Jauhar Ismail

The latest crisis that has Pakistani’s from all walks of life up in arms is the lack of electrical power throughout the country. While rolling blackouts or load shedding as its locally known has always been a staple of daily life in Pakistan, the problem has become acute in the last couple of years. In the second half of December, the situation got so bad that WAPDA & KESC (power generation entities in Pakistan) resorted to draconian levels of load shedding. The power cuts during this time amounted to 20-22 hours a day in most small cities and even cities like Karachi were seeing 18+ hours of load shedding.

Owais Mughal

Life is usually a mixed bag. While there are moments of sadness, they are invariably interjected with moments of joy. I believe the real life moments of joy are much more fun to read than fictional jokes. I’ll share with you some of mine and we hope to hear about yours too. After compiling some funny moments of my life below, I now realize that most of them are from my students days or teenage days. Is life more fun and full of laughter when we are younger? It sure seems that way.

(1) Where is abba jaan?

I have some family in Lahore. One of my cousins there used to give ride to his father (my uncle) daily to his office. It was a very set routine. Every morning, my cousin would be waiting at driver’s seat and then my uncle used to come to the car, open the back door, throw his brief case in and then sit in the back seat.

Owais Mughal

On these pages of ATP we are starting a new series on architectural landmarks of Pakistan. As first part of this series, we will take you to a visit to Merewether Tower, Karachi or as locals affectionately call it - the ‘Tower’.

It is one of the most known, but arguably the least acknowledged landmarks of the city. It is most known because it is located at the confluence of two major roads of the city viz. I.I. Chundrigar Road (formerly Mc Leod Rd) and M.A. Jinnah Road (formerly Bandar Rd) therefore most of the city people have seen it. It is also one of the major terminus of city buses. All around the city one can hear bus-conductors shounting tower tower. Therefore even those who have not seen it; they have at least heard about it as echoing sound waves.

S.A.J. Shirazi

Winter in sprawling Lahore spells horror for thousands of residents. Not because of cold but due to the phenomenon of smog. Let your gaze roam over the cityscape while standing on top of the Yadgar-e-Pakistan and one finds how the skyline of the minarets and domes looks dark and sad against the clouds of thick smog.

The fog is triggered by temperature inversion - the formation of a static layer of cooler air close to the ground as the nighttime temperature drops. Normally, air closer to the ground is warmer than the air above it, and therefore rises. Inversions are frequent on winter nights after the ground has cooled down so much that it begins to chill the air closest to it often causing mist to form as water vapor precipitates on dust particles. Normally the morning sun swiftly breaks through the mist and heats the ground, which warms the air above it, breaking the inversion.

Adil Najam

According to the 1998 census, the population of Lahore was 6,319,000 (6 million) inhabitants.

According to today’s Daily Times, these inhabitants managed to make 9,580,902 (9.5 million) crank (prank or hoax) calls to the emergency 15 number in 2008 (how many cranck calls were made to other numbers remains unknown, but is likely to also be an obnoxiously large number). No matter what the current population of Lahore might be, if these numbers are true it means that on average each Lahori man, woman and child made more than one crank call of Emergency 15 in 2008.

We are, in fact, an emergency-prone people, as evidenced by the fact that there were an (additional) 52,486 calls that were in fact legitimate calls to Emergency 15. This means that only about one-half a percent (of 1 in every 200) of calls received by Emergency 15 were legitimate.

Owais Mughal