S.A.J Shirazi

Comfortably tucked in green hills north of Islamabad, Hasan Abdal is situated right on the Grand trunk Road. The town’s claims to fame are Cadet College and temple of Panja Sahib. This small and clean historic town neat is sacred for Sikhs.

Hassan Abdal is famous for its cadet college and also serves as the gateway to some most stunning sites in Pakistan. It is from here that Karakoram Highways turns towards Northern Areas. It is a convenient halting point of Grand Trunk Road (G T Road) from where one can go to places like Abbotabad and Northern Areas, Peshawar, Taxila, Wah, Rawalpindi. Coins of the Greco-Bectrians kings discovered from the adjoining tract suggest that the area was inhabited in first century B.C. Accounts of Xuan Zang, a seventh century Chinese Buddhist traveler tells us that the place was also sacred to Buddhists. However, presently the town is associated with Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikh religion and Baba Wali Qandhari, a revered Muslim saint.

Aisha Sarwari

In an exciting new technology launch at Marriott Islamabad on July 1st, ICT R&D Fund sponsored the Campus Career Portals initiative, with 6 leading university rectors and other EVPs of leading Industry present at the launch. The aim was to officially begin the roll out of giving away costly technology to Universities completely free of cost across 85 HEC accredited campuses in 18 months.

In the photo above R-L: Dr. Amir Muhammed, Rector FAST-NU; Mr. QM Shaheed, Head of HR PTC; Dr. Dilawar Ali Khan, Dean and DG, NUST Business School; Monis Rahman, CEO ROZEE.PK; Dr. Qasim Sheikh, Chief Executive ICT R&D Fund; Dr. Zahoor Hassan, Vice Chancellor, LUMS; Mr. Leon Menezes, Director HR, Shell.

Although this is attempted in Pakistan for the first time, the product is similar in vision to Monster.com’s MonsterTrack commonly utilized by students to find internship and job placement in US universities, with the difference being that this technology has customization options to reflect the brand and theme of each university.

Mast Qalandar

Last week, I went to Washington, DC on personal business. I stayed at the Marriott Hotel, on Woodley Road, off Connecticut Avenue.

When I arrived at the hotel, and was taking out my luggage from the car, I could sense a commotion in the hotel — a kind of that you see at Penn Station in New York during the rush hours or, if you are not familiar with New York, at Islamabad Airport during the Hajj flights. People were milling around, dragging their luggage behind them, going up and down the escalators, and lounging around in the lobby of the hotel or wherever they could find a seat. They were mostly Pakistanis — men, some in their ethnic dresses; women in their usual colorful dresses; and a lot of children, from toddlers to teens. I soon found out why.

The Association of Pakistani-American doctors, APPNA, was holding its annual get-together at the hotel. Hundreds of doctors of Pakistani origin from all over the US, along with their families, had descended upon the hotel. They do this thing once every year in different cities.