Apna maqam paida ker.

میں شاخ تاک ہوں ، میری غزل ہے میرا سمر
مرے سمر سے مہ لالہ فام پیدا کر
مرا طریق امیری نہی فقیری ہے
خودی نہ بیچ، غریبی مہ نام پیدا کر
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رہیگا راوی و نیل و فرات میں کب تک ؟

تیرا سفینہ کے ہے بھر بیکراں کے لئے

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نہ تو زمین کے لئے ہے نہ آسمان کے لئے

جہاں ہے تیرے لئے, تو نہیں جہاں کے لئے

- in memory of M. Iqbal (1877-1938)

Lost.

The argument is that this was not the idea. The question then arises that what was the original premise? I hardly remember it now but there are resonating shards left of that great original idea. I must try and eat less and I must also eat a healthy and balanced diet. Why did I come to be? That is a question worth asking. One must also try and pursue the worth of one's existence in non existential terms. Secrets. There is no corner of the universe that I can hide in. There is no force that can change what I have done in the past. I must live with the burden that I have implicated myself in. To me my solitude. Will I ever see a dawn caressing, bouncing ever so slightly off the silhouette of soft features and tender skin. Why me? Why not me? Can someone held understand the thing that I am, the thing I have now become. I wish. I wish I would take more chances. I would stick to my word. I would love dearly the one whose right it is to be loved. A heart void of love is far worse than a dead one. Break the shackles off my heart, give me the sustenance, the vision, the perception to love You, please. I have fallen from grace. I request your hand to get back up again. For without your will all existence is helpless, lost.

The Battle

It has been quite a weird few days. First there was this list of things that I am supposed to do everyday. Theoretically the list is long enough to keep me more than occupied, it is supposed to overwhelm me in my daily excursions. So far, I am proud to report that the items have come up to 13 and with a foul and a miss here and there I am anything but overwhelmed. As time goes by my hand is getting steady at what I do and the time required per task is drastically coming down which will lead me to multi-taksing and henceforth the abysmal demise of this charade. Until the fall I walk in grace, or so it seems.
I must add more tasks to my daily list. I have suddenly and without cause lost the ability to come up with new ideas. I could certainly do with half a dozen more, easily. It as at times like these one feels the need for an adequate companion. Why isn't everyone so lucky as Dr. Who or as wise as him for that matter. The other thing that we must delve the vast recesses of our collective consciousness is for a theme, idea or inspiration for a photograph. My vision seems to be stuck at what I literally see in front of me. I, for the life of me, can not fathom any grievous attempts. I don't understand, what seems to be the matter? I have also resorted to drinking my tea without sugar and I must inform you Mr. Fry it is not whatsoever at al better that tea with sugar. Perhaps it has to do something with the tea bags, perhaps it is inherent in the fact that sugar really is good. I will never know because my mind is tangled elsewhere.
I am looking, my mother is looking. We don't see eye to eye. I hope one of us finds what we are looking for soon. It will inevitably lead to the demise of the other's plan. There is a premonition of a battle somewhere in my mind. I can swear that I heard war cries when I woke up in the middle of last night. I remember looking around for anything to comfort me. I felt around in the dark, nothing. I thought maybe if things were different, if some other soul lay beside me I would reach out and find solace. To my abject despair the hollow emanating from within me resonated the wails of despair. Nothing, it seems can stop the imminent clash.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

It has been quite a while since I have done this. There are a few words resounding in my head at this time. Placebo. Control. Denomination. Then there is this very faint very persistent head ache, at the very back end of my head. I can't put my finger to the cause of it exactly but I can feel it somehow. I'm a bit hungry. The 12 things a day are going pretty well. I saw 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'. There is no perfect time to watch it for the first time. Just start watching it and time becomes light :)

Sharp chilly night

You could cut the air, if you had something sharp enough, a Katana perhaps. The night is very clear. The air is light. Cold breeze blowing. It feels like a late Autumn or early Winter night outside. If you had a high enough vantage point you could see for miles, miles upon miles of shimmering lights.

Its as good as any a night to go :)

Rome wasn't built in a day.

Hello my friend.,
its nice to meet you again. i hope you have started to be more dynamic and active since your return from the capital. there were a lot of things i learnt on that trip. that most people behind counters are from eastern europe and that a barista can spoil a coffee by brewing it. and that sometimes its nice to get your coffee from non mass market conglomerates and the small coffee shops aren't that bad. i also learnt the joys of eating salad for a meal. I bought a salad from chop'd (yeah thats the name) I got iceberg lettuce, chick peas, beans, olives, raddish, (which cost me extra) and parmesan and chilli. i topped it off with olive oil. then the guy tossed it. that and water. i could not have imagined that being a goat tasted that nice. you should try it more often.
i also saw platform 9,3/4 it exists! who would have thought. there was construction going on at platform 9 where I got off and three quarters of the way down they had marked a section of the wall as platform 9 3/4. it was nice to see.
i visited fitness first which was a bit cramped. the next day i visited notting hill qnd portobelo road. george orewell used to live on portobello rd. its a nice little street with different coloured houses next to each other. its kinda like the housr i live in bradford but slightly smaller and more robust giving them an airer feel. they looked nice. and the colours were awesome. the colour scheme followed through the next few streets as well. it was a nice neighbourhood, somewhere i'd like to live, somewhere you have an unrestricted liscense to be creative.
the shops down that road were awesome too, with prints from banksys art to pulp fiction posters to leather handbags from india. and they were not overcharging either, it seemed pretty fair to me.
kings cross is a big station, liverpool street is charming and oyster rocks.
but despite all these adventures and a few more I learnt and re-iterated that "ROME WASN'T BUILT IN A DAY", it really wasnt. it would have been a massive logistical nightmare bringing all the stuff in together at the same time and too many planners/managers/important stuff would kill each other. that is how i felt sunday night. like everything was pouring in to the same direction and i had too many important things to do in a very very limited time. i got lucky, as i have so many times in the past. it won't always work, it doesn't, i've seen it first hand. but on the other hand, with a bit of spare time, hard work and earnest effort it is quite easy to build rome from scratch. i'm talking about your career now and like everything in your life I have to come to your recue. you do not usually do welk with conventional methods of teaching when either starting something or when you are not in the zone. so start off with video tutorials, youtube has everything and then some. get going, start making a business analyst portfolio, read cv's of experienced ba's, see what they've done. learn to sell yourself, you shortchange on many a occasion. try not doing that. sell yoursekf well. get sone skills if you want. you have a good summer to look forward to, probably the last of its kind, make the most of it. this is your life and its passing you by, really really fast. live it! go to cambridge/oxford for a summer course. go visit granda in june or july, make plans to arrive at apa's birthday. be wonderful, be yourself. you can do this, it is well within your reach. you just need to get to it and play to whatever works well for you.

