Dreamland Dubai A good summary Atif payee. Besides the mistake pointed out by rangeela, there's one more thing that's not entirely correct. Dubai's history dates back to hardly half a centruy at max. So it was never a tourist attraction for its rich history or indigenous culture. It was always material wealth, so not much has changed on that front. People who wanted to witness the historic connection would always prefer Lebanon or Jordan, even in the past.

Fathers and Daughters It's undoubtedly one of the best pieces that ever adorned chowk FP. Good to see it here. For more comments please refer to your ilogs page. :)

Who is Making the Oil Fume ? "Perhaps we are on the verge of a new era in which oil could lose its importance, exactly as coal did 100 years ago�

I sincerely hope it does. The adverse outcomes of the oil-hegemony have already afflicted this planet beyond relief. Solar power is the only way to the future, and as long as oil is there, it will remain undermined.

A very interesting and informative read Adnan. Thanks

Mohajirs Are People Too Re: # 82 AmaaN izuber miaN, I obviously implied 'successful hinju career businessmen' of money-lending fame with my use of that term. Aren't they the ones responsible for bringing strict professionalism into the very business, in particular, and into all business, in general? The banya mentality of mohajirs is a natural repercussion of their pre-partition communal association...or simply put, of their hinjun roots....and that implication is in no way meant to be condescending.

Mohajirs Are People Too haha Atif payee, they are people too indeed; I am yet to see a Karachhiite with three pairs of limbs or a pooshal!

I have visited Karachi only twice in my life and the last time I did was about 12 years back, and the visit lasted only about 3 days. But I do have some fond memories of the place, particularly the wide roads and the beach. I kind of liked the place and thought even then that it's much more open and welcoming compared to Lahore, may be that had something to do with my innate affinity for the sea.

As for the professionalism part, I couldn't agree more on the fact that Karachiites are far ahead of the rest of Pakistan, including Islamabad. I think one natural and important outcome of accumulation of a wide variety of people and cultures in a place is the invocation of professionalism in them. And then there's the banya mentality that was brought along by the mohajirs...

Where Billions Vanish A pelletron accelerator for research on nuclear and particle physics? This must go down as one of the best jokes in science history books.

It is indeed an irony, the way these hard earned billions have gone down the drain. Everybody knows the fate met by the Cockraft Walton accelerator installed at CASP, GCU Lahore, and that was just a donation, but nobody learnt a lesson. Their focus seems to be on sheer quantity while no significant enhancement in quality of research being conducted in Pakistan is visible. Heck, i'd say it's rather deteriorated over recent years.

I, Samurai Cool. Coincidentally, I watched 'The Last Samurai' a couple of days ago and have developed a strong fondness and reverence for this Japanese clan since. An ostensibly savage group of people who live by the sword, and yet have princliples, values and customs that would make the most civilized of communities covet.

Search for the God Particle Nasah re #4,5. The Higgs is by no means as elsuive or ghostly a particle as you conjecture it to be, nor is dark matter. The only difference between the two is that while the former exists only hypothetically as yet, the latter, we have enough evidence, does exist in the physical universe too, we just don't know its exact form and its characteristics as of today. Higgs 'field' behaves juts like every other fermionic or bosonic feild: a perfectly normal field causing the matter to interact in a certain way. And Higgs or no Higgs, there are no 'empty' spaces in the universe anyway, there is always one field or the other filling all those spaces, what we see as articles are the physical manifestaitions of those fields, resulting from their perturbation. That's what the advent of quantum field theory and string theory have taught us.

VRV #1, Just a little correction: Higgs is not the Bose's Boson per se, it's an etirely different object which does not follow Bose's statistics, and that's what makes it all the more difficult to hunt down.

India, Pakistan and the Kashmir dispute Sometimes I wonder if the Kashmir issue was actually resolved, god forbid, where would 50% of the news on all those Indo-Pak news channels come from, and what would happen to those hordes of writers/reporters/journalists devoted to this very cause?
It might sound stupid, actually it dies, but this whole issue appears to me as some sort of a media conspiracy - a contorted form of the `divide and rule` strategy. lol!

Kucha Garda No doubt the `poem` was written under the influence of `Kucha Garda`. I wouldn`t expect it to come any better.

Endless Knight Fabulous! The interconnection between the various eternal cycles -that of night and day, the spring and autumn, and the ultimate one of life and death - of nature has been beautifully drawn out. The writing style is thoroughly engrossing.

