Of Crabs and Sunsets

Brought to you by a cell phone camera in the absence of a real one. Taken during separate visits to seaview Karachi and sandspit Karachi. As always, clickit to bigit in a separate window.

At Sandspit Karachi: Camels, sunset, wet sand and the setting sun reflecting off it

At seaview Karachi: The slightly reddish spots are the crabs. Always makes me wonder how these survive in the ultra-polluted water

Some days are better than others ...

... today doesn't happen to be one of them. The sense of discontentment was there all day while at work. Something which has been there for all of the week actually but today was just much more apparent. On days like this, I prefer to stay at work as late as I can then come back and go straight to bed. Not that I have much of an option these days anyway. The euphoria of shifting out to a new place has died down to the realization of the work that needs to be done to make it habitable. currently its just a bed dumped in a room and thats it. Its too quiet, too lonely and too empty to be able to provide any other comfort except a bed to sleep in. Lack of internet only makes it worse, though I will hopefully get that done by tomorrow. I was planning to occupy my time by drilling a few holes in the walls and putting up a few things that need to be screwed in only to find out the drill machine I was so proud of doesn't work ... something wrong with its battery charger. There are things that need to be done and I just keep putting them off ... things at work, things at home, things to get, things for the future, just not in the frame of mind to do anything. Wish I was a compulsive busy body always needing something to do. My sinus problem isn't making things any easier either. The runny nose problem I've had since the last 11 years, in the past year and a half it has aggravated to the point that my nose feels swollen inside and hurts all the time and my head feels pressurized, and I have developed a persistant cough which I suspect is due to the cold settling into my lungs, and a bit of a sore throat too. It keeps me awake, wakes me up in the night, and makes it really hard for me to get out of bed in the morning. Lying down and breathing simultaneously is become quite a chore. Need to go to a doctor, keep putting that off too.

On a good note, the countdown i started a little over 366 days ago has whittled down to nearly 338 days. I have managed to survive 28 days of it, albeit 18 of them where in Islamabad. Looking forward to the first month of the countdown on the 15th. Haven't achieved much in it though. Next milestone of course is when I go back to Islamabad end-February, and bring mom back with me for two months. Mom coming here is what I'm pinning my hopes on. Hopefully the two months of her being here will lift me out of the state of depressive discontentment and push me on to go through the remaining 8 months of the countdown with relative happiness. Even when she leaves for Islamabad after her pollen allergy period is safely over in early May. Time does pass quickly after all.

Countdown to Salvation

365 days, 5 hours, 14 minutes and 36 seconds to Salvation! This is my Salvation counter that resides on my desktop, reminding me everyday what I need to do to make it happen. I put it up today.

Today is 15th December 2007. I've been in this god forsaken city for 1 year 6 months and 5 days. I've started to move today, from the apartment I've been in since I came to this city all that time ago. Packing up was like opening a Pendora's box of buried memories. Memories of lives changed, of good things taken away, of friends lost, of hopes dead, of ambition failed, of people changed.

For the next 365 days, each day will be a step to salvation, each with a place, each with a small part to play in the bigger scheme of things, each to contribute to the effort towards a single minded purpose, all the way to the final goal, to salvation. What is salvation? Salvation is freedom from this place, from the memories of all that it took away, it is a move towards the better, the happier, till the two and a half years that I would have been here would fade away to a distant bad memory, a nightmare, that you forget once you wake up from it. 553 days gone, another 365 days, 4 hours, 44 minutes and 06 seconds to go.

15th December 2007 - Step 1: I've started to move from the apartment.

I will be out of this city by 15th December 2008. This is my promise to myself.

Nostalgia

"Friday, November 19, 2004

The night is over and I'm really really weary

After dinner I came back to my room discussed some implemention issues and approaches of the Mousatron with Hashim till 3:00 am. After that it was a couple of 8051 e-Books and Data Sheets for me. It didnt take me long to get bored though and I ended up watching Legends of the Fall again ..."

