Creepy tributes

Saturday arrived in London, and against all odds the sun decided to put in an appearance. Not that it warmed things up much, but Londoners are depressingly deprived of sunlight, and every little bit helps, especially when it starts getting dark at 3:30pm. Ugh.

No matter how hard we tried, though, we were unable to leave the house before 2pm. That's because it takes my sister forever to get my nephew ready for the road. And THAT is because my nephew is royalty, and must get his gourmet breakfast, morning snack, lunch, and light exercise (and associated bowel movement) before he agrees to remain stationary long enough to be put into a stroller. I took my revenge on him, though, by bundling him up so tight that he wasn't able to move an inch for the rest of the time we were out.


We spent the day walking around the Tower of London and the Tower Bridge, and then heading over to see the Parliament buildings and Big Ben. I know I'll be back in London again, and I want to take tours of these places to learn some of the history behind them. That's one thing London has in excess supply - history. Outside of the Mediterranean countries, there are few places that can boast continuous civilization for millenia, not just centuries. London is one of them. Construction on the Tower of London, for example, started in 1078 and Westminster Abbey was built in 1045. These are old places which have withstood countless footfalls, from those of peasant farmers, to empire kings, to ... me. That was a cool feeling.


No trip to London would be complete without a visit to Harrod's, that iconic shopping mega-destination that is one of the largest department stores in the world. Although a pioneering British shopping icon, since 1985 the department store has been owned by Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Fayed. Fayed's name is famous not just because of his financial empire, but also because of his son Dodi Fayed's romantic association with Princess Diana. Which is where the creepiness begins. Since their death in a 1997 Paris car crash, Dodi and Diana have been memorialized at Harrod's by way of some strange tributes.

The first is a whimsical cast iron statue, showing Dodi and Diana dancing happily with what looks like a seagull, and with an inscription that reads, "Innocent Victims."


The second is a shrine built on the lower level of the store, with soft-focus shots of Dodi and Diana looking down upon the public. As if this wasn't weird enough, there is glass case front and center at the shrine which contains:

• A wine glass with visible lipstick marks, supposedly the last dinner vessel to touch the lips of Diana.

• A huge ring, with a mega-diamond rock stuck in the middle, supposed to be the engagement ring that Dodi purchased for Diana the day before their deaths.

The entire display evoked a sad feeling. Maybe this was a father's heartfelt way to grieve for his son and daughter-in-law to be, but instead it comes across as a kitschy way of shoving a conspiracy crusade in the faces of passersby (Mohamed Fayed has repeatedly claimed that the death of Dodi and Diana was planned at the highest levels of the British monarchy, with involvement of the British Secret Service).

Our visit to Harrod's was shortlived - the massive crowds eventually got to all of us, including my nephew, who by this time had managed to break free of his bonds. With his umpteenth diaper change starting to fray at my sister's nerves, I wisely recommended that we head back home and call it a night.

An ode to Facebook

There are few applications that I feel have changed my life - Gmail is one, and MS Money is another (does that make me a complete geek?) Facebook is definitely a close third.

I was a grudging adopter of Facebook at first. Social networking sites have been around for a while, and I've managed to stay detached from them all, despite emotional pleas from my friends. Friendster, MySpace, Naseeb - all have come (and in my opinion, gone). But there was something elegant about the simplicity of Facebook that drew me from the start. It wasn't gimmicky, and it wasn't a place dedicated to online firtation. That, and the fact that within days of creating an account, I was in touch with people from all over the planet, some of whom I had not seen in almost twenty years - both helped to make me a big fan of the site.

So why mention Facebook while I sit blogging in London? Well, it is because of this website that today I met up with an old friend of mine from grade school in Spain. We had discovered each other online, and on a whim I shot him a message to see if he would be around while I was here. Sure enough he was, and we picked today afternoon to meet for lunch.

I found the pre-meeting anxiety comical. I took extra care picking out my wardrobe for the day, and of grooming my increasingly sparse hair (it's a good thing Saeeda was not around, because she would undoubtedly have felt a twinge of jealousy.) The train ride into the city from my sister's house was uneventful, probably because I kept my mind occupied with reading material, but before I knew it, I was standing in front of the ticket counter at the Bond Street tube station, anxiously sifting through the strange faces milling around me as I tried to strike as non-chalant a pose as possible. Would I be able to pick out James from the crowd? I hadn't seen him since 1991, and he didn't have that many pictures up on Facebook.

But there he was. Bearded, wearing glasses, and a lot taller than I remember him, but James nonetheless. With pleasantries exchanged, and the requisite repetitions of "@%£$ man, how the hell are you?" out of the way, we walked over to a corner cafe near Christopher Square, and away from the maddening crowds of Oxford St.

