Solutions.

 I made a mistake last night – One I have made before & deeply regretted. Did I know I was repeating a mistake? Yes. Did I try to stop myself? Not hard enough obviously.

Strangely enough, the mistake also showed me solutions. Solutions that werent really hard to find, when you come to think of it. It is just going to be hard to find a way to get there.

But, when a mistake is caught – it doesnt really matter what it led to in the end. Right?

…in which I am greatful.

The following have made my day so far.

.. An awesome sms from hubby, just when I was about to blow a fuse on something mundane.

– A cup of green tea – not asked for, bady needed.

– Two nice reports i the pipeline.

Huge Moral Dilemma.

Okay so, an issue at office being investigated- me being one of the primary witnesses – the problem is, while I have no doubt that the current accusations are true – there are other things in the past that would come up – my testimony to those things, could / WOULD turn the case against the victim – but is it actually moral to give testimony to added twists that would in the end lead to a verdict that is not based solely on the issue under investigation?

Keep in mind – that both things could very easily be proven related – infact, if the factors in the past are taken up, the case going on currently would be deemed nothing but an attempt at defamation. Since I don’t believe this is an attempt at defamation  and since even the factor in the past is not a known fact only a something that could be deduced from various incidents -   I don’t know, exactly what to state in my statement.

If I answer all the queries totally truthfully, I know that complainant would be totally trashed, which would eventually lead to a dubious character being called innocent. If I don’t answer all the questions truthfully, well, I wont be being truthful, would I?

….of Karachi, springwashing, screw-ups & Books.

The fifteen days in Karachi were filled with stuff to blog about – The legendary electricty breakdown, the allergic reaction to the weather of the very city I’ve called hoem all my life, the family, Mom, sis, cousins, the shadi, the various things changed, unchanged – but ofcourse blogging isnt the priority when you have a year and a half to catch up on, and have only fifteen days to do it!

So I came back, with posts half written in my mind, aiming to put everything on record ASAP – only to find a most interesting neighbor on the flight back home! The posts shifted, the aunty gaining the top slot with no competition. BUT, reaching home to find it literally coated in dust, pushed the aunty off the top slot.

Do you know, spring washing each and every room of your home can actually be a rewarding experience – especially when you have a husband as rocking as mine and a large Papasallis Chicken Tikka Pizza around!

With me missing a laptop abhi tak, the Great Wash story had to wait till I joined back – But office, ofcourse had another story!

Making the long story short, while I’ve been away, a reporter has resigned accusing the MD of sexual harassment, I have missed getting my statement recorded in front of the Gender Equality Committee, the performance of the Bureau has dropped by a neat 50% & the management seems to have lost all direction.

BUT, the thing that pushes everything else to the background is being told, after I have already availed the leave that I was not eligible for a leave in the first place. Why I was not told of this amazing, totally un-understandable leave policy when I filed my application a whole month before taking the leave? Nobody seems to have the least idea. The consequent arguments & the pathetic solution leave me disgusted.

So the month has ended with me looking at a possible 15 day slash in my salary – an HR department whose effective response has consisted of not picking my calls (The director’s aide actually told me that the great director has been in a meeting during the 9 hours and 15 calls that I made during one single day)

Since writing about this obviously isnt good for my blood pressure, I will dedicate this post to a book meme I found at Assorted Mundanities – here’s to hoping thinking of books might actually end up improving my mood.

