Pervaiz Munir Alvi

Even though there was nothing remarkable about him, still every body knew Bakka Gujjer. Those were the days when many in our neighborhood kept a milk cow or a buffalo at their homes. Bakka was their sole trusted community cow-hand. At the crack of the dawn he would show up at our door and yell: “Doctor Chaman, Bakka is here”.

When I was young I used to hate Bakka for many reasons. For one, I had this assigned job to get out of my bed, go downstairs and hand him the milk-pail filled with water so that he could wash and milk our cow. And then I must stay there to take the heavy pail of milk back upstairs to the kitchen.

And the second reason: ‘Why the hell he always calls me doctor chaman’. “Bakka, I am not Doctor Chaman and don’t you call me by that name”, I would scream at him. “OK Doctor Chaman”, Bakka will answer with a grin. And the third reason of my irritation with him was that Bakka was hard of hearing. ‘Why must I always yell at the top of my lungs so that Bakka could hear me’. “I swear nothing is wrong with his hearing. He only pretends that to further irritate me”, I often complained to my mother.

Adil Najam

Pakistan is in tears today. Yet again.

70+ people are dead in Wah today, as yet another cursed suicide bomber targets Pakistan and Pakistanis. The Tehrik-i-Taliban has taken responsibility for them. Only two days ago, 32 people were killed in a suicide attack on a hospital in the northern town of Dera Ismail Khan. Meanwhile incursions and attacks into Pakistani territory by American forces continue and fighting between militants and Pakistani forces rages in Bajur and other areas, killing even more.

In what continues to be war on and in Pakistan, Pakistanis continue to die. Pakistan continues to cry.

Mast Qalandar (a.k.a. Aziz Akhmad)

Normally, I receive four or five e-mail messages daily that I want to read, mainly from family and friends. That day I received two dozen, or more — from places as far as Swat in Pakistan to San Francisco in the US. It was not junk mail, but helpful advice, offered in earnest, on how to determine the exact direction of the qibla (the location of Ka’ba, the cubic structure in Mecca, towards which Muslims pray) in North America. The messages came in response to an article that I had written about the APPNA meeting, “I fell among (the APPNA) doctors”, which was published on ATP and in The News.

In that article, I had described the various events I witnessed, from the sidelines, at the annual get-together of the Pakistani-American doctors in Washington DC. The events included recreational, social, political, and spiritual activities, both organized and spontaneous. Among other things, I had mentioned, passingly, an incident where a doctor, seemingly in a rush to say his maghrib prayer, had asked me the direction of the qibla, and I had, reflexively, pointed to the west, whereas the qibla, here in North America, is generally to the east.