A 55-year-old security guard with a big dream
Sitting at the entrance to the computer lab, at the Aga Khan University (AKU), seemingly like the many other guards around, he wears the usual uniform as people passed by him. What not many notice is that on his desk sits a copy of Thomas Hardy’s “Far from the Madding Crowd” and during the breaks he gets, he sits and reads voraciously. Saleem Akhtar, 55 years of age, has picked up his books again, and he is on his way to becoming an Intermediate graduate. Standing at about five feet four inches, sporting a henna-stained beard with half-rimmed reading glasses ...
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For the love of books: One woman’s battle
We are not always the monstrous creatures depicted in newspapers. There are people around us who are working for the betterment of society. These are people who keep hope alive when everything around us is falling apart and crumbling into disorder. The idea was simple: to help. While most of us were fixated on how the last game of Manchester United turned out or busy posting videos of a pleading man being mercilessly shot dead by the law itself I felt hope because of a young woman I have never met. She is one person who is bent on changing the lives of ...
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Reading for the soul: Helping kids love books
Today was the last day of my self-conceived experiment at a school in Lahore. A few months ago I had offered three hours a week of my precious time to read stories to my daughter’s kindergarten classmates. I was convinced that after months of interacting with these children I‘d be able to flush out and pacify a bully terrorising my delicate daughter. It would also, I reasoned, provide a good opportunity for a bookseller like myself to test that age-old lament that the youth of today lack the attention span for books – although granted, by “youth” most parents ...
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