A nuclear touch

So I have been ordered here, despite my uttering the tujh say bhi dilfaraib hain couplet.
Boy, are they dilfaraib! I had to clean the house and produce some weird compound. Strictly speaking it wasn't supposed to be weird but strange accidents do happen when I enter the kitchen(not that they get me exempted*sigh*).
There is this strange touch I have.Things tend to go haywire when they come too close to yours humbly. You must have heard about the golden touch that a king suffered from due to his greed. In my language they have a phrase that describes a very successful person as someone who touches dust and transforms it into gold. Some opposite power resides in my poor hands.
There is absolutely nothing in my home that I cannot destroy or disturb or break or annoy. I had a fairly reliable printer. At least it was very reliable as long as it was out of my reach.
Then it became mine.
Then it stopped working one day.
I deduced , quite correctly, that it had run out of ink ( I am good at deductions, its just that the practical thing is difficult).
So I fished out a new cartridge and swapped it for the old one. The thing started working but gave me way too much confidence with a printer.
(Hint: injecting me with more confidence is always bad. Always.)
So he next time it stopped working, I tore it apart to no avail. The poor thing currently resides on my table, crawling with cobwebs and spiders. Maybe you, the reader, can shed an imaginary tear or two for its fate.
Then there is my desktop pc. I manage to blow up its os at least 4 times a year. In my defence, I have to reinstall everything from scratch all by myself.
Some time ago the fan in my precious graphic card started whizzing too much. I confidently took it out and oiled it. Only later did I know that you can burn a fan by oiling it the wrong way.
Again, in my defence, the fan works silently as a mouse now.I just hope I don't have to take it out again, for its own sake.
The last time I got someone's out-of-order pc to repair, I let it gather a lot of dust and then fished out its browsing history and showed it to their mom (ouch!).
 For my life I cannot count how many LCDs I have destroyed while doing one thing or the other. Just hand one to me and consider the thing done.
And it is not for want of practice that the daal chawal I cook are always lacking in salt.Or biryani or aaloo gosht or bhindi.
Anything that I cook, that is.
I rarely press my own clothes, but on last Eid I managed to burn my zero-second shirt. (I hid it in my closet and simply took another dress out).
A couple of weeks ago I was trying to kill a lizard nicely, and ended up splattering its blood on the floor and the wall.(I know it is gross)
Some time ago, being a poor person, I was trying to straighten my hair with an iron.Fortunately (for my hair) my mom found out.
I guess I do like experimenting with things too much to be considered safe.
As for annoying people on purpose, I am considering doing that for a livelihood now.
Its this tendency towards self-destruction that I identify with in Mohsin Hamid's characters(he is quite a favorite writer)
You may have read an excellent work titled 'mujhay meray doston say bacchao' by Sajjad Hyder Yelderem.
One of these days I am going to be forced to write an essay 'Save me from my self'.

Some more reviews and the spring

Life goes on, like it always does, and leaves sleepyheads snoring behind.
But personally, I cannot think of one reason why one shouldn't spend one's life snoring while the world sprints on.
It steers you clear of a lot of quite unnecessary hassle.You also save up on a lot of energy, which you can use for some more hours of blessed ignorance of the world around you.
If the world wants to go on, let it go on. I do not want to go on, and that is the most important thing.
But I must not get carried away, as I promised to reduce the level of pointlessness that I carry around with me all the time.
So there are some books that I'd like to recommend to anyone who wants to read them:

• 'The Physics of Impossible' and 'Hyperspace' by Michio Kaku. I came across the former , liked it a lot, and read the latter. It was even better. Kaku is really good at explaining things and has an interesting style.
• 'A Song of Ice and Fire' series by George R. R. Martin. Based in a fictional world, it has some excellent, multidimensional characters and a gripping plot. It is still incomplete, five books have come out so far.For some people, it may be too long. (I am re-reading it nowadays, and praying that the next book comes soon).
• Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, a story that depicts a future world. Huxley is a favorite writer, and I wish for some soma  from time to time. Brave New World Revisited is a collection of his essays, equally liked.
• 'Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions' by Edwin Abbott Abbott, the satirical  narrative of a 2-dimensional being. (Women were a separate and markedly lower class even there.sigh.)
• 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' series, consisting of 3 books. Detective fiction at a fast pace, though it gets rather predictable as the series moves along,but I like Lisbeth Salander.
•  'The Taliban Shuffle' by Kim Barker, an American journalist's account of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Recommended.
• Brideshead Revisited
• A Room with a View
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
• Daisy Miller

