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The Law school just started, and they're making a new school of Physics and Engineering and what not. They're having such a difficult time trying to fit 3000 people in here that they've overlooked the most fundamental issue: the bloody name of the university! Pokerface (staring at the logo on the cover of her Contemporary Philosophy pack): Why is it still called the Lahore University of Management Sciences? They're going to have, what, Physics, and Chemistry, and (quizzical look) Biology? Decaf (shaking head): No, not biology. But yeah, all those other things. Pokerface: Well, where's management in that? Decaf: There isn't. PF: Well, what're they going to call it? LUS? Lahore University of Sciences? LUDS? Lahore University of Different Sciences? Decaf just sits there thinking while PF goes through LUAS (Lahore University of All kinds of Sciences), trying to save good ol' LUMS with (the ingenious) Lahore University of Many Sciences, or even . . . . ....

You know, when things go wrong everyone finds their own reason. Not an explanation - that's the logical thisishowithappened and thisiswhyithappened . The reason , the illogical, unprovable, but significant happening(s) that we thinked caused something to go wrong. "This wouldn't have happened if I hadn't been so . . " and "I'm sure it's retribution for . . ". None of it is sure to be true, but more importantly, none of it is ever false. Everybody feels there's a reason that it went wrong, and we're all convinced that our slight was important. And see, none of us ever believe that it wouldn't have happened without our reason . It would have. But our reason is why we deserve it, why we're not lowlifes or criminals but just people who've lost our way, people who made a mistake and are being punished. God humbles us all, sometimes quickly, sometimes late and sometimes very very late. Feeling helpless ( meeting people . . ) is eas...

Walking out into colddarkwinternights, stumbling while you're climbing footpaths, being slightly, strangely short of breath - your head starts spinning the way it only can when it's dark and a little lonely. You stare straight ahead trying to maintain this . . this dignity that walking alone at night in the dark seems to rip away from you. I tend to walk briskly but that's not the point - the dignity doesn't drain away because you feel like you have to walk fast. It's just that the space seems infringed upon if you walk in the quite night. The people on the sidewalk? They're superior- they either ignore you or stare through you with disdain. You haven't interrupted anything but you still feel like it's more theirspace than yours. Or nightspace. Or anyspace but yours. Sometimes this cat roams the dark alley which the searchlights can't quite invade, and sometimes the orange glow of the construction workers' lights sets off some memories that are...

Temporary Lull in Creative Thinking Originally uploaded by hohenmagnolie . My desktop from 'A' levels - it's from the old, old, old Radiohead website.

Winning your first game of (online, not-for-real) poker, on a pair of dealt tens, no less. How cool is that?

Philosophy is personal. No wait, philosophizing is personal. It’s not supposed to be twenty people standing and nodding their heads, with little private conversations proceeding on the side – private conversations, maybe, about who saw what on TV last night. It’s not supposed to be people piping in with fucking trite observations with smug smiles on their faces. Either they’ve thought about something simple like that – there was a video of a woman with no hands, and she did about everything with her feet – for the first time in their lives, or they’re just so fucking stupid that they actually have some reason in their head to go and whore out their thoughts, with a smugness that’s even more infuriating. I can understand someone making a hesitant, impassioned speech about something that they feel strongly about. Smugness in discussing something motivational and inspiring? That’s about as dumb as you could get.

When my cousin Asad was born 5 years ago, my chacha wrote him a letter. A proper, go-to-the-post-office-and-add-stamps letter. It was so beautiful that I just smiled, thinking how lucky Asad was to have gotten something like this; thinking how lucky he'd feel, when he'd grow up and have this letter for him, a testament to everyone's adoration, his innocence and all that hope . Chacha wrote two more letters, and they were equally wonderful, so I'm posting them all. Click on the thumbnails for larger images, and I'll try and transcribe them soon, in case they're easily readable. I just wonder, how will they affect him as say, a ten-year old, if they could affect me, with all my cynicism? It must be such a warm feeling.

It felt like there was a lake there, almost. At night the windows full of white light were reflected in the water and it felt like I had a lake-front room, with a lake-front view, for just a day or two. This morning:

National Geographic's "The Photographs" had a picture of forked lightning that was titled "Nature's Most Spectacular Special Effect". Their picture must have had 15 forks and this one has only one. It's even blurry. But I took it and it feels like the first time I've 'captured' something, and so it's here.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! Virginia Woolf

(Click here for the original picture) Wouldn't you want to drive along this road?

