Oven-roasted garlic chicken on a hot summer day
Summer time in Karachi can be a long unbearable ordeal. Temperatures are high and the humidity levels are even higher, which makes cooking all the more bothersome. Sitting under the fan, dreading the thought of standing in front of the hot stove in this scorching heat, I came up with this recipe. It is ideal for the summer as it demands only a few easy steps in its preparation, and while it cooks in the oven, you get a chance to cool off. The beauty of this recipe is the simplicity of its ingredients, the combination of which creates magnificent flavour. The only ...
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Don’t deny – defy dyslexia
The day Steve Jobs died my son came home from school and asked me: “Can I also please be dyslexic like Steve?” Dumbfounded I stared at him as he rambled on about Steve Jobs, about Mac and how “awesome” it was. Technological icon Steve Jobs left behind a silver bitten apple, a legacy of hard work and most importantly a realisation that learning differences are a gift – not a stigma. The problem Nobody truly knows the origins of learning differences. The spectrum is wide and deep, ranging from low attention span, weak memory, speech problems, auditory issues, literacy and numeracy challenges, vestibular and cognitive development and social interaction to behaviour issues ...
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Why women need to complain more
I can’t tell you how much I relied on my girlfriends for my sanity in my 20s. During our student days at the University of Virginia (UVA), we were each other’s roommates, psychiatrists, parents, and siblings. Far away from my family in Bangladesh, my friends and I became each other’s families. But something happens to our female friendships when we leave our 20s and enter our 30s. As we get older and get married, have babies, work, work more, and did I mention, work more, we also begin to talk less. Why is it that when women need their girlfriends the ...
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Don’t close hearts because of Shamsul Anwar
The story ‘Waiting to receive pieces of daughter’s dead body’ aroused a series of vacillating emotions. Shock and horror washed upon the public after hearing Shamsul Anwar’s heart-wrenching and soul-shattering story, affecting everyone who heard of or read it. People lost sleep over the desperate father’s horrific state and many even reached out to help him as much as they could. Those emotions were then replaced by more shock, but this time layered with deceit and betrayal as it was revealed that Shamsul Anwar’s story was untrue. Aside from pointing out the obvious negligence and shoddy efforts of proper research on ...
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Seven ways to score Facebook ‘likes’
Who doesn’t like to have loads of comments and ‘likes’ on their Facebook statuses, posts, photos, and so on? Don’t you hate it when someone seems to get all the attention on Facebook no matter how dull their updates? Let me give you some advice to help your profile become one of those very popular ones that you so passionately envy. Not everyone has a sharp mind, and not everyone is witty enough to come up with hilarious thoughts that they may convert into words and update on their Facebook profiles. Of course, we all want to be one of those ...
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Drowning and helpless
There are many ways in which you can feel helpless. You feel helpless when you think about college, you feel helpless when you realise that very few people around you actually remembered that Thursday was International Literacy Day. And it doesn’t help when someone tells you that 35,000 Pakistanis have been killed since 9/11. One of those times, and the most recent, involved a car, submerged in waist deep water, stuck while reversing over a ditch, with the water level inside the locked car rising exponentially, the rain thundering outside and leaking through the crack in the window, and with ...
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Accidents are not entertainment
It was a sunny afternoon in Paris, and my family and I were just stepping out of the glorious Sacré-Coeur basilica when our discussion on Romano-Byzantine architecture was cut short by the sight of an injured man lying on the stairs. I wasn’t precisely sure what had happened to him. All I knew was that he was breathing heavily and that there was blood streaming down his leg. The terrace was filled with tourists and worshipers, but only three people were sitting next to this wounded gentleman: one of them was a security officer; the second one, a female tourist who ...
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Why should feudals apologize?
I have grown up hearing all the stereotypes on television in newspapers. Feudals drive big jeeps (who cares how many books they read?). Feudals are the reason the country can’t prosper. Feudals abuse people in the name of tradition. But this ‘wadera’ boogeyman image is not accurate. I’m not saying that exploitation of the poor does not exist in rural Pakistan, but the facts that are often ignored are: Exploitation is not exclusive to the agricultural community. For every landlord who mistreats the people who depend on him for a livelihood, there are at least three who are actively working to provide services (services that every ...
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Riaz wanted to learn English
It was almost 11 years ago when I stopped my car at the Teen Talwar traffic light to be greeted by the usual herd of beggars, windscreen cleaners and newspaper sellers. One of the newspaper sellers, Riaz, a total of four feet in height, asked me for a lift to the Marriot signal. Irritated by the commotion around me, I chose to ignore him. Rather than moving on, he boldly walked in front of my car, locked eyes with me, stuck his teeth out like President Asif Zardari would, if he stared at the sun, and performed a mini-break dance ...
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The man who taught me how to give
I was not too surprised when I saw the elderly man on the side of the Islamabad highway. Beggars are a common sight on the road and drivers are used to ignoring them. But as I waited at the traffic signal, I noticed the man stepping onto the road. The light had just turned red and the timer had started. He only had a few seconds to get someone’s attention. Watching him from the car, I assumed he was asking for money, but his movements suggested otherwise. There was no weariness, no weakness in his movements, which is usually associated ...
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