There is no kindle fire in the near future for me, I am afraid. A sad existence mine is, indeed.
There was a discussion with a friend about showing off, and I argued that one must have something to show off. I don't even have a Sandy Bridge i7 (which I dream about), what can I possibly show off? Or something with Ice Cream Sandwich, which I'd really love to have.
Sad,isn't it?
One day, when I will be rich, may God have mercy on all things beautiful and fast and slim and symmetric and with processors.
Right now, it is difficult to be sad for a long span of time. Yesterday morning, when I stepped out of the house, a gust of cool air greeted me. The sky was a beautiful grey, neither too dark nor too light to be as plain as daylight,but a metallic shade. For a moment, I stood looking at the tree in the yard, which had its leaves waving merrily along with the wind. The sun had not yet climbed high on the sky and was a nice shade of pale yellow.
Somehow, when I boarded the bus to my college, I couldn't find it in my heart to be as gloomy and cynical as usual.Rather, I thought of forests and valleys with streams and waterfalls and tall green firs and dew-covered grass in the morning to walk upon and a clear, star-studded sky at night.

A few reviews

Even though the semester has ended, the workload has not.There is still a project, and I have no idea where to begin.

As someone so aptly put it, this project is a way for us to recognize the might of the subject that we call antenna.

Not that I am even begging to differ.

Iqbal comes to my mind:

وہی میری کم نصیبی، وہی تیری بے نیازی

میرے کام کچھ نہ آیا یہ   کمال  نے نوازی

There are some books that I thought I may want to review.

• The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. The story transports you to the world of Clarice Starling, a trainee at the FBI Academy. She is portrayed as a determined and courageous woman and is assigned with the task of interviewing a man charged with cannibalism, who also happens to be a noteworthy psychologist, to help the police in what may be another case of a cannibalism.  
• Rebecca,by Daphne Du Maurier. The writer has a distinguishing style, a blend of the mellow and the melancholy,with some unexpected twists in the plot thrown in at places where you do not expect them. Basically, it is the story of a young,poor girl who meets a middle-aged rich widower and marries him, to find out that their life is constantly haunted by ghosts of the past. Throughout the story, you cannot help feeling sorry for the lack of self confidence and the childish innocence of the heroine, who, interestingly, remains anonymous till the end of the story (and even after it).
•  The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame. It is a story for children. A very good story, nonetheless, of some animals who, of course, live in their respective homes. Some of the animals it features are a mole, a rat (called ratty) and a very conceited toad, who composed a poem in his own honour:
            ' The world has held great Heroes,
             As history-books have showed;
             But never a name to go down to fame
             Compared with that of Toad!'
  
  
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is definitely a very curious case and a good read, though a short one. The (short) story of a man who was somehow traveling backward along the time axis.
•  A Damsel in Distress, by P. G. Wodehouse. One can always trust Wodehouse for some hours of sheer delight. This book describes one of his high-spirited heroines and the adventures she had, defying her family.
•  Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck. A sad and disturbing tale of two field workers looking for work, a sharp yet unsuccessful man and his friend with very limited mental capabilities.
•  Something Wicked this Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury. Science fiction, fantasy and horror. It discusses some of the deepest, most well-hidden desires in almost every mortal being. The desire to live forever, and to be young forever, and the lengths to which human beings can go to get what they want.
  

Saying it at last

For once in our life, we can blame the absence of a martial law for our troubles.
Disregarding the serious, the ugly and the tragic sides of the ongoing tussle for clinging-to-power-despite-absolutely-lacking-morality in the country, a royal friend and I discussed the situation for about an hour and expressed our hopes that we may get some unforeseen holidays and hence could have the exams delayed.
Alas,our hopes were in vain, and now we have to face the terrible truth:the papers are here, and our preparation is nowhere.
If there is anyone in the higher setup who is in the mood for an adventure, I do hope they embark on it before the upcoming holidays,or it won't be any use at all.
Sometimes it happens that you try to escape something and it comes after you in hot pursuit.In another discussion, the above mentioned two had agreed that the following questions fall under the category of very immoral questions:

• How was your paper? (particularly asked again and again from a poor student who is staggering out of the exam hall with a numb brain)
• How is your preparation? (asked on the day before the paper, the night before the paper, the morning of the paper,while the poor, lazy student stares at others' shining, eager faces.Of course, as it happens, the student under consideration is the dumbest and the laziest of them all, rather one of the very,very few dumb and lazy ones.)
• Have you studied subject x, book y, chapter z, topic a, page b, figure c, curve d? ( This asked all the time during the semester.A solution may be for the student to prance around with a placard saying  'NO' worn around the neck.)