Are there deadlines in fourth grade? At that time homework left over for after ten o' clock was a taboo. There were phone curfews, some people slept early, others did their homework right after reaching home, and I admit I've done it in school if someone was late picking us up. Calling a friend to ask a particularly difficult question at eleven in the night was outrageous. You could tell it was - your parents thought so, their parents thought so, they thought so and you thought so. Eleven! What did you do the other six hours you had to yourself? That's what everyone asked implicitly, always implicitly because the question spoken aloud was always about how long it would take, when you would sleep. I remember calling a friend at six - six! - in the morning, to tell him excitedly how I'd solved the question we couldn't understand last night - this was seventh grade - and setting off a whole chain of calls that ended with people hurriedly scribbling homework before clas...

Light the sky and hold on tight the world is burning down I don't post lyrics as a rule, but this just came at the right time.

There's something with driving that I'm always hard pressed to define - when I do, it's always cliched, never being able to convey the meaning I want to. Everyday, I see the gorgeous orange lights curving their way across the wide empty toll road, and I can't help but wish I had a car to take to the road. A car not just to drive, not just to speed across the tarmac, or to hear the air rush by, but just to set me free. There it is again. I suppose I had to try. I once drove as an escort for my cousin. She is a naturally fast driver, and she was in a hurry that day - I was only there because it was late and she had two small children with her. She drove really fast, but never in an attempt to lose me in traffic. I think that, given the choice, I'd never have been a fighter pilot - I'd choose to be the escort for a bomber, or some important plane that had to be protected. Like a lioness protecting her cubs: never the aggressor, but always defending staunchly. I fol...

There are black and white mono bands on my desktop. They're beautiful. Black and white spirals that make pretty bands when they're large, and go deeper and deeper inside the picture until they look like faraway monolithic machines with several legs and minimal intelligence. The 'legs' look like giant gyrating pipes that spawn more and more legs as they go down. And if you look close enough, there are diffused little circles of black and white. It's all rather pretty, actually. And artificial - it's too smooth a black and too smooth a white. If you stare deeply, you might get the sense that you're looking at something which you could encounter ordinarily. But there's always this sense of artificiality holding you back. Not so with black and white movies. I once glanced up from the screen and saw my yellow wall with the UHU-tacks from old stickers, the marks of old scotch tape, the dust-covered connecting cradle on the desk and the colours, all the tacky ...

While flipping through the pale red book of course descriptions that LUMS provides with a prospectus, I'd decided enough SS units to have been a double major. All sorts of Literature courses - courses I discovered wouldn't be offered for the longest time, if at all; all the Philosophy courses; some history, sociology looked interesting, and oh, can't miss political science. I even attended Intro to Philosophy with a lot of optimism, when I did manage to take it. That was until I realized that I was unwilling to share, or change, and that this, for me, wasn't the liberating exercise I'd imagined it to be, but rather an exercise in a lot of knowing and a little bit of analyzing. I realized that my mind was stuck somewhere halfway - deeply rooted to the philosophies that I adhered to, and at the same time unwilling to share the experiences that those philosophies had brought me. I couldn't be like the people who'd learnt the ideas (and names) for the first time...

Go click on the image on Google's main page! It was a nice surprise in the morning, seeing it. Considering I never go to Google anymore, and just use the Firefox toolbar, I'm glad I stumbled on it.

I woke up with crusted blood on my face the second day in a row. It's not a good way to wake up. I felt immobilized and my mouth felt dry. It took a few minutes to shift into a position that wouldn't soil everything. Then I managed to find a sink, but not before a drink of water. I dabbed and patted it's remains with tissue paper but there's still a little bit of it left. I'm afraid it'll burst tomorrow morning and I'll wake up like this again. I never was queasy with my own blood, until now. I suppose I'm growing up, in some strange way. I think it's the involuntariness of the process. Except it doesn't feel out-of-my-control. It just feels like someone punched me in the face and I'm waking up after having passed out from a fight.

I'm an arsonist at heart. I light fires tentatively, with much trepidation and little tolerance for heat. I shy away from the ensuing flame, and usually panic when it reaches my hand. I've only let a matchstick burn to my fingertips once, and that was just to find out how it felt. But I'm an arsonist at heart. I look at the oil slick, curving its way from the car. Its bends are lazy, pronounced. Like a section of a river that flows slowly over the ground, knowing its reduced speed, almost enjoying it. The slick is thick in clusters, where the bubbles inside the oil almost threaten to burst. The oil dries away before it reaches me, its riverbank a small lump of gravel that the oil bubbles collect against, rising in number, like a protest that goes on eternally. I just stare at the oil. It looks so inviting, so delicious. A matchstick might be enough, a box of matchsticks better. A lit up Zippo might have been perfect. I'm scared of flames. I've sprayed deodorant at c...