What you see up there in an excerpt from a blog entry that my good friend I-T (Iqbal Talaat Bhatti) made in his blog "I-T's Blog Central" three years ago. This is one of the first few entries. I-T started blogging in Novemeber 2004, back then blogger was pretty new, and all of us were home from GIKI for mid-semester break. I-T didn't stop just there but infact i'm sure he was the single influencing factor in getting many people to blog, including me. Though I never was as faithful to it as I-T, as is evident from his long list of archive as opposed to my very short one. I even killed my blog and reincarnated it after a year. Please do pay I-T's blog a visit, the link is in my right pane under 'More Blabbers'. Anyway, since I am celebrating sad-yet-sweet nostalgia, I will continue to explain the background to the entry I-T made above ...

It was our 5th semester, and me, I-T, Hashim and moody (Ali Osman Hameed) formed a group for our Microprocessor Interfacing course project. We were all hoping to become fully qualified Computer Systems Engineers in another year and a half. We, rather ambitiously, decided to make a mouse-in-a-maze robot and after careful and lengthy deliberation, christened it 'mous-A-tron' (i think I-T and I came up with that one). A huge undertaking as it was, I-T and Hashim took the job of working on the code for the microprocessor itself, with I-T doing bulk of the actual coding, I was entrusted with making a circuit to accept the signal from the processor and send it up to the 15volt stepper motors (stepping it up from 5 volts to 15 volts on the way), which would in ideal conditions turn to make the mouseatron run, and I also designed the robot body in this rather cool engineering design software that we learnt in our 2nd Semester. I can't remember the name right now, but incidentally, it was I-T's elder brother, Kashif Bhatti, who was a mechanical engineer and had graduated in the spring of the same year we had joined, taught us the software back in our 2nd semester as he was our Engineering Design teacher.

Anyway, Moody and Hashim took the responsibility of actually constructing the robot body using the services of the workshop in the mechanical engineering faculty of the university. I-T also single handedly constructed the infra red obstacle detection circuit which was supposed to be the 'eyes' mousatron would use to get out of the maze. We spent some four weeks labouring over the project, during which I-T went crazy learning about the 8051 microprocessor while I could claim a half PhD in stepper motor theory. We finally got done with the four seperate parts of the robot but found out that they wouldn't work when put together and there was no time and hope to debug as the semester was nearly over, not to mention the final presentation was in the next few days, so in the end we showed all 4 components working seperately and incidentally got away with one of the highest scores in the class. Apparently we had done more with a non-working project than many people with fully functional ones :)

Fast Forward a year-and-a-half

All four of us graduated in the class of 2006. Our final exams ended mid-May 2006 with our convocation on 7th of June. Among our various accomplishments was an A in our two-semester, final year project, for which I-T, Hashim and I were again in a group. I think after mouseatron the three of us almost always ended up making project groups together.

Fast Forward three years

I-T: After graduation, I-T spent some time at his home in Lahore with his family. He had earlier applied to Microsoft, made it all the way and got hired. And I believe that he thoroughly and truly deserves it. But even before that, he worked at GIKI for sometime as a teaching assistant (TA), which I'm sure he was really good at. He moved to Microsoft which is situated in Redmond, outside Seattle, in April 2007 and been there since. Other than working, he spends his time experimental cooking, photographing, kayaking, canoe-ing, extreme sporting, biking, travelling and has nearly drowned at one occasion and multiple-fractured his arm at another. He's in Pakistan (Lahore) these days, his first trip home since Microsoft and is due to leave for America in a few weeks time. He blogs very regularly at his blog central. Link in the right pane. He is also found to cheer sad or sick friends up (meaning me) by sending them Chocolates and KFC through gift services.

Hashim: After graduating with the rest of us, Hashim, originally from Rawalpindi, worked in a local software house for a while, then went to GIKI as a TA around the same time as I-T, and left a few months after him. He is currently pursuing his masters degree at Chalmers in Goteborg, Sweden.

