Crow's Nest...

I read this well researched and thought out article on the often not so authentic TPS today and found it to be very informative.  the writer has been very elaborate. Telecommunication industry is developing very fast in our country.  For a strong and stable telecommunication industry a constant and stable supply of electricity is essential.  In the backdrop of current supply shortages we must look into alternate sources of energy.  Given the extensive tower infrastructure of the telecommunication companies all over Pakistan it is easier and more feasible for them to use solar energy for generating electricity for meeting their local infrastructure needs.  This will help them in two ways.  It will reduce their dependability on more expensive and polluting sources for the same energy and will also reduce the operational costs of the units in the long run. It is also important for the same industry to explore this avenue because they have money to spare an...

I was just going through the pictures of the test match between England and West Indies that ended in a euphoric and very convincing win by West Indies.  It has been a long long time since we have heard of the Caribbean nation making a mark in the field of cricket.  This is a solitary win and may not mean much but to me the pictures of the bowlers jumping in joy were reminiscent of the bygone days of their glory.  Well done WI.

We recently received an email in our inboxes telling us that there is an acute shortage of opiates in the country these days.  The company that was producing these opiates has been shut down because it failed to meet the criteria set by FDA.  The result is that drugs like, Oxycodone, Percocet, Vicodin will no longer be available.  Even when these drugs become available they will be rationed and the supply will be short by many fold. This news is a huge shock to the system.  Our patient population is squarely dependent and at times addicted to opaites and narcotics at every level.  If there are no narcotics available for them to use they are going to complain and all hell is going to break lose.  As soon as people start running out of their supplies they will start calling the hospital and the clinics for answers and in the hope that the doctors will provide them with narcotics, as they had been doing ever so diligently, without fault for so long a time....

Pittsburgh Steelers have won the super Bowl 43 in a sensational finish today.  I watched the first half of the game and then followed the second half on the NFL website.  I hated the 2 minute lag on the website but it was still better than knowing nothing about what was happening down in Tampa Florida. JAS called me 2 minutes before the end of second half and told me that Cardinals had pulled the lead and i advised not to rush to conclusions as 2 minutes is long enough time to turn the tables.  It is a repeat of Super Bowl 42, only way better in every respect.  Its not over tills its over. Steelers have won the Super Bowl the record 6th time.  Holmes is the MVP of the game and goes home with more than a diamond ring, a brand new cadillac.  Tomlin is the youngest head coach in the super bowl history to take his team to the winning podium.  He started his own career in the very same ground in Tampa Florida.

After a long wait we finally are going to get some kind of entertainment that is acceptable to all sections of our society.  We are going to have cricket played on our grounds.  We are going to have a few moments of fun and relaxation. Thank you team Sri Lanka for coming to Pakistan, to the rescue of millions of fans in this country.  If India can not be there for the fun and festivities due to political motives and gains we have at least some friends who we can look up to. Pakistan, Lanka first ODI today - GEO.tv

Madam, - The World Press Photo of the year award 2006 was given to photographer Spencer Platt, who captured an image of four stylishly dressed young women and their driver cruising through the rubble of war-torn Beirut in a convertible. The photograph, not surprisingly, caused controversy. Nikola Solic’s photograph in your edition of January 2nd is equally striking, and will surely be remembered as an iconic image of the tragedy that is Gaza 2009. The image is of a group of young, clearly well-off Israelis, five females and one male, surveying from a hilltop distance an Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip. One young woman is laughing heartily; another gazes languidly into the distance, and has a mobile phone glued to her ear; another, armed with binoculars, is looking, presumably, at a scene of devastation. An extraordinary photograph that narrates, even better than words can do, the attitudes of a nation. - Yours, etc, CIARAN COSGROVE, Glenageary, Co Dublin. ...