It's strange watching a movie with someone who's watching it for a completely different purpose. I watched A Clockwork Orange without knowing anything about it, except that it was a classic . It didn't help - I was slightly confused, and extremely disappointed. I didn't realize then, but part of the reason was that we kept being interrupted, all three of us. It's all right if you're interrupted, but not if someone else is. I don't still understand why. All I know is that I kept being bothered by the term 'Orange' everytime someone came in and asked what we were watching - and there was a lot of them. To one of my friends, it was just a classic: it couldn't be wrong, even if it felt wrong to him. It wasn't just a movie, it was an item on a list: things to be done, songs to be downloaded, things to be struck off. I was just watching a movie after a long, long time. I watched it again at home, alone, with headphones on, my chair comfortable and...

I ripped Wild Strawberries from DVD during the summer. I hate idle PCs, and there were two sitting in my room. I completely forgot about it until I woke up itching one day a year or so ago. After the usual token attempt - tossing and turning in bed, shifting around the room, pacing the wing corridors - I decided to do something. I chose Wild Strawberries. I'm glad I did. It's one of those films you like instantly - it's almost impossible to dislike casually if you're thinking, unless you have a bone to pick with the nitty gritties of film-making. I'd heard about art films since the time I was five or six. Nana Patekar only acts in art movies. Art movies - the term signified some sort of movie in which you paced art galleries and commented on them. I know the first art movie I saw must have been Rashomon, which was fantastic, but the whole concept of a 'thinking' film only became clear to me after Wild Strawberries. With Magnolia, I wasn't sure if I like...

The first few steps were always measured and slow, so he didn't find them hard to manage. Slightly tipping over on either side, groping the sofa and the dining table, almost tripping over the power plug. It was a small room, cramped with a dining table that was too big for it, and as he got older his slow, practised walk across the room appeared more dangerous each day. His hands scraped something; it turned out to be cream from the half-eaten doughnut lying on the dinner table. He rubbed it off with slow despair and kept on feeling his way across the room. The maid only came once a week now; standing here, feeling as soiled as he could ever remember being, he couldn't understand why he had asked her to do that. He finally made it to the cage. He fumbled his way around the lock until he found the latch; when he jerked it open, he heard the splash of the little water bowl being turned over. He felt through the numerous things in his coat pocket, things he'd been instructe...

The music is clearer, richer. The bass is more pronounced. The speakers are placed from left to right, and of course, there are more of them. There is a small walk to the bed; there's a little cost to not having the volume just right, or the wrong song in your playlist. Its wider, and somehow more cramped here. The walls seem to be collapsing into each other; there's this restless feeling of energy, of having to do something that makes me roll off the bed every five minutes; a force that drives, and somehow also enervates. Everything ends up in this eventual state of flux, where I can pick up books and read them for a good 20 minutes, maybe even half an hour. Then the bed that slopes upward in the middle becomes more pronounced. And my head starts sloping back more, even though I know it can't be possible. And in this half-sapped, half frenzied state I go to sleep again. If the music is still on, it seems like its coming from a long distance. Anyway, its too late to turn of...

One short sentence followed by several others sometimes gets irritating. It breaks the flow of your reading and it makes paragraphs feel hollow. But Oates' did it exceptionally well in Beasts. The beginning of the book was strewn with short sentences that never allowed any rhythm or flow to emerge. What it did do was make me sit up and take notice of each sentence in a way that other books rarely do. What I thought was a lack of artistic flair turned out to be a precursor to a wonderfully crafted sequence which makes the short sentences worthwhile. Plums deify. Stephen King says that makes perfect (grammatical) sense, and that short sentences should suit authors who're not as much in control of their sentences as they'd like to be. But I think he's missing the kind of usage that Oates has, the kind that sometimes brings flair simply by delaying it.

When I read Jeffrey Archer, I decided I didn't enjoy his books because his writing style wasn't good enough. Which is why I took a slightly better liking to Forsythe. It makes me wonder though. What right do I have to not read authors who do not "write exceptionally well"? Or at least far above average? I don't think I'm so affected that I read them for the mere fact that they're written well; I know I enjoy good writing, possibly more than a good story. Probably more than a good story. Read sometimes for the story, Bobby, and sometimes for the language. In that book, The Lord of the Flies had both. I hope there's many many more of those books to explore.

Suffocation seems to be the only word that fits. I heard Ted Hughes say to Sylvia Plath to write about "anything . . you know your subject, you're just skirting around it" and it was obvious he knew nothing of suffocation. I feel like I have something inside me that suffocates and chokes on the lack of colour I provide to it. It seems cruel to murder again and again but murder is what worked for her. She's as crazy as any other poet and yes, she's very stylized, but she knew what it meant to not have the words you have come outside where you know they belong.I read Daddy again and its impact is still incredible. Its a rollicking, speeding train of anger and metaphors, reaching its terrifying climax like Blaine The Mono reaching Topika. Blaine The Mono, the insane train which flew worlds in seconds and crashed its passengers on a fight about a riddle. Blaine is a pain and that's the truth. Daddy builds to its climax like that, only it is more menacing, and far...