Yes I live in Peshawar, not the one you’ve heard of!
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 31st, 2008
4 years back while I was living in Tarbela Dam, a friend of mine asked me to accompany him as he wanted to have a computer upgrade, geek that he thought I was, I couldn’t say No to a close friend and said “Fine, let’s hit the road to Peshawar tomorrow”. The more easily I replied positively the harder it was for me to digest the response he gave”Oh no, I am not allowed to go to Peshawar, between me and you even my dad is afraid to go there, you know the people there and the city itself….” (For those who don’t know Peshawar, it’s the city that gave shelter to nearly 3 million Afghan refugees after the Soviet war, lies in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan and capital of the very province). Why my friend made that response is a different topic to debate on, but anyways let me tell you first I belong to a Pathan family from NWFP and my friend was from Okara, Punjab. Despite the cultural differences we have in NWFP and Punjab, there is a complete change in lifestyles as well, although we lived in the same colony that fall under my province but the place was quite a developed town with mostly educated people around so they were ok with that. Apart from that when it came to shopping around for stuff, Pathans would prefer Peshawar while the Punjabis preferred Rawalpindi although both cities were at equal distance from our town but that was just the priority and culture that mattered more to us since Rawalpindi was a modern city of Punjab and Peshawar being the capital city of my province who Punjabis think is very rural and backward. Anyway coming back to the start, he had his computer upgraded from some vendor in Rawalpindi rejecting my offer to go to Peshawar and later that year I shifted to Peshawar for educational purposes while my friend took admission in a renowned engineering institution of our country.
What he said to me four long years back is still something that is stuck to my mind, not only did that line meant his own views about the city or the Pukhtoon culture but the views of the entire Punjabi community. I am sure they are not much aware of the situation in Peshawar now since I can really tell a lot about the city having spent 3 good years of my life over here. It’s getting modernized and civilized not to forget to mention even getting educated on a massive and advanced scale. Peshawar as in the eye of my friend would be nothing but a backward area with hardly any sign of people getting good education, but well that’s just there point of view without having seen the place even, apart from education the city is well developed enough to have good roads and efficient transport system, also having from the most basic to the most advanced facilities a modern individual would desire and not as you hear from people, but women are equally getting educated as men are. This however is the only sneak peek of what I wanted my friend to know. The culture is rich and preserved yet getting innovative, yes and I think I am just a single example of that culture which others think is backward.
I study business in a renowned school of Peshawar and I live in hostels, we have all what it needs to be modern(at least enough modern in Pakistani point of view) , all the basic facilities from furnished rooms to TV, newspapers and a high speed broadband facility (not that you’ll see too common in my country though), games facilities and a beautiful yet under-construction campus but well that is not going to be a big wait till it gets completed using the state of the art engineering techniques and design features. I have a good company of friends around me who are from well educated families and know how to talk well, dress well and act well. We hangout mostly on the weekends hunting for good food mostly landing over in Pizza Hut, KFC, Italian and local continental food inns as well as the traditional tikkas and barbecue restaurants where i see many families, couples and gangs roaming around as well, we have parties and functions occasionally and they are modern yet reserved, my friends occasionally smoke but none of us is a victim of drinking, we listen to good music be it western or eastern but its of a class (not to forget to mention even the underground bands of Peshawar out of which Sajid and Zeeshan happen to be my favorite that sing English), am fond of good movies and TV series and I have a huge collection of movies in my computer’s hard drive, I can sing and I recently started taking Guitar lessons which happens to be a part of the course offered in my university, I have access to news and information of all types, I have a good knowledge of internet and computers and I often spend my leisure time in Orkut and Facebook while online. I don’t have a private car of my own, no one in my hostel does except a few but than its all about the afford ability yet time, we don’t have time to look well after a car and as far as conveyance is concerned, what are friends for. I can shop for any product I want, be it a needle to a Jeep or even a Cannon, the latter one though just doesn’t fit with me and I can get anything repaired yet again from the city, the thing is all about the perception and trust. I trust my city and community which they don’t, although I feel comfortable even when am in Punjab.I dunno why i feel so weird saying all this though i still think am missing many things that even some of the modern people can learn from us but well i just want my word to be heard and I can even freely say “Yes I live in Peshawar, not the one you’ve heard of…. Or shown on the TV how it is” cos that’s my next story….
So guess what Federrer got busted, and Maria continues with the glory~
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 27th, 2008
Australian Open Tennis hasn’t been good for Federrer, though he did qualify for the semi finals but the world champion had to face a straight sets loss against the Serbian Novak Djokovic, yesterday while i saw the match it was nothing but Federrer keeping on cursing himself for every shot that went from his racket, he was trying his level best to keep doing his dodge tricks but Djokovic was super freak this time in Federrer’s expertise, he dodged the hell outta him and well Federrer is out. Finals for Men’s singles are tomorrow between Novak Djokovic and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga of France.
Coming to the Women’s singles Maria Sherapova continued in her style and won the trophy beating the yet another Serbian Anna Ivanovic which i thought was pretty impressive, she was playing well in the first set and i thought she might end up winning the first set but well Maria returned to her real gameplay, the rest of the match i didn’t saw since i had to sleep while it was only 8 am in the morning here.
Update: Djokovic has won the Final of Men’s Singles
For bloggers who are willing to shift to personal domains and hosting~
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 22nd, 2008
In the past years the Pakistani blogosphere has seen a tremendous boom specially with the increase in the number of bloggers popping out, the initial start of bloggers comes mostly in the form of a quick set up of blog on sites like blogger,wordpress etc but with the passage of time the ones who take it seriously and love the passion of blogging just for the fun of it shift to there personal domain and hosted blogs that run mostly on platforms like movabletype and wordpress. Wordpress happens to be the most popularly used interface just because of its great features, enhancements and that it is open source. But you have to have a good catchy domain (doesn’t really matters IMO if its a personal blog) and off course a reliable webhosting solution.
