Syed Ahsan Ali

After a hardwork and serious studies of 4 years, my friends and I got our Economics degrees from the University of Karachi. Before jumping into the job market we were all afraid of our future because we had heard stories that in Pakistan, good jobs are only landed by using bribery, influence (sifarish) or other unfair means.

On the contrary, soon enough, most of my University buddies landed themselves good jobs in banking sector which paid them handsomely with attractive perks and all on merit. So it came as a blessing and good surprise that most of us got decent jobs without any unethical means.

At present, most of my friends qualify as part of the burgeoning middle-class, which has been progressing decently by earning good money. They live in comfortable houses, their kids go to good schools, they travel in cars leased from the loans from their banks and they eat fast food. To sum it all up they have the status and the lifestyles that remains a dream of millions of other Pakistanis.

Aadil Shah

Abdur-Rehman (1650 – 1715 A.D) widely known as Rehman Baba was a great Pushtu Sufi poet who is regarded as the most read and quoted Pushtu poet of the larger belt of Afghanistan and the North Western Frontier Province of Pakistan. There isn’t much known about his life due to the lack of eyewitness accounts yet a few legends portray him to be a reclusive poet, singing his poems near the Bara River while strumming a Rubab.

His poetry shows him to be a poet who had full command on fiqah (jurisprudence) and tasawwuf (Sufism). A powerful Sufi touch in his poetry notwithstanding, he was not inclined to a particular order of Sufism and it is more likely that Rehman Baba was a free soul, with an individualistic practice of Sufism similar to that of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai in Sindh. Thus he says:

“On the path which I travel to see my love, make holy Khizer and Ilyas my guides”

Owais Mughal and Agha Waseem

After the tragic assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan witnessed widescale burning of Government and public property. Pakistan Railways got its share of bad luck. On the fateful night of December 27, 2007, the locomotive shown in the photo below was hauling Chiltan Express between Quetta and Faisalabad. When the train was 100 km east of Jacobabad, near the Sindh-Punjab-Balochistan border, it got attacked and burned by armed criminals at Bakhshapur Station.

While the criminals did the dastardly act of burning the locomotive as well as the coaches, people of Bakhshapur including the local nazim (mayor) provided exemplary help to stranded passengers by giving them shelter and food.