Economist in its print version tells us a story, that, I am sure, will make Tableeghi Jamat writhe in anguish and pain.  It is somewhat of a counter point to their claims that almost anywhere you look and everywhere you go Islam is spreading like wild fire.  It, infact, might not be true for the state of Kosovo where, Muslims are converting to Christianity and not in small numbers but in quite large numbers. I will however take this story with a pinch of salt.  Part of the reason is my primary faith and the hurt that I feel when I read this story but the other part is more to do with the quality of fact telling that Economist does.  To be very truthful Economist articles are more often than not factually misleading and stories in their own right.  I am mostly disappointed with the way facts are quoted without any care for the real picture.  Then again I read Economist for the quality of opinion more than the quality of its facts that I know by now are if ...

I never wanted to write about benazir bhutto on my blog once after she was dead and dusted.  I am not a very big fan of her being and also not a very big fan of her not being.  I really don't care if she lived or if she is dead.  It is interesting both ways.  Therefore this post is not to contemplate her course of action if she were to live and neither is it to lament the loss, which for me is no more than the loss of every other person that died that day and in the violence that ensued after her death. I must say that she was very lucky in that even her death turned her into something more and bigger than she really was.  She was a tactful politician and maybe this time around she was a changed politician.  But who cares she is dead and we have a nemesis to deal with that she left behind in the form of Zardari and her son and daughters. I mean to write this post to infuse some sanity in this benazir hysteria that seems to have over run our nation that ...

According to the BBC News, CIA is using erectile dysfunction drug Viagra to lure Afghan warlords into submission.  According to the news report they are meeting success with this tactic.  Afghan war lords seem to have insatiable sex drive that is only hindered by their inability to perform.

Monday was a high alert day for Pakistani air force and the airports.  For a while it looked like, from the media reports that we were on the verge of war with our neighbor.  There were all sorts of reports about PAF flights in various sectors around the border and in the cities.  Airports were put on red alert and flights were delayed.  But all this continued for a very short while and then things went back to high alert state. I personally think it is something blown a hundred times over by the media to sensationalize the situation.  PAF is battle ready all the time and most likely were conducting a quick response rehearsal.  During war time commercial airspace is also used for tactical and flying purposes.  Our war planes do not use these routes in times of peace.  It seems that what PAF did on Monday was to provide a short course to its planes on the less traveled routes in preparation for any adventurism from across the border and it was bl...

I was reading this interesting news item on wired today.  Scientists at UCLA have hacked simple camera cell phones to enable these to count blood cells.  If refined further this idea has great implications.  These cell phones can help replace in part the expensive laboratory setups required to do simple blood analysis.  Given the low cost and extreme portability of the instruments we can take disease detection to the very remote villages of the world.  This is amazing.  This is coming.  Read it here .

Soldiers have an inevitable and unavoidable relationship with their guns.  Mostly because these very guns are their bread and butter.  These are the instruments of stability in their lives in some way.  Without a gun a soldier is not a soldier just as without a wing a plane is not a plane.  A bullet is a direct and sometimes a very violent consequence of having a gun around.  But no one will argue with the fact that bullet is the only significant consequence of a gun so it should be assumed that a soldier has a same relationship with a bullet as the one he has with his gun.  Guns and bullets are synonymous.  Neither is useful without the other.  So it should be interesting to know what would a soldier feel like without a gun while facing a bullet.  Apart from the horror of death that is incumbent upon almost all of us there should be other feelings that come across a soldier who has to face enemy's bullet but has no gun of his own.  How...

According to the news reports coming out of Stratfor international community believes that Indian military operations against targets in Pakistan have in fact been prepared and await the signal to go forward. You can read the news item here .  It is a very interesting piece of news.  I think for two reasons.  One, both countries have done strategic planning of their own modes of strikes and they keep on revising them so this news is probably nothing else but a pressurizing tactic.  Second, if India does strike it will be really interesting to watch Pakistani response.  Given the successful Indian and Afghan support to the Balochistan separatist movement I think India doesn't need to do more than it is already doing.  But you never know!

Media reports point us towards a new twist to the Mumbai story.  Ajmal Kassab the sole surviving Mumbai gunman was arrested by the Indian Secret Agencies from Nepal in March of 2006.  It is being reported that the case of his illegal abduction is pending in the Nepalese Supreme Court. Now if Ajmal was in Indian custody ever since how on earth could he have been part of the gang of attackers?  Quite obviously he is being used as a dummy to strengthen a very weak case. Here is the link to the story, here and here and here .

