The readership demanded an end-of-year post. And what a year it has been! Well, here it is with all due apologies and respect to freedom, liberty and the civil society's democratic struggle in my homeland.


Special apologies to the original photographer whose photo I, er, enhanced, and those who appear in it.

Labels: pakistan

According to some readers of this blog (like my famous appearance on Oprah, they're also a figment of my imagination as no one really reads this stupid blog, ha ha), I should try posting more meaningful experiences. You know, the kind that makes a blog uber-readable and ultra enviable.

So, last week, I visited an unbelievable number of a few thousand blogs, which took most of my week's 8 minutes of leisure at work. Then I spent an entire good part of a quarter of an hour actually reading them. Needless to say, I'm an authority on creating great blog posts now! And I am very pleased with myself, as anyone reading my following blog posts will be too.

Wednesday

My Secret Crush was wearing high heels today. This gave me just the perfect excuse to approach her and introduce myself. Then I got the better of myself. Don't want to come across as an obsessive-cobbler Mochi in some previous lifetime. Speaking of shoes, did I share that MSC also has a nice pair of short heels? As a matter of fact, I think she has more shoes than Imelda Marcos.

Took a great photo of my clipped toenail for Flickr. It has been viewed 3 million times already! Amazing. Got an offer from someone on Ebay to buy it because to him/her it resembled The Last Supper painting by Da Vinci. I said I'd think about it.

Thursday

MSC was looking particularly ravishing today as she stepped out of the elevator and headed across the hall. Didn't quite catch a hold of her feet though. The damn photocopier needs to be spilled with diet coke in order for someone to take it away for repairs and unblock my view.

Took an amazing photo of the great view outside my window. The parking lot never looked so "breathtaking" as someone on Flickr commented, and it was viewed three hundred thousand times in 5 seconds.

Friday

My boss called in an emergency meeting. We were all excited because it could be a nice way to show our excitement to our boss who wants us excited during these kind of meetings. He started off with the weather and how thankful he was of the fact that (he thanked his deity) it was Friday. Then he read from a memo regarding a tragic incident with the photocopier. Apparently, last night someone opened the toner compartment and had deposited some carbonated drink in it (4 and half cans of Diet Coke, I wanted to correct him, as someone was really thirsty too, but whoknows who it was!).

Missed MSC because of the damn meeting.

Saturday

The landlady needs a serious lesson in Thermodynamics. The frequent Proper Recyclables Disposal notices are becoming a pain in the ass.

Sunday

Shahid Afridi should be publicly stoned to death near Lal Masjid, under strict military supervision. The cricket match was a fix, clearly, because I saw Bob Woolmer's ghost behind the stumps for a fraction of a second.

Monday

Oh, the heavens might fall! MSC wasn't in today. Who knows what tragedy befell her during the weekend. The view was perfect today (no copier). But they said the photocopier needs to be replaced altogether and the new one would be arriving tomorrow! Damn luck.

Tuesday

I am leaving this blogging world, dear readers. I know some of you have become quite attached to it, as have I. But one must move on. I have blogged a good part of my life in here (just a day short of a week, that's incredible.) May be sometime I will return and read this and wonder about the great experiences and caring I have received on this blog.

Took a photo of my office keycard and posted on Facebook and Flickr. Someone from Facebook has sent me an email asking me where do I get such inspiration from and how she could sample some of it in person. She works part-time as a model for Vogue while finishing her PhD at McGill.

I don't know, I have high expectations from women. So I deleted her message.

Adios.

With apologies to Apple Inc, American Telephone & Telegraph and iPhone-assemblers in China.

With apologies to Helium.

With apologies to Second Life.

How ironic, he thought as he tried to make room for himself over the rusted cast-iron planks on the wildly chugging freight-car of the train: it rocked, rattled and screamed more than a bouncing cat inside an old canister of oil being kicked and hurtled by two 9-year old brats returning home from school after a bad day of getting bullied by Deishu the ugly, rat-faced fat 8th-grader.

Yes, Deishu paid for his sins two decades later when his ugly rat-faced 29-year old body was deposited unceremoniously back inside the bank which he'd tried to rob but failed after the getaway car developed serious transmission problems. While Deishu was scratching his head after opening the bonnet, he discovered painfully that the only transmission problem was between his brains and his body: for inspecting a getaway car for trouble right outside the bank you just robbed was not exactly Gary Kasparov beating Big Blue the-chess-playing-monkey. Oh, and also, one of the trigger-happy bank guards happened to be a boy who was bullied so much in school - by Deishu himself. The rest can be ridiculously obvious to the intelligent reader.

