By S A J Shirazi

Traveling whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head.

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”

I believe Pakistan is one of the best travel destinations in the world–desert expanses in Thar and Cholistan, Lush green plains in Punjab, mighty mountains in Northern Pakistan and Chitral; so many unexplored and “just to yourself” places. And also great urban centers like historic Lahore. The beginnings of world history can still be traced down to Pakistan – Indus Civilization. Moreover, Pakistan being one of the cheapest countries in the world is a great deal for budget travelers.

S A J Shirazi is a Lahore (Pakistan) based writer. (See more at Shirazi’s blog ‘Light Within’).

Adil Najam

I have been so much wanting to put this one up as the picture of the day. Just because it is such a striking composition photographically.

The title I have used ‘Levitating Lyari-boy‘ is the title originally used by the photographer, Ali Khurshid, whose other work of Karachi Beaches (as displayed on flickr.com and elsewhere) is equally captivating, especially in terms of his technique and use of light.

P.S. Hey, what do I know about photography. I just know that I get mesmerized by a lot of his compositions!

The Onion is a satirical parody ‘newspaper’ which is published in print and on the Internet that reports both real and imagined stories and makes fun of the earnestness of the mainstream news-media, the gullibility of its readers, and the general state of the world we live in. However, as with all satire, it tends to pack some hard-hitting truths in its imagined coverage of events.

Below is one hillarious example of The Onion’s craft. It is fictitious only in that these people probably are not real and never said this; at least not out loud. But the way they view and interpret the India-Pakistan conflict (here) is really not that far from how much of the world actually sees it. Of course, this particular piece is some years old, when tensions were higher than they are now; however, the international attitudes it depicts are timeless.

Enjoy. Smile. And, then, think hard.