and that it would just be the start to a beautiful ‘group friendship’ who like hanging out, going to places and do all sort of stupid things, like 12 people dancing pathan style around a cup to sitar music on daman-e-koh at midnight on a work night among other things, was unthinkable.

i guess that is the art of living a good life no? doing the unimaginable and the unthinkable!

thank you all for being a part of my life! and for bringing joy into a near empty existance.

When it is not, the very same change can leave you devastated..

Thankfully.. my changes are good

After mulling it over for almost a decade (ever since a cousin got hers) i finally got contact lenses today!

I’ve literally changed my world view(ing abilities).

Once again, Pakistani’s are taking back Pakistan!

This story comes from NetworkWorld, contributed by our very own Rabia Garib of CIO Pakistan fame, about NADRA. A couple of months back, i had a session with one of their project managers who gave me an overview what NADRA was doing now and how exactly were these projects coming along. To me, one of the area’s i truly believe will bring back the pride, honour and commitment in our countrymen for the country is to celebrate it’s successes and take pride in the wonder’s we are doing in the world, and i desperately wanted the media to pick up on these. That’s where this post comes in.

In this story, Azhar Nawaz, another project manager, walks us through the challenges NADRA faced in the last three years to become what it has today. Please read the complete article for the insight, as i cannot do justice to it by summarizing. However, i will leave you with a quote which really got me going.

When talking about the ramp up of NADRA Swift Registration Centers (NSRC), Mr. Azhar says

“It was a huge success and we were registering up to 50,000 citizens in day during peak registration period.” There was no previous history of this kind of project anywhere in this world. What makes you appreciate this fact to an even greater extent, is the fact that NADRA was working within the confines of a political bureaucracy and red tape that was simply not used to such rapid escalation of any project. The kind of technology that had been deployed may have been extremely complex in its time, but it served a basic purpose — to build a database and archive the records for every registered citizen of Pakistan”

Link to article: http://edge.networkworld.com/news/2009/051409-a-database-is-born-nadra.html

Mostly providing atta bags to registered IDPs, as of this writing, they’ve delivered 7087 bags of atta (in 10 and 20 kg). And the website is directly linked with their distribution centers. In the time i was browsing it (2 minutes) another 5 bags were distributed!

This site is the perfect example of how technology can help create both awareness and transparency when dealing with disasters.They’ve partnered up with airblue and accept donations (in cash and cheque) through Airblue counters worldwide, as well on online through credit cards. For US nationals, this is a 501.3c registered charity and any donation given can be tax deductable.

Current stats:

Current status: 13,431 families registered (approx. 105,128 IDPs)
Current delivery: 7087 bags of atta or 1,067,995 servings of roti!

Hopefully this method will be picked up by other charities to bring transparency to their operations!

And to practice what i preach, i will be diverting my donations to them from today.

being in pakistan, that kind of outlet was only granted if i was lucky enough to chance upon someone remarkable. the chances of that happening, however were slim. not zero, but slim. i didn’t realize it back then, but i had one teacher for 3 years, whom i almost hated, but who was among one of those remarkable people.

now, TED has changed all that. it’s like almost overnight i have access to idea’s and thoughts that appeal to me but were always outside reach. Like Emily Livine’s talk about her theory of everything, where she introduces the trickster (something i discovered i share a lot of commonality with, but am continuously shunned for in my society. this video single handedly got me hooked onto ted btw).

Similarly, Jimmy Lee’s Wiimote experiments! Kevin Kelly’s the next 5000 days of the internet and the list goes on and on n on.

similarly, i’ve discovered Ignite. another platform to share idea’s on, but within a limited format of 5 minutes and 15 seconds per slide which automatically advance. it’s kind of like TED, but on steroids.

the explosion of all this information is starting to take it’s toll.. my addiction is back big time. the addiction to knowledge. at first, it was only blogs, but with blogs i had to filter out stuff, make context and generally do a hell of a lot of reading. though i still enjoy it, but this medium is.. well… much more visual.

when PTCL doubled their internet speed earlier this year, i never anticipated this would be the outcome. the most i was thinking about was streaming tv shows instead of downloading, but opening up a whole new world of information in such a visual sense was way way wayyy beyond my comprehension!

one of the side effects of all this new information is identfiying trends and threads within it. that’s part of what makes life as an engineer and a consultant all the more rewarding. i could take large amounts of data and synthesize context and meaning from it. doing it for a client, or to solve a specific problem is one thing, piecing together all this information from all over the place is a different arena and dimension all together.

needless to say, i’m loving it! and if i was full useless knowledge before, it’s about to get a whole lot worse

so much indecision, so much of the unknown…

i used to think i thrive in this environment, and maybe i do, but that doesn’t mean that i still dont get butterflies everytime.

so here’s to new beginnings, to new experiences and to new mountains to climb!

funny right?

what’s even funnier is that i was thinking along the same lines this weekend, when i ran out of epi’s of Battlestar Gallactica (thanks MP for getting me hitched on it).

only thing is, i prefer french fries to donuts

The reason for that is simple, it’s because what Shanaakht stands for.

For years, i’ve been lamenting the fact, and telling any person who will listen, that we need to celebrate our own heritage first. Our own history, our own success stories and our own accomplishments especially when done on our own soil.

It started off after i realized that no one had anything good to say about Pakistan. The government was corrupt, the army was corrupt, the utilities, banks, public sector, private sector all didn’t perform and as a nation we were nothing but screwed.

For some reason, i didn’t want to believe that. Maybe it was because i opened my eyes in an era where i saw public services doing something. Building infrastructure, being operational and actually solving (some) problems. Granted, they sometimes made even bigger problems than they solved, but atleast they were doing something. I saw an economy which was going up, i saw jobs being created, i saw salaries raising, and i saw opportunities wherever i turned.

I also saw myself as a citizen of this nation, joined to it by birth. I worked, i innovated, and i created. If i could do it, sitting here in Pakistan, why couldn’t the “nation”. I also saw people around me achieving heights others said couldn’t be achieved while being here. I saw people applying idea’s, being creative and lifting themselves from one strata of society to another based on their hard (and often smart) work all within the span of a decade.

I started off in a company that was 2 people in all, and i (made) saw it grow into a national operation, and now playing in the big leagues, taking business away from multinational giants.

I saw an era, where sitting in Mingora, one could purchase an airline ticket, have it paid for in Islamabad and picked up in Karachi, all within the span of an hour, and i saw a banking system where we could deposit 5 checks from five different cities in Islamabad and have it credited in Karachi, all within 2 days.

To me, that is what my shanaakht was. A citizen of a new and emerging Pakistan.

And then the festival was destroyed, by people who couldn’t “control their grief”. The same people who wreaked havoc and plundered the country, causing untold losses of billions in the name of grief, before occupying the throne and looting it again. And i couldn’t help but notice the irony.

I’ve been told this time and time again, and even though i still dont want to believe it i can’t help but nod my head just a little now at it…

“what happened at Shanaakht, sadly, IS our shanaakht.”

God help us.

how’s that for a full day!

sometimes, i think i may actually be doing something in life onwards to greater things i always say!

oh, and i also managed to get chalaned in all three cities within a week too! another milestone :p

and in a couple of hours, had a serendipitious event.

it’s funny in how many ways life can be funny…