``Why nature is so obsessed with its cycles, few know and even fewer try to understand. ``

In the same spirit, this is what i wrote in an ilog entry a while ago:

If, somehow, the earth stops rotating, would we stop growing in age?
Agar aisa hai tau koi brake lagaoo pls. I can`t stand this injustice...Who gave the earth the right to feed upon our ages, just to satisfy its wicked aspiration of ROTATING AROUND!!?

and as for the `even though everyone knows the ultimate futility of dusk overcoming all` bit, this is what Iftikhar Arif has to say :

raat kay doosray kinaray per
jaltay bujhtay huay chiragh ki lau
khauf-e-nadeeda kay isharay per
mujh say kehti hai Iftikhar Arif
raat kay doosray kinaray per
raat ik aur intizaar meiN hai
!
koi chupkay say dil meiN kehta hia
raat per apna bus chalay na chalay
khwab tau apnay ikhtiyar meiN hai!

and indeed this `khwab` is what instills the zeal in us to forever seek a tangent to all these eternal cycles!

Always enjoy your artistry BJ. Look forward to more.

The Girl on the Car Window ``He turned that way, with squinted eyes focusing hard he saw, against the glass window was the face of a little girl, with her nose pressed hard against the glass pane and saying something``

since a picture is worth a thousand words:

Black in my Rainbow Re: # 8 I don`t think anybody intended to `batter your poetry to fit his mould`. The sole purpose of these forums is to discuus and opine on whatever is published, and that`s exactly what has been done here. Even if someone is brutally castigating, try to take it in the right spirit and it will certianly help you blossom as a writer.
take it easy.

A Trip Down Moscow Lanes #16 Glad you liked it Naqshbandi sahib. The younger gneration, as I have stated in the article, is much more genial and welcoming compared to the older one. But I won`t go as far as saying they are polite, and my doing so could rather be attributed to my obliviousnes to their language and social gestures. Indeed, exceptions are everywhere.
I neither experienced nor witnessed any acts of violence throughout my sojourn, so can`t say much in that respect. There was one little incident I encountered on a subway, but even that didn`t have any recial undetone to it. However, since the economic conditions have declined abruptly and this fact is pretty conspicuous, I would naturally expect the crime rate to soar. One reason for this being that the police, much like the case in the subcontinent, is notorious for its co-operation with the criminals and its ripping apart of the tourists. But, speaking for myself, I walked alone on the alleys and in the subway stations until as late as 1 a.m., on most of the nights, with an SLR hanging around my neck, and still have managed to return in one piece.
The Moscow State University IS fantastic, nobody is doubting that, with all the facilities that you`d expect in a cosmopolis, but again it is not very well maintained. In fact, I developed the same notion about almost every thing there. It looked as if the Russians, as if in an instant fit of glorification, accumulated a lot of wealth and initiated a brisk wave of progress in every walk of life, but then suddenly, as if they lost interest it would seem, left everything in the middle, to look after itself. There`s everything there; it`s just outdated!

And Atif is spot on in #20 that Russians are some of the brainiest people in the world. They would venture into things in the fields of Mathematics and Physics that the rest of the world won`t even dare even tread close to. But the downward spiral has played its part here too, despite teh fact that they have managed to maintain some standards. For example, this conference that I went to, was the first one in Physics to be organised in Moscow in a span of about 30 years! That is a real tragedy for a country that has been the heart of excellence in pure sciences and whose pople have contributed more to its various deciplines for decades than perhaps the rest of the world combined!

A Trip Down Moscow Lanes #11 irony, ain`t it ironic that men have a huge capacity to be landed anywhere anytime throughout their lives ;)

#12 That`s an interesting question you ask scout. I`d ceretainly love to go there again, like I said earlier the place had certain feels and impressions exclusive to it; actually any place is good enough to visit at least once in a life time, as long as the visit is by choice and not by necessity. Because in the latter case, even the sweetest of joiurneys would appear burdensome. As for myself, the nomad in me would find it really hard to settle down at one place, just like my mind finds it hard to settle on nb, or aimie .... if you know what I mean! :P

#13 I certainly did, the only thing missing was a Bengali tigress`s company... :|

#14 Thanks Hiren. You can reach me at einsqad2@hotmail.com

Of Men And Rats Exquisite stuff! In places, particularly in the first half, the plot bears remarkable resemblance to and looks clearly inspired by Bano`s `Raja Gidh`; even the notion of ultimate self-destruction in a deluded attempt to maintain hegemony over the nature mimcs that in the said book. But the theme is very well presented and the details are penned down with great care and diligence. Some of the sentences are really very porfound and, as Bhatti sahib correctly pointed out, force the reader to think. Creative expresion is beyond doubt the true source of emancipation as well as amelioration of the human kind.
Thoroughly enjoyed it. Well done and do submit more.

regards