protective walls….country becoming very vulnerable……………….No I love my land, it doesn’t need more surprises.

The news is overwhelming but even more indigestible are the fake  tears of the other political leaders…or are they the tears of gratitude from God that they got spared and maybe they will now see the error of their ways? Oh me, the optimistic pessimist ever and to me it’s not even an oxymoron, it’s a way of life.

Allah (SWT) help my dear Pakland come out of yet another turmoil…oh what a crazy era I have been witness to…our grandparents saw the war of independence and we are still waiting for the day of deliverance….