There are few things in life more epiphanous than reviewing your past with an old friend, because you come face-to-face with someone who knew you when you were a completely different person. Through the reminescing, you are able to review the different paths that your lives have taken, and you learn a tiny bit more about that most confusing person in the world - you. And reminesce we did.

We talked about old teachers, places, and most importantly, old friends. There were stories of sheer tragedy - the friend who turned his brain to mush on an overdose of drugs; the friend who lost his mother to cancer and his father to financial ruin; and the intelligent friend who hit some bumps along the way, and is now stuck in a no-hope situation in the middle of nowhere. But there were also stories of great success - of friends who were never going to amount to much, but are now raking in the millions on the European race car circuit (!); of friends who completed their PhD's in engineering and are pursuing successful careers in Spain; and of friends who settled down continents away, and are married to the people they love, with children that they adore.

Time flew by, and I was struck by how lives for our children are going to be different from those of my parents and those of ours. My parents speak nostalgically of childhood friends that went their separate ways and are now only vague memories. In contrast I can reconnect periodically with my old acquaintances using applications such as Facebook. Will our children ever have a valid excuse to fall out of touch with their friends? Will social networking sites make it impossible for them to say they don't know what someone is up to these days?

Seeing James was one of the highlights of my stay in London, even though I've only been here two days. Experiences such as these are invaluable, since they allow you to circle back on your life and strengthen the delicate bonds that are always at risk of snapping. Hopefully we'll stay in better contact from here, and hopefully there will be others that I will reconnect with in the future. For making this happen, I thank you Facebook.

(PS, the picture at the top is from when I was in Spain, and was around twelve years old. James is in the blue shirt in the back row, and I'm two to his left).

Death of a leader

I wanted to write a separate entry for this. Even though my day was spent having fun in London with my sister, I was never really able to keep the thoughts of the day's events in Pakistan from my mind.

Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated that morning (London time). With an unpopular war abroad and racial and civil unrest at home, Bhutto had represented a challenge to the heavy-handed Musharraf that had caught the attention of policymakers around the world. Until today, she had led the only truly "pan-Pakistan" political party, one that had managed to reach across the ethnic and sectarian boundaries that are so prominent in South Asia, and had successfully withstood the Pakisani army's efforts at emasculating it (practically from the time of its founding by Benazir's father). With her death, the experiment with democracy that Pakistan has pretended to flirt with for the past 60 years can be returned to the cryogenic freezing facility from whence it originated.

The riots that have followed Bhutto's death have been no surprise, especially to the people in Pakistan. I spoke to my parents immediately after I found out what had happened, and they told me how markets and workplaces had emptied in the blink of an eye that day. One of our relatives was shopping in the busiest areas of Karachi, when suddenly people had started running in every direction. Someone somewhere had started yelling that Bhutto had been killed, and it didn't take long for people to understand what was coming next. Karachi was going to burn, and it was only a matter of time until the first flames arose. Customers ran so fast that some tripped out of their shoes and didn't bother to return for them.

It was the same at workplaces too. Businesses and corporations shut down immediately, and employees tried their best to get home before the rioting started. Not all of them were successful, though. My parents were surprised at home by my cousin and his friend, who showed up unannounced. Both of them lived on the other side of town but worked closer to where my parents live. They had tried to make it home, but the rioting had already started - after trying to weave past mobs on a rampage, burning vehicles, and advancing police, they had wisely decided to come over to our place for shelter for the night. My dad told me he had never seen two grown men as scared as those two. And that scared me.

The question is, can Pakistan recover? Will Bhutto's death shine light in areas that need it badly, and force Musharraf and the other political parties to come together in an attempt to keep the country from burning? Or will there be a doomsday scenario - extreme violence leading to civil war, with the army losing control of the country and perhaps its nuclear weapons, forcing the US and its allies to pre-emptively invade and seize control?

Scary times, my friends. Scary times.

Madame Tussaud's

A little more refreshed, today my sister and I decided to head into the city to visit the big landmarks and meet up for dinner with Kaleem after he got off work.

Certain memories from the time I lived in London have came back to me quickly. As we spent the day in London, I remembered riding the Underground to get around town, visiting the city's parks with my parents, and of course, hanging out at Madame Tussaud's. My sister commented that the last time we had visited the venerable museum was as kids with my mother. Now we would be visiting the museum together, with one of us towing along a child of her own. Life doubles back on itself in interesting ways.

The museum was crowded and there was a lot of jostling as people rushed to stand with their favorite celebrities. Travolta and Samuel Jackson were chilling off to the side, so I hung out with them for a little bit ...

