Often overshadowed by the scenic beauty of well manicured Islamabad, Rawalpindi hardly gets the attention it deserves. Whilst Islamabad is planned suburbia, Rawalpindi depleting buildings and deserted chaats. It has been loved and discarded long since.

I am always the silent observer when the Islamabad v Rawalpindi debates pan out in public ('Pindi mein dekha hai kis thara ghor ke dekhtay hain loag?' (Have you seen the way people stare in Pindi?' 'Tu Jinnah Super mein bhee hotay hain cheapsters...' 'There are cheapsters like that in Jinnah Super too' 'Haan woh Pindi se Uth ke atay hain!' 'Those come from Pindi!') :)

To gauge the the merits of one against the other (although this is well settled with Pindi-ites proclaiming 'we have cinePAX...' in a lofty tone of those well contended with life) is fruitless but who don't know Pindi well or who are oblivious to it is history and the weatherbeaten intricate wooden cravings cornering jharokas in the shambled buildings of it fail to see it as a city in mourning for former its lovers.

Mobeen Ansari captures some bits of Pindi in his work.

Silence
Billy Collins

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

I just got back home grinning from ear to ear carrying a liberty books bag filled to the brim - and flat out broke, of course.

The fusst thing I'm going to do tomorrow is to see if this year's booker winner is available at Saeed's. Never have I been this excited to read a book.

Wolf Hall

Oh, it releases on the 13th. Hopefully, it wont budge up Britain's history the way BBC's version of the House of Tudors did. Now that's one awful show. Thankfully it ends with three seasons.

Blog of the month: Photos by Emilio Morenatti
















Pakistani boys play billiards in the Christian neighborhood of Khashi Kaluni in Islamabad, Pakistan, Tuesday, April 15, 2008. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti)

Book Tag

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I still remember the 8-9 hour reading marathons when book 5,6 and 7 were released in 2003, 2005, 2007 respectively. My favorites: Book 3 'Harry Potter and prisoner of Azkaban', Book 5 'Order of Phoenix' and Book 8, 'Harry Potter and the deathly hallows' )

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Gregory Peck did justice to Finch in the movie. There's something about Peck, Clark Gable and Rex Harrison, no?)

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Great book. Pretty good movie, had it not been for Leslie Howard's terrible performance as the rather boring Ashley Wilkins)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (My favorite Dickens novel with 'The tale of two cities' close behind)

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Watch the BBC series)

34 Emma-Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Again BBC)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Lovely 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 (I have a few copies of this book too)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Angels and Demons, anyone?)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (and the others which follow in this series. Infact after Harry Potter, this is the best series of books I can think of. Mark Twain called it the sweetest depiction of childhood yet)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Thank you, malo, for leaving this in my car. It made for an enjoyablel read)

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Favorite Austen. 'When the romantic refinements of a young mind are obliged to give way, how frequently are they succeeded by such opinions as are but too common and too dangerous!' - Colonel Brandon)

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I LOVE this!)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

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

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -

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

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

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

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Grand total: 45, if i counted correctly

Who is that dropping in from Frankfurt?

*Have found a teacher to worship. She told me to call her by her first name. She also knows all the cool people there are to know and some of the most admirable people I know. I cant believe I lucked out this *speads arms wide* MUCH!

*FunkAsia is awesome, Ego somewhat overpriced. I know this seems unbelievable but I will justify myself later.

*Will do the tag soon.

.