In these times of uncertainty the question remains, 'Shall there be war?'  The answer might not be that simple.  There might be but there will not be war.  One might infer that it is my desire and denial to disagree with all things apparent that drives me to make this statement.  But the case is otherwise.  There is an implicit understanding between the two neighbors that there can be no war for the better of the two and the best of one. I was reading the news article posted in Dawn about the recent incursion of Indian fighter/reconnaissance planes into our air space in two separate sectors in one day.  Our planes had to chase them out.  It was claimed by our information minister that it was a un-intended mistake by the Indian side.  I know all too well.  But i am not impressed.  The thing is very simple.  It is Pakistani government's necessity to diffuse tensions.  We simply can not afford a war on our eastern front when we ...

This post is mainly for all the Toyota owners out there.  I recently got an oil change for my car.  I didn't go to my Toyota dealer mainly because he didn't offer synthetic oil for my car.  Seems like kind of strange but yes he told me that he doesn't have synthetic base motor oil and if I wanted one I had to provide it for him.  So I ditched him and opted for Vroom instead.  They cost me less and almost did or claim to do all those things that my Maplewood Toyota Dealer would have done.  There was one exception though.  Since my car is a 2009 model the dealer at Vroom hadn't seen very many of these and didn't have the make and model in the system.  they didn't reset my odometer.  As I had gotten my oil change at about 4000 miles the maintenance required indicator that reminds us of oil changes started blinking two days ago when my car completed 4500 miles.  That kind of pissed me off.  So I went to my Vroom people and asked them ...

Rediff readers ask very important questions in wake of the Mumbai attacks and I echo them here in a bid to help find answers, How many terrorists were there? Did they number 20 as Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh told a press conference on Thursday? Or did they number many more? If two or three terrorists attacked the CST, how many terrorists were present at the Taj and Trident? Did the CST terrorists drop a grenade/explosive device at Dockyard Road on the way to the station? Or was someone else responsible for that act of terror which claimed three lives? The terrorists are said to have set up control rooms at the Taj and Trident hotels, a Cabinet minister told PTI on Thursday. When were these bookings made? A detailed investigation into the bookings made at both hotels in the months, weeks and days before the attacks may reveal the names of suspicious guests who registered there. Military sources tell rediff.com that there was no way the terrorists could h...

It took the indian forces 60 hours to flush out 10 or so killers out of Mumbai . It was a horrible scene as it is always when innocent lives are lost and unsuspecting bystanders butchered. I have seen this all too often in my country lately to know any better. There is a blame game being played for meeting political ends on both side of the border. All the little trust that was ever there is being lost. My western friends are almost convinced that it is the Pakistani terrorists who are behind these happenings in Mumbai . I am not all too sure right now about that. The important question is who is to benefit from all this that has happened. Is it Pakistan, US, Al- Qaeda , other non state actors or perhaps India itself? It would be foolish to think that some 20 odd people will bring this carnage on a city without any clear and positives ends to meet in their own pereverted minds. But a look into their minds is the most difficult and likely impossible sight right now as all of them are ...

Uzer is coming to the twin cities in December.  Sometime in late December.  It will be damn cold then but his presence will warm things up I am sure.  looking forward to his visit. In other miscellaneous things that i did today i got my car serviced.  This is another thing off my head.  I can relax for another 3000 miles.  But can you imagine I called my Toyota dealer to set up an appointment with him for an oil change and he told me that he doesn't have synthetic oil in his inventory and if i wanted synthetic oil then i had to provide it myself.  I mean this is just ridiculous.  Maplewood Toyota boasts to be the number one dealer in the state.  But i have been less than satisfied with their dealings with me. When i bought the car the dealer didn't mention anything about the resurfacing that this car needed for working in harsh climates like that of my city.  When the whole deal was done and dusted then they charged me an extra sum f...