Following is a list of books recognized by BBC as being the most read ones in the world. The ones in Bold  are the ones I have read.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen) -  Who hasn’t?
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien - Sigh! Sigh! Sigh! Even though the movies don’t come anywhere near, me and hubby spent hours watching all of them back to back, the very week that we were married.
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte - Ofcourse!
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling - Cant thank Rowling enough for bringing magic back into my life!
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee - Have owned at least 3 copies of the book!
6. The Bible .. Tried but couldn’t get past the first few pages.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – One of the first books that actually left a tangible impression on me.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – Love it!
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens ­– Even followed the Urdu serialized translation that was published in Naunehal a decade ago!
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – The only one of the series that I actually enjoyed.
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – The most recent classic read, was presented the book on my wedding anniversary by a colleague.
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare … Nope! Nor have the strength to.
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – Have read, & forgotten.
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – Read at a time when I was too young to appreciate, is on my list of ‘to be read again’.
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens – Own it, haven’t somehow.
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – Wish I had.
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Oh love it, love it, love it! When my research professor was bugging me to submit a proposal for my Master’s thesis I lost my cool and wrote a proposal totally inspired by Douglas style. Needless to say, it was not approved.
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll - The rule is Jam Tommorow!
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Siggghh!!!
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – One of my favorite Dickens’ books.
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen – A book I forced myself to read cause everybody had read it. Cant say I liked it much.
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen – Again, yeah well!
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Appriciated it much more after reading his second book.
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell - Was forced to read it cause it was a part of a friend’s course!
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – While the most popular, it remains the least admirable of all his books.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – HATE IT. No second thoughts about that!
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – Lovely book.
46. Anne of Green Gables -  LM Montgomery – Ah! Still love Anne. Left most of my books home for younger siblings to enjoy, but couldn’t bear leaving Anne behind.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – Well, I guess I really don’t have a taste for classics.
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (x)
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – One word, AMAZING! I love the way the book captures the mundane details of the character’s lives while still keeping us abreast of the greater picture of politics, Hindu Muslim riots, feudalism and what not. A work of pure genius.
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – Another Dickens favorite.
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon.
60. Love in the Time of Cholera -  Gabriel Garcia Marquez  – Own it, but couldn’t make my self try another Garbiel Garcia.
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov.
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – Again, have read both the book and the serialized Urdu version.
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding – No book has ever made me feel this shallow before!
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie …Read with great expectations. Found it okayish.
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville.
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – Not one of my favorite Dickens.
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker – Read at a very young age, remember only snippets of random paras.
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – A book second only to The Little Princess.
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – Sent me in a depressed mode for days. Extraordinarily powerful prose. Cant decide weather I love it or hate it.
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – J
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Love the stories, hate the character, simply cause he is so smug!
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton  - Oh Man! Can still remember all the afternoons I spent fantasizing upon the possiblity of coming across a similar tree.
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – Lovely!
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Dunno what to say about Hamlet.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  – Wanted to kill the idiots who made the movie, totally butchering the wonderful images the book was capable of evoking.
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Ha! Only Forty read – bah! Not even half of em, and I actually called myself a nerd!

Of seths & phuppos.

I almost envy people who have the energy to write about ‘issues’ – social, political, local & global. Me? I’ve had my fill of them at the end of the day.  The ‘seth’ mentality is taking over – and I have ended up explaining myself to people I have never held in much regard more than once this week. Non journalistic attitudes, business instincts guiding a news channel cannot turn out good in any way.  

However, job market sucks, we have a million responsibilities, a million liabilities – loans, leases, installments, rent, us, his family & mine – there is no way that I can even think of leaving the job without being sure I’d get another one which pays as much if not more.

~sighs~

This is where I wish my dad was rich! Correction, this is where I wish his brothers and sisters were not the scum of earth and after his death we had managed to secure the house & the money that was rightfully ours.

Double sigh!

Pooh! I hate being in this mood. And I hate even a fleeting reminder of my dadhyal walas.

The pathetic woman, who hit my mom in front of me, told us to get out of the house a mere fifteen days after abbu’s death, showed up at our apartment waving huge scissors, accused my mom of worrying abbu to death with all the ‘responsibilities of her children’sent stuff she bagged from my mom’s jahaiz as my wedding present, actually has the guts to show her face at my home again. And not just that, she actually has the guts to tell my mom that I don’t have kids as yet cause she never fed me properly.

I don’t know who to be more angry at – Amma for even letting her in and then listening to her bullshit calmly – Phuppo, for existing and being the bitch that she is – or myself for the inability to take all her crap in a lighter vein.

Agh!

This is not the mood I wanted to go home in.

Firstly, absence really does make the heart grow fonder and more importantly, it defintetly helps put things into perspective. The Husband was gone for a week, covering the IDP crisis from Mardan, Swabi and Bunair & seven days spent without him drove home the amount of time we do spend together.

It definitely didn’t seem this much when he was present. As a result, his return has been much more anticipated and welcomed than I could imagine.

