My favorite extract from fiction

God of small things- Arundhati roy

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.

Estha occupied very little space in the world"

The Lonely Jinnah

Inside the crowd-puller Quaid-e-Azam resided a very lonely person. Jinnah used to take long retreats, away from the noise of daily life, inside his quiet chambers, behind the walls of his home atop Malabar hill, in the detached environs of Simla and Kashmir or in the self-exile in London. This need for a measure of withdrawal was necessitated as much by his ever-weakening health as by the urge to reminisce Ruttie. The sudden departure of his lovely wife Ruttie stands out as one of the painful periods of his life. Jinnah, lovingly called ‘J.’ by Ruttie, was very secretive about his private life. Thus, one can only fantasize how he must have been seeking out those retreats to remember Ruttie, talk to her spirit, read Shakespeare to her and shed a few tears which the ‘Great Leader’ was not allowed to do in public by some unwritten rules. However, Jinnah did once break down in public. Kanji, Ruttie's closest friend, recalls, “...as Ruttie’s body was being lowered into the grave, Jinnah, as the nearest relative was the first to throw the earth on the grave and he broke down suddenly and sobbed and wept like a child for minutes together.” M.C. Chagla, Jinnah’s legal apprentice, adds, “That was the only time when I found Jinnah betraying some shadow of human weakness.”  There must have been many more such moments of love and longing in those lonely days and weeks of the Quaid-e-Azam. However, he aptly hid them from his millions of Muslim followers who, like many Pakistanis today, would take only a uni-dimensional view of this fascinatingly multifaceted personality.     

my letter in 'dawn'

The following link:

http://archives.dawn.com/archives/50562 

still there....

Hey!!!! How are you doing?
I know i have remained away for quite long.My last post here was back in august last year. Since then lots of things have happened. There is lots to write about. Days preceding the exams, the experience of exams itself, my cousin's marriage, my teaching experience at school and many things in between present a lot of stuff for a number of blogs. I will keep writing about these things intermittently. For now, got to go. I dropped in just to tell you that i am alive and that, hopefully, you will soon start hearing from me more frequently..

Happy Birthday to me!!!!!!

It is 1st August today.
My 24th birthday!
what? 24!!!!??????
Have i exhausted twenty four years of my life?
Are you sure the number is 24?
24??? Is it T-w-e-n-t-y-F-o-u-r???
Where did they go? How did i spend them?
Did i spend them purposefully? meaningfully?
The answer to a greater extent would be NO.
Have i squandered these 24 years?
Perhaps NO on that count too.
The answer, as always, lies somewhere in the middle.
Nevertheless, 24 is quite a lot of time and it has gone past very quickly.But as time goes by, it leaves behind large trove of memories. Thus, surely, these 24 years of my life have been full of things to recount and reminisce. And thankfully, huge part of it consists of pleasant memories. However, at this point in time, i find it out of place to indulge in any nostalgic exercise.
On my 24th birthday, it is the future that fascinates me and it is the present that pre-occupies.
Notwithstanding the pleasant feelings that the reminiscence invokes, it will have to wait the pleasure of my encounter.
Right now, it is time to roll-up the sleeves and get on with the work.
Happy Birthday to you Waqar.
You deserve it boy.
It has been a Life well-lived and lived as much for others as for your own self.
So keep it up.
And God bless you.

Reflections from home-I

Many things have happened in the past month or so. Hence many reasons to write this blog. However, eschewing every other development, it is the personal bit of the news that I would like to write about right now. Six months ago, on 3^rd of November, my youngest uncle died an untimely death.  The news came around the evening on that fateful day of Wednesday and we had to leave for our ancestral village immediately. It was after almost 3 years that I was going there, however, not to be warmly received by my ever-smiling uncle but to mourn his death.  What followed in the next 4 days was a sobering experience. Fast forward to 6 months later, on 4^th may, Wednesday again, the sad news of our grandpa’s demise reached us in a similar fashion around the same time.This time around, my sojourn lasted for 2 days-I could not have stayed longer. However, the raft of experiences and observations was no less. I noticed that, in our extended family, we the children have suddenly, almost imperceptibly, grown into adults and our parents have grown older. There were many other important observations which I will keep sharing here over the period of time. I got to go right now...catch u later....

Moin Akhtar

“Come quickly, he is on T.V!” my sister would shout whenever Moin akhtar appeared on T.V and of course I would come running. And before he uttered even a single word there was already an expectant smile on our faces. That was the man called Moin akhtar who breathed his last on 22^nd of April.

Some of my fondest childhood memories are associated with Moin akhtar’s performances as I have grown up watching him perform. It was in the 90s when the youtube and facebook did not exist and our entertainment avenues were limited to PTV, bollywood movies, and a couple of Indian channels courtesy dish antenna. Yet we never felt like a generation starved of entertainment. This was so partly because of little awareness about what else existed in the world. However, for the most part, the credit for filling our childhood with fun and quality entertainment goes, of course, to Moin akhtar and his ilk-if there was any.   

Amidst the slew of obituaries, tributes and condolence messages in the wake of Moin akhtar’s demise, one comment that would particularly resonate with the Pakistanis of my generation is the title of ET blog by sabahat zakariya which said, “With Moin Akhtar, a piece of my childhood dies.”

Moin Sir, Thankyou.