... before I ran into Jessica Simpson and found myself mesmerized by her big ... hat.

It was only a matter of time before I was going to run into a desi celebrity, and sure enough Shahrukh Khan was standing in a corner with a goofy smile. Well, anything that SRK can do, FRK can do as well, goofy pose and all (and yes, those are Amitabh and Superman in the background...

The funniest part of the museum, I felt, was running into pranksters who would stand really still in silly poses, and I kept thinking they were wax statues too. The museum added to this confusion, because throughout they had placed occasional statues of "tourists" snapping pictures of the other statues, or of walking with their "kids" beside them.

After the museum Saima and I headed over to Canary Wharf, where we met up with Kaleem and had a delicious dinner at Nando's - a halal Portuguese chicken restaurant, which provided a combo that is not quite typical.

London, like any other major city, is bustling with energy. It was ten at night and it was freezing outside, and yet people were still out shopping and having fun. I took this time-delayed shot on Regent's street, one of the prime shopping areas in the city:

London, land of the CCTV

The flight over to London was uneventful, other than the fact that someone somewhere took mercy on my knees, and upgraded me to United's Economy "Plus". Although it is the most dastardly form of price discrimination ever, the extra three inches of leg room were a life saver for my aging frame. I watched "SuperBad" during the in-flight entertainment segment, and have to admit that the movie was hilarious even though I was watching it on a tiny screen with sound that went in and out the whole time.

Memories of London from my six-month stay here when I was eight years old started coming back to me as my brother-in-law drove me to his place from the airport. The same narrow lanes, the same rows of houses huddling together, the same driving on the wrong side of the road. My sister lives north of the city in Greater London, and her house is in a quiet cul-de-sac shared by three other houses. My arrival here soon caused commotion though, as I hugged my sister (who I hadn't seen in two years), and came upon my nine month old nephew (who I had never seen). I'm still trying to figure out how his facial muscles are able to support his cheeks and lower lip all on their own:


Most of the rest of the day was spent sleeping off the jet lag, eating lunch, sleeping off some more jet lag, and then venturing into the city with my family. We headed over to St. Christoper's square for some Lebanese dining, and I was completely taken aback by the number of CCTV cameras everywhere. One corner had FIVE cameras pointed in every direction. Can you even imagine something like that in the US, where people complain about privacy issues with red-light traffic cameras? Kaleem, my brother-in-law, told me that on average, one is photographed THIRTY FIVE times between stepping out of their house in a suburb and getting to work in downtown London. THIRTY FIVE!

I'm going to have to make sure I drop my nose-picking habit while I'm here.

I'm off to London!

As the title to this blog reflects, I have fallen prey to my desire to travel again, so I'm off to visit my sister in London. Although I've transited through Heathrow and Gatwick multiple times, the last time I spent more than a night in the land of the Queen Mother was in the 1980's, when my dad was briefly posted there for work.

The goals for this trip are to introduce myself to my brand new nephew (almost 9 months old now), and to see what all the fuss about this "Europe Rising" thing is. Stay tuned!

True heros

Imagine my surprise the other day when I got an email from my friend Rangina Hamidi. Any time I hear from Rangina is a pleasure, and to be honest, a relief. You see, Rangina is in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and I get to hear from her so infrequently that inevitably I start wondering if she is doing ok. Until I get another email from her, and I get to rest easy for a little longer.

Rangina is an Afghan American who I became good friends with while we were both undergrads at the University of Virginia. After graduating we went our different ways - I started my career in consulting, and Rangina decided to go work for a nonprofit. Until 9-11 and its aftermath.

Fiercely independent and an ardent believer in women's rights, Rangina wasted little time leaving all the comforts of the US for the hardship of Afghanistan the moment the Taliban regime fell. I don't think she had any idea what she was going to do once she got there, but she knew she wanted to help somehow. Today she is being honored live on CNN for the work she is doing in her home country (www.cnn.com/heroes).

Watching CNN describe Rangina's work makes me think long and hard about the opportunities for impact that each of us are provided with, and how many of us actually seize those opportunities. Rangina is working with the women of Kandahar, helping them market their beautiful embroidery across the world (you can find out more at www.kandahartreasure.com), while I am handing out notepads and pens to receptionists. Ok, I know, I exaggerate. I'm doing more than that, and I'm proud of my work. But my point is this - not so long ago Rangina was faced with a difficult decision. She could remain in the US in relative comfort and try to help Afghanistan remotely, or she could pack up her belongings and head to a dangerous environment to use her upbringing and education to help the women of her country. Rangina chose the latter.

What would I have done, if faced with the same situation? What would you have done?