sidewalk scribbling

The door opens and she slips in quietly, rubbing her cold hands together, then as the door closes behind her, she steps forward, walking past people sitting on small wooden tables and blowing her icy breath at them, chuckling to herself as they shiver and reach out to wrap their hands around teal cups of hot coffee. At least that’s how I imagine it because every time the door opens, there is a short pause before the cold air reaches me, a languid passing by, almost distracted, like the smell of someone’s perfume as they pass by or the suspension of smoke in the afternoon light inside a dim room. Fahad and I have divergent views on civil protests and demonstrations – while thousands of people, friends and strangers, gathering together to speak out for human (or animal) rights tugs at my heart strings and pokes at my tear ducts (enough for 2-4 tear drops), Fahad scoffs at what he calls ‘idiots getting together for something they have no idea about’ or more succinctly - ‘hypoc...

June 24 “ Bijli aagaee? ” chirps two-year-old Arhu. Every job has its own vocabulary, terms and phrases that are tossed around like balls between jugglers, foreign to those outside of the office space.  Banking, telecom, journalism – I can of course only recall ones related to journalism because it is obviously the most interesting of these fields! Annoying pomp aside, eras have lingos too.  Who can forget the infuriating but convenient acronymization and abbreviation of already colloquial words! LOL, WTF, and the dreaded one I seem to blurt out too often – O-M-G.   All the words that come with changing fashions and technology.  And so we have our era of electricity issues.  Load-shedding, UPS, generator, battery – these are part of everyone’s everyday language.  My short week in Karachi with its erratic but still not-too-frequent power outages did not prepare me for this resigned ritual of one hour of electricity followed by one hour of load-sh...

June 11 I’m a hypocrite, I admit it. I refuse to put Kindle on the same shelf as real books, I tell myself I will ensure that my kids can hold a paintbrush and scribble with crayons before they can swipe fingers at IPads and play games on portable devices, I roll my eyes at couples who write sappy messages on Facebook and turn what should be private and sweet into what at best, bores the rest of the public (you would be surprised at how little it matters to the rest of the world that you ate dinner with your honey at the little bistro down the lane and then he bought you a long-stemmed rose). I will reserve my thoughts on Facebook for later, but that brings me right to the dirt. I say I hate all this technology that has taken over our lives, that keeps us connected to people far away at the cost of ignoring those in our geographical proximity, but my Blackberry has become something like a third hand, or at least an addendum to one of my hands. I upload photographs on Faceboo...