In memory of a friend

What do you call when a man and his family are tied and then strangled one by one, which one in front of whom no one knows yet, with each alternative so gruesome that it would make anyone’s heart bleed. Murders? Killings? I find these English words inadequate to express what evil befell my friend and his loved ones on the night of 13th of October. The youngest of the victims was 7 years old. Evil, sinister enough, to have shaken the heavens.

No matter how hard I try, it’s mighty difficult to shake that night out of my head. The pain and grief that they would have gone through, though difficult to remotely comprehend is enough to send shivers down my spine and leave a lump in my throat. We belong to a land no stranger to senseless killings and tragedy, to an extent that we have become unfortunately a bit immune to grief. But this one struck too close.

Being humans we have a strong need to understand and rationalize. Why would the killer do it to a family he was closely related to? A family that had been kind to him. Had helped and supported him over the years. How could he do it to the children that he had played with and seen grow up in front of him. Greed? Envy? Anger? Pride ? Or maybe the combination of all of them. He let the seeds of all these evils grow in his heart. They would have whispered to him until they became strong enough to overtake whatever humanity he had inside him. What gives me some consolation at this juncture is that justice would be done to him and his collaborators in this world and definitely the next. And for his friends and family, I hope time will slowly heal the grief that has been deeply inflicted.

My friend was full of life, love, laughter and kindness. This is the image that I will always have of him and I believe this is how he would have liked to be remembered also.

Rest in Peace Aamir Ullah Khan and family.

Corporate Strategy

“Becoming: If you ask young men what they want to accomplish by the time they are 40, the
answers you get fall into two distinct categories. There are those — the great majority - who
will respond in terms of what they want to have. This is especially true of graduate students of
business administration. There are some men, however, who will answer in terms of the kind
of men they hope to be. These are the only ones who have a clear idea of where they are going.
The same is true of companies. For far too many companies, what little thinking goes on
about the future is done primarily in money terms. There is nothing wrong with financial
planning. Most companies should do more of it. But there is a basic fallacy in confusing a
financial plan with thinking about the kind of company you want yours to become. It is like
saying, "When I'm 40, I'm going to be rich." It leaves too many basic questions unanswered.
Rich in what way? Rich doing what?”

From “How to Evaluate Corporate Strategy” by Seymour Tilles, HBR 1963.

A Charpoy

Come to think of it, a charpoy or manji as it is called in Punjabi is the most useful piece of furniture ever invented. Before we were introduced to sofas, beds, couches, chairs, settees etc etc  a charpoy was the alpha and omega of furnishing. One was born on it and then a cloth was tied to one of its side as a hammock or a hanging cradle, which was rocked by mothers sleeping up. From here started a life long association with it. You basically slept on it, had all your meals, met visitors and had meetings on the same charpoy. A charpoy was adjustable as you could tighten it or loosen it exactly the way you wanted it. It was mobile also. You could drag it along wherever you went, under the shade, out in the open or indoors depending upon the time of the day. I have personally seen it being used as a bed to dry chilies, wheat grains and other stuff. And these are only the uses when its four feet or poys are on the ground. When not required it could be made to stand vertically or horizontally not only to create space but open other vistas of use also. Could be used for hanging your clothes or as a cover while you changed your clothes or had a bath. Its could be used as stairs to climb up walls or go to the roof top.

And then when one died the same charpoy was used for the final ritual and carrying the body to its final abode. Does any piece of furniture even come close in terms of utility ? I don’t think so.

Metro rail for Lahore ?

Good news for Lahoris. It looks like the Lahore mass transit rail project is hopefully back on track. An MOU has been signed with Norinco of China to build the first line (the so called green line) of this project at a cost of 1.7B USD (with China financing most of it). This line from Shahdara to Gajjomata(somewhere on the Lahore-Kasur road) will be 27 km in length, partially underground and the rest overhead. 3 more lines (Orange, blue and purple) are planned somewhere in the future.

Can't really comment on the financial or design matter (the politicians can tear each other apart on this), but this if implemented would go a long way in alleviating traffic problems of Lahore and giving people a convenient and quicker way of moving around the city. So fingers crossed that this project starts on time becomes operational in the near future. Civil works expected to start in October this year.

Posting a brochure on the project also. Looks too good to be true, doesn't it :).

Of heritage, cows, a canal and a graveyard

A visit to rural Punjab comes with two revelations (a) load shedding is really as bad as reported by geo news although most of rural folk apart from the more well to do seem to be least bothered about it and (b) most of us including myself sitting in Islamabad and Lahore are totally disconnected from daily reality of a majority of our people. I recently visited my maternal village (if it can be called as such) after a gap of a number of years. The village was the same as i remembered with a square having a mosque, a few shops, stray dogs and charpoys under banyan trees. The rest of the village surrounds it, a mix of brick & cement and brick & mud houses with open sewers running in between them. And lots of cows. The most prized of possession in a rural economy and the target of most of the theft incidents. You come to realize why the Hindus so exalted their status into something divine. This leads to another realization that the quality of life of cow there is arguably better than that of a human; they live in the same space, do nothing, are fed and washed and never beaten like the donkeys are.

While there a visit to the village graveyard was a must, where a number of relatives are buried including my grandfather, grandmother and mamoon. And for the first time in my life i was taken to my great grandmother's grave who had died a number of years of me being born. My great maternal grandfather had came to this new village around a hundred years back from India after the British had dug a huge canal (the lower bari doab) through the plains of Punjab and were giving away 12.5 acres of land to every adult who could take up the challenge of planting these barren lands. My great grandfather had three sons. The progeny of the eldest (my grandfather) did relatively well over the years while the others not so and seem to be stuck now in the vicious cycle of rural poverty. If i would explain the divergent paths despite a common heritage it would boil down to a few years of education, a few decades of good health and no untimely deaths to de-rail things.

Back at the graveyard, after heartfelt fatehas and apologies for not visiting earlier on all the family graves we could identify, it was time to head back.

P.S: The grave of my Great maternal grandfather has disappeared with time (apparently it was in an earlier graveyard which no longer exists). May he rest in peace. Thank you for your side of my heritage and to give the devil its due thanks to the British who built a canal which has nurtured his family for over a hundred years.

Newton's Second law

My seven year old son almost got the newton's second law without actually knowing about. Unusually quiet during his few hours in the car today while we ran some errands through Lahore, he by the evening had this to say. A truck on the road if it hit us will do a lot of more damage because its a lot heavier and if we were to cause the same damage to it we would have to come at a much higher speed. I brushed this aside initially but then realised that this was crudely what Newton's second law had to say. Remember F=ma from your school text books. Funny it took mankind thousands of years to actually formulate it. But perhaps formulation is the toughest part of any argument or theory.