The other bullied boy, however, kept bouncing and stumbling for a comfortable hold inside a circa. 1892 freight car of the Great East Zambian Railroad along the Luangwa river. Then he noticed that he was not alone in the darkened compartment, and realized he was not even in a darkened compartment to begin with.

He had jumped on to a freight-car that was loaded with another container with an accidentally loose little door just ajar enough for one man. And out of some cruel twist of fate, his calculated jump to board the freight train had landed him right inside the container within the freight-car within the freight train and closed the accidentally opened door behind him with a huge metallic clunk that sounded like when that death-deserving-creep living upstairs drops a frying pan on the floor and wakes you up early Sunday morning.

He was trapped, like a razor blade detaches itself during shaving and drops down inside the half open sink drain - leaving one fuming with early-morning swear words and face half white.

And he was not alone in the car.

To be continued...

Labels: epic

While doing a painstaking research on what to blog about - amidst mounting pressure of failure... isn't it strange that you come across what is infinitely the most amazing video clip that you have ever seen in your entire life:

He kept on walking until the land gave way to the ocean, which in fact was a muddy swamp of a river but he had flunked elementary geography in high school. Out of a corner of his eye he could feel the bi-plane now spiralling like a moth on three screwdrivers and eight tequila shots, so he rubbed his eyes violently because the corner of his eye had caught an eyelash and there was no kamikaze bi-plane anywhere.

The bi-plane had indeed disappeared, and along with it, his hopes of rescuing the Queen of Euquay and his desires to encounter surly Delvira again. He sighed remorsefully - only to realize that he sighed because he had treaded on heavily and squelched a pair of mating tarantulas. Ah, at least he had saved some poor farm animal going berserk in the middle of the night after being bitten by them and as a result, helped a farmer's son steal his father's tractor and heading off to the bright lights of the city (the farmer would have woken up to the squealing bitten animal running amok and would have caught his absconding son, he reasoned.)

Sell the tractor and don't spend it all on the first innocent looking damsel in economically attired distress, he wished the boy all the luck.

Looking back at the ocean again, he marvelled at God's great handiwork. What he mistook was the crisscrossing patterns created by the Great East-Zambian Railroad's ancient signalling system to be God's marvellous handiwork across the river bank.

Still, he should've known better. For the wailing train whistle told him his days in Africa were about to be history - or his future, because he often confused the two.

To be continued...

Labels: epic

Now that Halle Berry reveals that she chats anonymously on the Internet, it's time I came out clean and reproduced this Instant Messaging session with her (my secret online handle is Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude, for those who didn't know):

Anonymous_Girl_HB: Hello there, handsome.

Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude: My God, you sound like Halle Berry!

Anonymous_Girl_HB: How on earth do you know that?

Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude: What are you wearing?

Anonymous_Girl_HB: Well, today I went shopping and spotted these amazing pairs of shoes, so I bought the store.

Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude: Will you marry me?

Anonymous_Girl_HB: Yes, that is an important question, and you sound like a very nice guy.

Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude: You are very very sexy.

Anonymous_Girl_HB: I know, that's what I've been trying to tell you. Men think I am sexy but I think I am just an object that everyone treats like a woman.

Abdul_Hashim_Cool_Dude: Please convert before we can marry, my mother will not allow otherwise.

It was a dark, stormy night. No, it was a dark, cloudless night with few stars scattered across the sky, like after a pack of cheap instant macaroni splits open with a crackle and a gush of rock-hard broken pasta pallets sprinkle all over the kitchen floor.

"Damn..." he mumbled as he looked up toward the sky and saw a tiny bi-plane spinning out of control, as if a freshly bug-sprayed cockroach dancing wildly on its back before resting forever - waiting to be pinched inside a piece of kitchen towel and thrown into the bin with murder written all over dirty fingernails. He also smelled fear, and noticed there was a half-open bottle of Fear cologne lying on the ground.

The bi-plane took a majestic dive: Her Majesty the Queen of Euquay (pronounced Aooa-yuuk-yuiwa-yiay) was flying and no one else. How that woman could fly - he wondered. He wondered because the woman could not actually fly at all. She was being flown with her hands tied behind her back and her mouth gagged with a fabric shoe-shiner soaked in a putrid blend of shaving-cream and BurgerKing-mustard-sauce. The woman that he wondered about was the real pilot - the devilish almond-eyed surly elvira known to the underground tyre puncture pluggers as simply The Delvira.

Yes, he thought. Today is a great day for freedom.

Then he corrected himself, because it was night time. A dark stormy night. No, a dark, cloudless night with stars scatt...

To be continued...

Labels: epic