Moody: Moody also from Lahore party-ed after graduation and then moved to London, being a British national, as he was born there. There he switched jobs (and apartments) with quite regularity, yet never letting the party die out as many of our batchmates from GIKI went to UK for studies and proved to be his constant companions. He is currently working in the I-T department at Harrod's and can be heard from (online ofcourse) complaining about his 11 hour shifts.

I: Having gotten a job offer from P&G while I was in my 8th semester (I had interned for them in the summers after my 6th), I moved to Karachi just 2 days after graduating from GIKI. I started with the company on 12th June 2006. Coming from Islamabad, which is as diametrically opposite to Karachi as any two cities can get, I have had a rough time living alone here, with very few friends, a few personal set backs, and limited mobility due to the rather unsafe nature of the city. I have been here for nearly 1.5 years now, and I spend my time away from work in my room, staring at my laptop screen, enjoying the delights of unlimited internet. I was reading through I-T's blog archives when i stumbled upon the post above. My mother is still in Islamabad, where she has lived for 27 years and where I was born and raised. My sister now lives in Dubai with her husband, having gotten married some 2 months after I came to Karachi.

Here's the link to I-T's blog entry that triggered the cascade: The night is over and I'm really really weary


Here's a google map with GIKI, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi tagged along with my impressions of them. For Redmond, London and Gotenborg refer to your nearest google map.



View Larger Map


P.S: I'll try to dig up some old mouseatron stuff from my old PC which is lying like a relic in my room now and post them here. Next time I'll try to post about Egypt. A few people were interested in that.

Sadness Prevails

Happy Ramadan all you observing Muslims out there, today was the 3rd Ramadan - 1428 Hijri, in Pakistan. Another half an hour to Iftari and another day gone, mercifully rather quickly. Its Sunday and as usual I'm confined to my room, sitting in my bed, stuck to my laptop, playing with everything that can be played with via the internet.

I miss my mom's Iftari, or even the one I used to make myself last year. Now thanks to a busted fridge, a flatmate you hate (and vice versa), no car, and no friends who would like to break their fast with you, my definition of Iftari has come down to dates, water, a pack of lays and uhmm a peach (till stocks last). Then i'll pray, sleep and wake up and order a 6" Subway I guess *sigh* The stuff above accumulated over a few chance visits to the proximity of grocery stores. Karachi is not a place where you can walk to your nearest shop alone, on foot. Its too damn unfriendly for that. I know I wouldn't have hung on if not for a job I really really really like and uhmm yea thats about it.

As for the flatmate we used to be on good enough terms till about 2 months ago, thats when all hell broke lose, had an argument with my flatmate, and sadly she stooped to the level of verbal violence that I can never even imagine stooping to in about a six hundred billion years. The reason?! Me not helping her with getting the fridge fixed. Hell, I didn't want to tell her I was so depressed I couldn't even find the energy to feed myself 5 days outta 7 in a week let alone be bothered about whether the fridge is working or not. Again, my work life is great, its just my personal one thats screwed up! Last year I made both of us sehri and iftari, since my flatmate's culinary skills are very limited, and for some reason NEVER rubbed it in, but my flatmate makes a point of hurling at me, everything that she has done and I haven't ... and oh of course since she moved to Karachi first and had already bought the fridge and the TV and the microwave and such, its obviously 'hers' hence now off-limits to me.

The silver lining? Well I'm praying more regularly, more regularly than I have in more than a year, I hope I stick to it. I'm working and uhmm updating my blog, if that counts as a silver lining.

Adios all, 10 mins to go, I'll go wash my dates and slice my peach.

For those who find some terms up there unfamiliar:

Sehri: the meal taken before the fast. It must be taken before dawn.
Iftari: the meal taken when the fast is broken. Taken at sundown.