I speak for reliable hosting since am personally hosted on a server based in Pakistan, but truly speaking am never satisfied with its performance, there have always been problems with it one way or the other, even currently i have to use a proxy to log on into my admin panel since the entire server and sites hosted with it won’t open on the ISP am using. Not only me but in the past many of my friends from other parts of the country would end up saying my blog won’t load, so if you want your blog to be accessible to all the readers make sure you make the right choice for a webhost, after which you can hire a blog designer for a unique blog design,necessary adjustments and than continue on adding plug-ins and tools to be updated, but the first priority in the start should always be a good webhost, quality content is than the other step.
I know its a heck of a job at choosing a good host but there are plenty of review sites on the web that’ll give you reviews from the users, other than that there are regional hosting directories with many links to hosting websites, i personally recommend web hosting choice ( a website that will help you find the correct if not the best host for your site based on your requirements such as setup fee, disk space, monthly cost and bandwidth etc ), using this you will have economical price to pay.
In,Pakistan due to the very rare number of credit card users and the less know how of getting domains and hosting many good bloggers remain stuck with free blog hosts like blogger, but than again when the political issues arise, specially the last year blockage of Blogger and its sub domains in Pakistan many bloggers faced problems, so its always good to have your own domain and a reliable hosting.
And yeah, don’t host your sites on the server my blog is on, am going to move it sooner to a new hosting;) *secret*.
So do you stumble?
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 20th, 2008
I have a hell lot of tool bars and add-ons installed onto my web browser Firefox making it too complicated to look on the first impression but when i give it a detailed look it has all that i need. So we were talking about stumbling, how often do you stumble? or in short do use Stumbleupon?
First lets get to what stumbling is, in a normal definition we can say that just randomly visiting a website through some way, but in the context i am speaking stumbling is stumbling across a wordpress blog, youtube video, a flash website, an Onion news,a wiki article or a MySpace band’s page etc using Stumbleupon. If you are not aware of it try stumbleupon’s website and install the toolbar and put in the settings, i am sure that it is very helpful to kill time when you are up and there’s nothing to do over the internet.I have found thousands of good sites and resources using the stumble tool bar and it helps me alot.Just like for instance if i showed interest in electronics when filling out my profile at StumbleUpon and with the tool bar installed i press stumble a page, it brought me into a website say for instance Testfreaks.com a website that contains electronic gadgets from iPods,Phones,MP3 players to receivers, TVs and cameras nearly everything, so it means StumbleUpon was intelligent enough to bring me to a site with my interests. So will you stumble?:P
Oh and if you think i referred you to stumbling, please stumble this article to help your friend’s stumble too:)
A Mighty Heart: Movie or a “Message” to Pakistan?
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 13th, 2008
I don’t know why i even wanted to review this particular movie, though it was not upto the mark in my opinion if it comes to story or direction but well patriot that i am i really wanted to mention it, just a glimpse of what the western media wanted to convey to Pakistan.
“A Mighty Heart” is a Hollywood film based on a true story about the tragic incident of an American born Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl who was kidnapped from Karachi and than later murdered.Its cast includes Angelina Jolie as Marriane Pearl and ( not to forget a portion of role from Adnan Siddiqui and Sajid Hassan (the two top actors in the Pakistan Tele Media)).The movie is taken from Marriane Pearl’s own book with the same name that she later penned down after the murder of her husband which is than filmed into the afro mentioned Movie.
The movie as i saw it was all about plenty of questions that lead to Daniel Pearl’s murder, the journalist is shown as a decent man who went far from his job to interview an Islamic Fundamentalist Sheikh Gillani that in the end turned out to be a plot designed by Ahmed Omer Sheikh (the guy who was released from an Indian jail after a hostage swap between the indian government for the hundreds of hostages in a hijacked plane way back in year 2000) who is later captured and commits the fact that his fellows killed him just because he was a Jew, and that American’s are not treating the prisoner’s at Guantanamo Bay humanly.An evidence video tape than later confirms the death of Daniel Pearl.
What i took from the movie was that it was not just a movie but a message to Pakistan about how evil our society is, how weird our thinking is specially when the Indian Journalist is termed as an Indian Spy and Daniel as the agent of Moosad in the movie. They also kept on doing sarcasm over the way the intelligence agencies in Pakistan carry out the proceedings of an investigation neglecting the fact that they tried there level best and finally reached the criminals but after the journalist was murdered. Only the ending of the movie and a few words from Angelina Jolie (Marriane Pearl) made my day when she said something in an interview with the CNN not blaming the country or a race or a portion of people from some religion to be behind her husbands death but an International and Un-Human groups of people responsible while she leaves the country as a widow to continue with her remaining life.
I don’t have much problem with the movie, but respect is what they missed which should have been there. Not much more to say.!!! Won’t recommend the movie even!
These days the clothes are more stylish than the product itself~
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 8th, 2008
I know some of you might think am gone a bit mad enough but these days, the covering is more appealing than the product itself. You definitely tend to be more and more attracted to a product because of the stylish and exclusive packaging they have specially when it comes to electronic devices, and than when you have pouches for phones that are more stylish than the phone itself, the cd inserts are more stylish than the cd’s collection you have, and than there are casings for cigarettes, laptops and cameras… just a few of them go like …
May God rest his soul in peace - Ameen!
Posted by Khushal Khan on January 6th, 2008
I had to rush back to my village on the friday morning when i heard the sudden death of my uncle Omer Hayat Khan, he was above 70 years of age and had no ailment what so ever, he died peacefully in the morning after having his break fast, just how helpless a human being can be at times, i wonder. May God rest his soul in peace, Ameen
