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The language at the bottom is Welsh and reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” This apparently happened as someone emailed a welsh person for translation and the return back was not the solution but an auto message.
What did they say about the welsh again? 
A massive earthquake has hit Pakistan yesterday morning in the Ziarat region, 60 km to the north east of Quetta. According to eyewitness reports entire villages have been flattened as the initial shocks were 6.4 on the Richter scale and after shocks around 6.2 and 6.1 which were felt in the afternoon in the same area.
The casualties are piling up as we speak because relief operations are still underway and rubble is being removed to check for survivors. uptill now 200 people have perished with 500 injured all over the region.
Most houses have been destroyed due to massive boulders falling down the mountains during these shocks. Rescue workers are digging mass graves as there is fear that bodies left in the open might spread disease. The worst is yet to come I am afraid as 12000 people are now homeless and out in the winter cold and as we all know this region is below zero at this time of the year.
Its time once again that we got together as a nation and donate whatever we can to help in this effort, the first requirements like last time will be tents, foods and medicine. Please do what you can as several NGOS such as “The Mercy Corps” have sent their teams in the affected area and aid can be sent through them. i would advise anyone who wishes to donate in the effort to check out the organization and whether it is “present” in the affected area right now. We must help though…
Donation links
Message from “The street kids of pakistan org” for Karachi residents who wish to help
The Volunteers are collecting stuff for the survivors of the Earthquake – Balochistan- please send warm cloths, shoes, blankets, Torches with cells, water, medicine, tin food.. please drop the stuff of at 7/2, zulfiqar street 4 opposite Carlton Hotel:
Details: 300-2332142, 321-7272-369
Note: Truck to Balochistan will leave on Saturday Eve, so kindly drop of all donations before that.
In most countries of the world leaders engage in forward planning to negotiate and bring in prosperity whilst they are in office. Pakistani politicians however are caught between a rock and a hard place as our media tells us.
Personally instead of blaming everyone from top to bottom I cannot recall when we were not caught in this position in a democratic setup. Seems to be that our “phoren friends” are hellbent on ensuring that dictatorship prevails in the end because after all it is only through one man rule that the most absurd of decisions can be implemented. Quite frankly “Mush” was a dictator but he would not go against our interests and he paid the price for his patriotism in the end.
Right now our honorable finance guru (Mr Tareen) is talking about different plans to rescue us from our ailing economy. He labels them as plan A, B & C as follows.
A) Help from phoren friends
This is not coming no more, Pakistan has totally alienated itself by its asking for alms wearing armani approach and thus no one is willing to cough up any money for us. Not even our long term charity giver Saudi Arabia which does not like the current government’s overtures with the Ai ra nians. The western friends that we claim to have are already suffering at home themselves so even if they have any money to spare i doubt it will be for us.
B) World Bank
This just went kaput today, as the IMF stopped the World Bank from donating to us, i use the word donate and charity because we are never going to pay these folks back. The IMF claims the WB has no jurisdiction to grant us loans. Hmmm so basically we are now divided and placed in some kind of weird world map which has jurisdictions, perhaps the 5th world?
C) IMF
The only option remaining to us now, they are offering 6 billion dollars of money that will trickle down to the suffering masses because the IMF will they say audit each and every step. Poor Imfers have no idea how good we Pakistanis are at bribing phoren officials. Before you know it the auditors will be the toast of the town.
So lets recap our scenario…we are as poor or no better off than when we were born, we increased our economy but increased our population at a rate triple of that. We are a nation of 17 million beggars who are plying around the world looking for alms. thus the eternal question remains…what wil become of us??? Well let’s just put it this way, i just heard that even the Qaid dead as he is has applied for an Ekama, to shift his remains to Dubai.
On 30th October 1947 Qaid E Azam the founder of Pakistan and the greatest leader we have ever said the following on reaching Lahore where several brutal acts were committed against minorities.
“We have, undoubtedly, achieved Pakistan and that too without bloody war and practically peacefully by moral and intellectual force and with the power of pen which is no less mighty than the sword and so our righteous cause has triumphed. Are we now going to besmear and tarnish this greatest achievement for which there is not parallel in the whole history of the world by resorting to frenzy, savagery and butchery?”
Alas we in Pakistan never heeded the words of our founder and we have been butchering, harassing and brutalizing the minorities in this country at any chance that was given to us to this day. The worst part is when people in our media and specially anchors take it upon themselves to indulge in discrimination and hate-mongering of the highest degree and bear no responsibility or lament for it afterwards.
One such incident has shocked me to the bone recently when on September 7th 2008 in a live show on Geo commemorating the 34th anniversary of members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community being declared non Muslim in Pakistan, Dr Aamir Liaqut Hussain a well known political figure, former state minister for religious affairs and self styled religious scholar made absolutely no attempt to stop his guests, Maulana Mohammad Ameen(a respected deoband cleric) and Dr. Saeed Inayatulla,( Naib Ameer and Patron-in-Chief of Madrassa Saulatiya, Saudi Arabia) when they referred to members of the Ahmadiyya Community as “kafir” (infidel) and maintained that anyone who holds beliefs as Ahmadi Muslims is “wajib-ul-qatl” (deserving of death). The guest panelists referred to the extermination of the members of the Ahmadiyya Community as incumbent upon all Muslims. Not only this but Dr Aamir went as far as to repeat this instruction several times and urge muslims to kill without fear. The video of this live transmission is still available on youtube for the world to see.