talk to people, socialise, go places, do gigs, live a little, eat a salad sonmetime, pray, love God, the fear will go away itself.

take care and take charge of your life.

-on a train from London St Pancreas to East midlands Parkway.

the road to recovery leads through the road to ruins

"the road to recovery leads through the road to ruins" me

I now drive a golf. Not something that sounds like a golf or something that looks like a golf but a golf. A turbocharged golf. :) I am anew

you sit there looking at a paragraph. you read it over and over and over again. and once again and you still don't know what its saying. and you don't even know what you are thinking about. space. or spaced out. bleak. I need to do stuff out of my comfort zone. everyday. more than once each day. the path is there, I need to get on it

Of late

I have been unwell of late. Not the apparent one that besets most of us every change of season. This time it was something inside, something primitive had been shattered. I blame myself. I brought it upon myself really. I feel as if it is over now, if I can persist. The weather is luke warm for this time of the year. That definitely helped. Now I am picking up the pieces and getting ready to move along. I hope to beat you to the pole.

The cat and the night

Glasgow is a cold city full of lights. Its also a bit wet. It's semi-welcoming when you first enter it. It beckons you to explore itself yet doesn't allow you room to move about. I went to a new city and sat in a cafe all day, walked down a single street and around the train station and now I am on my way back. This is so very unlike me. This is the first time I have visited a new city and walked up and down one street ad back. Why? What has this place done to me. EVen my words have lost the panache and pointedness. It's all become blunt. Is it because I am getting too old or have I been consumed from the inside, left without any butane. Have I been too late in rescuing myself. Enough about me though. The weather has been bleak all day. Although I did get a few glimpses of the sun it never got high enough on the horizon. Lots of promise and not much heat. The sun should try harder, get higher up in the sky. I still feel cold, I think my new duvet is on the way. It will come in handy cause the room really gets cold at night. Its Friday tomorrow and hopefully it will bring some news about my Xbox.
There was this guy I knew long ago, he lived in Edinburg. He had a cat and a television, something you'd expect from a twenty something. He was never keen on keeping fish in the house, he thought it was not fair keeping fish in transparent glass aquariums. It felt like keeping humans in houses made of solid air. You wouldn't see it but you'd be tuck within its confines. Often the rules man makes for himself do not apply for anyone else. So all he could think of was keeping fish in aquariums made of bricks. That, it appeared was not a good idea.
We want to live our lives far from the reach of prying eyes but we'd die before we let anyone look in on our lives. Its not that our lives usually amount to much. Most people and I mean you and I, live and die engulfed in the same struggles as everyone else, none of us dare to make a dent in the universe. The guy I knew wanted to change everything but he did not know how. He started living his life, struggling as others did around him expecting a grand plan to be revealed before him. As years went by he found wonderful things and he did things he still doesn't understand. But the years tool their toll. THings remained the same, everything seemed harder, the weight of everything became unbearable. In search of lightness he took to the streets one night. I wish he had met her that night. So did he but that was not to be. It was never about her but ever since he had been doing what others were doing everything seemed to revolve around that one idea. And in all honesty that idea wasn't all that bright nor worth all the time everyone was putting into it. He thought they would eventually get weary of all this and turn their attention to all the magnificence of the world around them but no one seemed to care. So he with his cat saw the sun make its journey day in and day out. It was never enough so one day he bought a ticket and got on the train. He didn't bring his cat along because she wouldn't leave her home for some trivial journey that would surmount to nothing. Little did she know that a journey on an empty stomach often leads to moments of wonder. Moments of wonder are far and few in between and once you stumble upon one you hardly recognise it. Someone once said hindsight is the best sort of vision, it was with a sense of irony. The irony of that night was lost upon the cat. She was after all a cat and could hardly keep up with the ramifications everyday brought with it. So there he was, far from his home, in a place where he knew no one, could not open up his heart to anyone, looking for apexes set out by those around him, lost but with every knowledge of where he was. Some say the irony wasn't just lost to the cat that night. The cat wanted to see the stars she only got close to watching the ones bright enough to pierce the night light of the city. The cat and him, their lives were not so intertwined as it once seemed. The cat never realised that the sun belonged to her and he never realised that the stars were all at the mercy of his sight. His heart screamed but his lips were silent, his mind cried but his eyes were dry. And so another day passed him by. The universe revolving in all its glory, inviting, wonderful, momentous but without someone accepting to change it. {18/11/10 -glasgow to york}