Secondly, Absar Alam, the only reason we all joined Dunya without a second thought resigned a couple of weeks back – Result? A total lack of interest in work, a surety that the ratings would drop and an implementation of policies that might make all the sense to a businessman but none whatsoever to a journalist. Our team joined this channel in November 2008 – before us, Dunya had changed three teams and had been in pipelines for more than two years – We took it as a challenge and the channel was launched in exactly a month and a half, December 15^th, 2008. In the first three months we were steady at No. three – Geo being the first and Express the second. Over the next few months, we flirted between the 2^nd and third positions – Now, even  thought we haven’t has a steady two or first position, we are still proud of the achievement simply cause this is probably the only news channel without the support of a newspaper staff – the only channel with no proper ‘group’ to speak of.

However, now that the driving force behind our efforts has left – the future seems kind of lost for now. I hope things wouldn’t really shape up as bleakly as the recent decisions of the management suggest.

Finally, I’m going to Karachi next week. The first time since I moved here – a whole year and a half – the leave is for fifteen days and there are a million people to meet and a very hectic wedding to attend. I should be ultra excited, but truth is, I am already worrying how this or that is going to fit in the schedule.

On the national and the political front, I’ve been writing reports over reports regarding both the crisis and the IDPs plus the Budget and simply have no energy to cover them here for now.

Just realized I’m tired as hell.

From the frying pan into the fire!

I cant believe I am saying this but the very reason that made me join this channel has now become the very reason that makes me want to quit.

To have worked on and on to make the best of people with absolutely no experience, to have made them into people who could atleast stumble forward if not sail when it comes to package production , to have stayed till mid night trying to make sure everything is as good as it can be only to be told that most of ‘simply doesn’t count’ cause it really needs no effort and on top of that, knowing that is there is no way possible that you could improve the turn out given the crew and the resources !

Leaving Geo was supposed to be a good decision – I don’t want to regret it.

All my life, jobs have walked by, offered themselves, opportunities just made themselves available – now that I need to move away from here – I simply do not know how one goes about looking for a job.

 

The Capital under Seige.

As of now, anyone reporting live from the Capital could comment on the following

-          Two additional pickets on Margala Road F-6/1.

-          Increased activity & deployment in FC Barracks near the same.

-          Constant air patrolling in twin cities.

-          Increased checking of cars & bikes regardless of the registration numbers or ‘women’ present in the car.

-          The new & improved security pan at the National Assembly in response to a threat aiming to blow up the Parliamentarians & the Media.

But, what would say much more about the security situation, is the fact that all private & government schools remained closed today due to a serious security threat.  FROBELS has been given an ultimatum to close down or face a suicide bombing. DG Islamabad calling an emergency meeting with managements of all private schools in the city disclosed an intelligence report detailing a militant plan to stage a Mannawa type attack in schools, holding the children hostage to get unknown demands fulfilled.

The UN Offices in Islamabad will operate on skeleton staff till 25th & are in the process of adding additional security personnel to thier staff.

Right now, a commercial building in Pindi has been surrounded by Police & Rangers to cordon of some militants present inside.  Husband is present at the scene & I am worrying yet again. So far, 365 people have been arrested including one, who tried to escape in a Burqa.

The teenager wearing a suicide jacket who high jacked a car on Adyala road last Saturday is still on the loose.

The office has become a no entry zone for  ghair mutaliqa afraad cause the threats haven’t ceased.

Last week, a friend sat on the stairs of a shop in Jinnah Super Market, smoking.  She was approached by Mullah type youngsters who proceeded to tell her that girls don’t smoke. She told them not to talk to her, cause Shariya doesn’t allow that. As she walked to her, another young guy in Talib get up, followed and told her ‘not to worry cause various Taliv\ban groups were present & active in Islamabad, and Shariya very soon would be a reality.

She drove, reached Saeed Book Bank & got jolted by the blast that wrecked the FC Barrack that night.

They say there is a danger of civil war in the country – I think the war has already begun.

P.S. I just found something about the Liberty attacks that I am dying to tell – only it cant be told cause it isnt in ‘National Interest’.

Another f**** blast.

The possibility of a nice weekend, wrecked by yet another blast in Isloo.
While husband is on the scene, I cant hardly control my nerves here in office.
I cant live this life – we need to get out of Pakistan. I simply cant take it anymore.

So, what are the options for a jaded journalist wanting to switch professions? I cant decide what’s worse, the timings, the work itself or the thick skin you have to grow.