Aalim Online is a widely watched religious TV show which presents panel discussions on religious issues well as those pertaining to daily life on Geo TV and is hosted by Dr Aamir Liaqut Hussain. This program is aired simultaneously in Asia and Europe as well as the US on Geo’s frequency. In layman terms it is basically our version of Billy Graham and has been hugely successful in the recent times in gathering a following of millions of people who tune in to praise their own beliefs and pooh pooh anyone who does not toe the line. It is the brain child of Dr Hussain, who has acquired a controversial reputation. He has been known to portray himself as an extremely religious and god fearing man who is on air every night just because he wants to save our souls. However I wonder whose soul he was saving in the telecast mentioned above immediately following which two very prominent members of the Ahmadi community in Pakistan were murdered.
According to the information received via an Asian human rights organization, at 1:15pm on September 8, 18 hours after the broadcast, six persons entered the Fazle Umer Clinic, a two-story hospital at Mirpurkhas city and two of them went to the second floor and started pressuring 45 year-old Dr. Abdul Manan Siddiqui to come downstairs to attend to a patient in crisis. Dr. Manan left his office and descended into an ambush. He was shot 11 times and died on the spot. His private guard was also shot and is in a serious condition. A woman was also injured by firing. The killers remained at the hospital until the doctor was declared dead, then they walked out of the building’s front entrance. Police registered the killers as unknown.
On September 9, 48 hours after the broadcast, Mr. Yousaf, a 75 year-old rice trader and district chief of the Ahmadi sect was killed on his way to prayer in Nawab Shah, Sindh province. Yousaf was fired on from people on motor bikes, and sustained three bullet wounds. He died on the way to the hospital. The assailants had taken a route past a police station. No one was arrested.
I wonder who will bear responsibility for these murders, or bear the crux of the pain now being suffered by their families? Why this telecast was never censored or taken off air even after such an immense tragedy in its wake is anyone’s guess. Aalim Online continues to dole out zealousness coated in sickly sweet religious piousness and stays in its prime time slot because it perhaps generates revenue and ratings generous enough for people to look the other way?
Whatever the case may be this is by far one of the most intolerable incidents of media irresponsibility on naked display for world to see and a prominent example of journalism and broadcasting gone horribly wrong. We in Pakistan often make examples of the Shiv Sena and their hatred towards Muslims but where are we sleeping when Aalim Online goes on air? Perhaps in the same place where people use a religion whose very meaning is peace to go on a rampage of viciousness in the name of salvation.
As published in The Hoot on Oct 26th 2008
Recently the Oxford youth business development organization held a contest for young entrepreneurs and their mentors in this region of the world to pick a business venture along the following criteria
Obviously many teams with their Mentors from Oxford participated in this prestigious competition and a fellow co author at Karachi Metro blogs and her team won the coveted first spot. It gives me immense pleasure to announce that this team from “Pakistan” focused on an enterprise which not only gives an entire new range of clothing for women suitable to our own style and heritage as well as sizes but has a visible social impact and relevance as well. How do they do this? Well its simple half of Pakistan’s populace is made up of females and “Daneen” which means princess focuses on providing through their clothing line an opportunity for females here to be themselves. That is follow their own ideas rather than aspiring to fit into clothes made for “0″ sizes Daneen’s line will embody the woman of Pakistan in everything from style to sizes which are more tuned to proportions here. Plus it will provide employment opportunities to rural females as well as young fashion designers who are being laid off from the nosediving textile sector here. In essence it will be a start of emancipation of the Pakistani female, ethnic and soulful.
My personal congratulations to team “Daneen” (Sadaf Muhammad Aslam, Rafia Iqbal Hashmi, Sidrat Asim, Syeda Farea Hashmi) from the Institute of Business Administration and their mentor Neha Sethi. Well done !!!!
Totally non pc but so hilarious I have seen it like 10 times already and I cannot stop laughing. Note to viewer if you are a conservative Muslim this is when you press the big x up there…enjoy 
Credits : Jeff Dunham
Its very common in today’s world to commercialize the needs of a “metro sexual” man and sell him everything from designer briefs to designer gadgets and ties all at the expense of his large bank balance and causing even more inflation of his over inflated ego. Personally I feel objectified catagorized and over exploited!!
The following takes the cake however and is a body washed aimed solely at washing “man bits” whatever happened to old soap and water eh?
To top ot all off the website touts the product as “organic wash” for your intimate manly area…hilarious!!
I am picking up apples from the garden. Again. I have given bags of the fruit away to everyone who wants them, but still they tumble from the tree. Sometimes they even have the audacity to fall on me as I am gathering their compatriots beneath, the little green bastards. But still it feels like a crime to waste food.
I stand up and stretch. All around the leaves are turning to deeper yellows and oranges, drying into every shade of ochre and brown. In the mornings the mist rolls onto the fields, but the afternoons are bright and sunny – unseasonably so after the damp summer. Beneath the trees the cyclamen crouch, purple harbingers of autumn first, and then winter.
In the greenhouse, he is picking the last of the tomatoes, most of them as green as the apples on the grass. They won’t ripen now, and even if they do, they will remain bitter. Such a rich harvest the garden is finally offering us and we do not have the heart to throw it back in its face.
Chutney is the only answer. He continues to dismantle the tomato plants as I rush to the supermarket for vinegar, sugar and spices. And then, in the kitchen, we stand together and chop. Apples, tomatoes, courgettes, onions… ginger, coriander seeds, cloves, chilli… once together they barely fit in the pan. And then they simmer on the stove as the afternoon fades to dusk, and the dusk into night.
Tomorrow, I will start to write again. Write properly, I mean, a new novel. The feeling that I can create something worthwhile, weave a little magic even, has come back to me after the long months of waiting, after the long, heart wrenching weeks of the summer. The falling of the leaves is like the closing of a chapter, but I will not waste the words and feelings, rather I will take them forward with me.
I never thought religion was sexy…any of them in fact but I was a bit taken aback at this..what do you think?
