Crow's Nest...

Since my city is the third class city of the third world country we should not expect anything from the drivers on her roads. But before we move on let me clear this here and now that in my understanding there is no second class or first class city in this third class country. By this assumption I mean to tell you that do not take my city and its rules and regulations as any exception to the rule or anything extraordinary. Anyhoo! There are no qualified drivers on the roads. The cars, bicycles, donkey carts, buses, wagons, motorcycles, few horse carts and many more donkey carts are moving at their own designated pace in the meshwork of ways that we like to call roads. There is smog, all around, and public transport is adding to it 24/7. There is no sense of traffic rules. You can turn right, you can turn left, you can even take a U turn without any prior warning or sign on the main road, at the behest of your dear heart. It is like driving in the wheel of death. It seems it is no...

I have been trying to embed pictures within my posts using Hello. there has been little success on the shortcut way but I have figured out a long cut way for the time being. In some of the first pictures I present my humble abode for the past 7 months. I have been faithfully sitting on the chair in front of this desk from early in the morning to late at night. This table has seen me through thick and thin of studying. Made of solid wood and gifted to me by my grand father I have been studying on it for the past 12 years. It is only now that it has been changed to fit my desktop over which I spend most of my time. I will be posting more pictures later on this blog.

World Call calling card boasts a minimum of 155 minute talking time on its Rs.100 denomination card. This is a lie one should not entertain. I bought the card and was told by the female computer generated voice that I had no more than 100 minutes on the card. This is inspite of all the bill boards and huge advertisements on display in the city that tell us that we have 155 full minutes irrespective of the time and distance. Telling lies right in the face of public has become a common strategy employed by the companies these days. we are told that we are being given this rebate and that rebate but instead we are always deprived of our hard earned money. One of the reason for this is lack of consumer rights protection entities. If there are any their role is non existent or very limited. Consumer based powerful organizations should be instituted to tackle this problem and safe guard the rights of the consumers. Strict laws should be enforced and practiced to curb the evil.

Since I have been tagged by Zac so here are the six weird things about me or so I guess: I have a fascination for early morning rain. Rain just before waking. The smell in the soil and the sound of falling rain drops. If I don't go to hell I would use most of my spare time in replaying this scene. In accidents on the road I always hit my car from the right side. I could never spell the word weird with confidence. Is it weired, wired or wiered... I still don't know! I have to keep as few shortcuts on my desktop as possible. I have to turn off the computer when I go to sleep or the electromagnetic field will burst my brains or so I believe! My attention span = 1 minute. If you want it to be heard say it within 60 seconds or move along.

Between 2000 and 2004, Thomson Scientific indexed 89,976 papers that listed at least one author address in India. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals classified in the field of agricultural sciences. As the right-hand column shows, the relative impact of published research from India has yet to attain the world average in any of the fields shown. Nevertheless, there were areas of relatively strong performance--including physics, in which papers from India scored at 79% of the world average (2.89 citations per paper for India, versus the world figure of 3.64 cites), while India's research in computer science was just 18% below the world mark. Materials science, engineering, and chemistry were also areas of comparative strength. Via Thomson Scientific . But perhaps for a Pakistani this , this , this , this and this are more of interest.

USMLE Step 2 prep has been going on for the past 5 days and it is since today that jhai I have started to find the original pace. I think now that USMLE steps can be taken in any order it is much more convenient and better for an AKU graduate to take Step 2 before Step 1. Since the subjects in Step 2 are all those which have been dealt with in the final year any student can take the exam with a shorter duration of preparation. Infact it will not be of any harm if the same prescribed books are read through atleast once in medical school during the rotation. This way a student can save precious time from his/her step 2 prep and be done with it in our case by December of the graduating year. Since most of the graduates really start their Step 1 prep after their convocation in December the timeline for Step 1 preparation will remain more or less the same. The benefit of this approach will be two folds. Step 2 scores will improve since the information will be fresh in a fresh graduate ...

Continuing Medical Education. That is what all the world of medicine is striving for. Everyone is ranting the word and everyone is interested in getting CME credit hours to his/her name. Its the buzz word. I think medical doctors have realized that it is about time that they mend their ways and went the right way. The right way being the way of continued education and learning experience. Gone are the days when one could sit on his/her MBBS degree alone and become a famous well deserved doctor. Now the world is changing ever so fast and the doctors have to change with it. It is change or perish. Doctors have to be very flexible nowadays. They have to give way to new ideas and procedures and learn to forget that they had so painstakingly learnt in the years gone past. This is the right kind of attitude that needs to be nurtured in the mind set of every future doctor in Pakistan and in the developing world. To be innovative and to be able to use the scarcely available resources...

When there are too many things to write about one gets flustered by the mere amount of text to be written and committed to history. In my case there are many half written pieces waiting to be given the finishing touches. During my recent visit to Lahore I spent a day with my host Usman. He is a changed man since I last met him. Much inclined towards the practical aspects of the religion these days he is trying to incorporate discipline into his life through religious practice. The piece of paper stuck to his wall says everything in one word "Discipline". I got a chance to revisit some old memories and watched some 'Grey's Anatomy'. The programme is developing into a nice thriller drama about surgical interns at SGH. I am so addicted to the programme that I ended up watching almost 7 episodes of the programme in just one sitting while Usman was busy studying for his USMLE. We went out to a sheesha place and had some pizza. My PMDC registration is still pend...

I was going through my usual dose of paper today and not very astonishingly almost all the paper was filled with news of, for or on USA and its involvement on the world stage. At one point in time I gave up the effort to read anymore because it had started to annoy me. Here is this paper that is published from a third world country for the citizens of a fourth world country yet it has all the news about a first world country and no news of the citizens of this unlucky piece of land. It seemed as if there is no other nation in this whole big world. Tell me is it only me or everyone feels that our media looks upto the first world a bit too much. Focussing on their problems and in the process neglecting what hell we are going through. We act like hungry puppies that have their tongues dangling out of their mouths and saliva dripping from the corner. Breathing ever so fast and hoping to get a piece of bone that is not our fate in the first place. I have to run now but I will be back ...

Is to be the date when I start my Step 2 preparation. Till then I am free. But this freedom desires that I be of service to mankind. So it is. I have yet to buy my course material for the next step. I am stuck in middle of so many things that there is no possible way to come about this shopping. Anyways lets see what transpires through in next 6 hours. My computer is getting connectivity problems. I don't want to reinstall windows since that will ruin all the customization and I don't have the wits to redo them. I have to figure out a way to fix the corrupted components of the windows without having to formatting the drive. That will take some doing since we all know windows is the sloppiest of all operating systems.

I am done with my USMLE Step 1 exam as of 25th May 2006. It is about time that i resumed my postings here. There is a lot to write but i am waiting for a better machine to write on. This computer is getting hiccups every so often now.