So we are trying to create a world in which exams don't have a hype around them. But then we got a message telling us that we have to go and see our marked papers this monday.
Now I particularly dislike this subject, for it is an ultra stupid one, and not even the instructor, who is one of *the* best teachers I have ever come across, could create a spark of interest with his amazing teaching skills.
(By the by, the teaching talents of this particular teacher have been quite wasted, teaching a stupid course. He could have been assigned something worthwhile. But,on second thought, which talent isn't wasted here? Jump to next thought.)
So now we will have to see it and forget it.
Having a short term memory helps. I wonder if goldfish really are the happiest of us all.

I am afraid that the semester project I have to complete is turning into a case of
 ہاتھ کانٹوں سے کر لیے زخمی
پھول بالوں میں اک سجانے کو
When I succeed in overcoming my fear of doing it finally, the monitor goes blank,courtesy wapda. Recently, there was a power outage of approximately 18 hrs at my end. A discovery I made: lack of electricity can induce murderous ideas in a human being.
I am not sure if it would last long enough for me to complete this post or not.
Not that I am out of ideas. Not at all. In fact, I was rather looking forward to my teacher's reaction when I was going to deliver a little speech in front of him, elaborating that I could not complete the work as there wasn't any electricity the entire weekend, and because I am a miserable,poor person after all, and how I should be excused for it.
In fact, I'll still have to give him some excuse.As I am a proponent of telling the truth, it would be something along the same line, that I am lazy\slow-witted\hibernate in winter\have some family feud with processors\ etc etc.
In the cold morning, getting up seems one of the most difficult and brutal things one can ever be compelled to do.
In the upcoming holidays, I want to try my hand at developing some website. Personally, I think I don't have much of a taste for creating a design, so I'll just have to use some custom template. Rather, I'd concentrate on the development part.
Rain is finally here, and is as nice as ever!
So, if I emerge alive out of this trying to make a project, I'll continue this blog. For in the other case, I won't be able to blog.
To my single, most devoted reader: I promised you that I'll try to decrease the level of idiotic content in my babbling, but I don't seem much successful.

The game is done! I've won,I've won!

Quoth she, and whistles thrice.
Except for the fact that the game is not done. In the least.
This is something I might have mentioned before, but I'll say it again,anyways:Winter is a time to sleep 16 hours a day.
Besides, a winter without rain is-not the right winter.
As things-to-do pile up, my mind wanders at random to Ancient Mariner lines and I keep thinking of a number of completely unrelated things.
I am waiting for someone's post, it is supposed to be a happy one.
Still waiting for it.
For some time, I have been intending to read Ghulam Bagh, for I have heard a lot about it.
I came across the song of ice and fire series and started reading it. At first,i was not impressed. But further reading took me deep in the world of Starks, Lannisters and Targaryens. Then I watched the entire season of A Game of Thrones, and now I am waiting for ACOK. Despite knowing the entire story beforehand (or as much of it as has been revealed to date, till A Dance with Dragons), it was a nice watch. The way the season stays true to the real story is nice,too.

The Wall is such an interesting place

A Dream Of Spring (break)

So this weekend was spent dreaming, with open eyes.
Someone announced the date for exams in a very public place. It was thoughtful, I must say. Still........
I was turning the date over in my mind, subconsciously,when I realized  what final exams really imply.
I sat up with a jolt.Upon rechecking, the result was the same:
  The spring break is near!!!!!
 So,naturally, the rest of the weekend was spent in a blissful fantasy.I dreamed of the chocolates I'd eat, the mornings I'd spend curled up in a warm bed, the books I'd read (the break isn't really important for this) and the long story I may write,if I can muster the energy. Who knows, I may get an idea for doing something  interesting , though that not very probable, as I have not thought of many interesting things to date. (I am an exceptionally boring and bored person.)
In short, my weekend was radically different from that of my friend, the distracted soul.
(DS, times change often,so don't dwell too much on useless things.)
There are a few things to do in the meantime, of course. There is a project to be made, along with, horror of horrors, a report. Due to a series of unfortunate and unforeseen events, I'll  have to make the report myself *shudders*
Besides, a minor problem is that I am as yet undecided about the project. In the end, if I cannot find anything more interesting, I'll have to settle with a matrix inverter. (The thing I most like about a matrix is its name. Matrix! Maybe I should search for a nice title page for my report, with iridescent green letters on a black background.)
If I cannot find something to do with prime numbers, matrix inversion it will have to be.
I got to play with a beautiful Nook today. Thank you, my friend-with-a-Nook.
There are a couple of lines by Ghalib which are the favourite these days,ever since I first read them last week: 

تماشا ،  کہ اے محو  آینہ داری

تجھے کس تمنا سے ہم دیکھتے ہیں