Heading back home

After 5 days of 4 hours of sleep and 18 hour days finally heading back home to Karachi. Good trip. Details later.

February 12, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

Get help early for your child

NYT article on speech delays and child development. Getting Taha to Anika Shah a year before he started school has made a world of difference in his life and ours and it made it possible for him to focus on settling down at CAS without worrying about academics. Don’t ignore the signs, don’t [...]

February 10, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

Karachi city update

Was at work all day and then went from Baloch Colony bridge to Khayaban-e-Bahria to pick up the kids (5pm) and then took Kalapul, Shahrae-Faisal and Karsaz to head home to Gulshan (5:30 pm). Roads are open, traffic is thin, lots of security being deployed and petrol stations are closed.
Two blasts in [...]

February 5, 2010  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: I can't hack it, Karachi, Pakistan  No Comments

The Caltex, PSO, Shell Challenge…

Good petrol pumps (gas stations for my friends from an earlier life) are hard to find in Karachi. Good petrol pumps that will give you consistent mileage weeks after weeks are even harder.

After painfully experimenting with almost every brand and every locality I have now built my own list of three pumps that [...]

January 31, 2010  Tags: , , , , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Pakistan, the economy stupid  One Comment

The Larry Ellison Fix in Karachi…

The first car that I ever wanted to drive was a Honda Accord. Don’t ask me why, there is a long convoluted tale behind that desire that goes all the way back to Abdullah Haroon Road, traffic duties as a prefect and my school days. Twelve years later the car I first learnt [...]

January 10, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Karachi, Pakistan, Personal shit, Taha  No Comments

The Reboot presentation at TIECON, Karachi – Revisited

The TIECON 2009, Karachi, 4th November 2009, Reboot presentation was the first time I was able to shrink the story in under 20 minutes. Spent three days putting the presentation together but it will be a while before I am able to get to an editor that will run the presentation and the video [...]

November 27, 2009  Tags: , , , , , , ,   Posted in: Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Education, Failure, Pakistan, Startup, TIE, computer science, entrepreneurs, new ventures, small business  No Comments

MIT CEF BAP 2009 – Finals (unofficial, unsanctioned, undercover coverage)

I have been spoilt rotten.

After blogging about the PASHA SI session as well as the Tech Crunch Awards live, I expect events to be blogged about instantenously. My pictures, my videos, my time.

Which is why when I decided to gate crash the MIT CEF BAP party, I brought my own camera. Though [...]

November 14, 2009  Tags: , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, Ken Morse, MIT BAP, entrepreneurs  2 Comments

All is silent on the blogging front

ZAK and Sabeen have both been out of action since T2F. Adnan is in self imposed exile in Dubai. Mohtashim ran off to colder pastures. Tech has been on the road. Teeth frequency of post is down by a suspicious percentage. And CIO Pakistan has been undergoing extended renovation. Pakistan at Alltop looks [...]

November 14, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  2 Comments

The many faces of Alchemy

I did this slide deck a year and a handful of months ago. We were riding high and the cycle had hit but hadn’t really hit us. When I started working on the deck the objective was to showcase all the interesting things we had done together as a team. It still bring backs [...]

November 7, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Columbia Business School, Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Karachi, Startup, entrepreneurs  No Comments

Adil Moosajee on Failure

There is something that Adil said during our Q&A session about failure that is still resonating with me. The question dealt with retaining a positive outlook after failing and Adil jumped in with a great analogy.

“Have you ever cooked a new dish?”, he asked the audience. “Yes”, they said.

“There must have been instances [...]

November 6, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Desi Back to Desh, Desi Startup, Failure, Pakistan, TIE, entrepreneurs  8 Comments

Remembering Salman

I knew him as the Dear Salman I inscribed on his copy of Reboot. ZAK woke me up with his post tonight and I found out that he was also a blogger and just like the rest of us, someone as fascinated by life as he was by code. Didn’t have all the details [...]

October 20, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

Infrastructure update

Can you guess the name of this city? Courtesy MB’s post on metblog. A quick look through the selected pictures shows how far we have come on the infrastructure side in the last four years.

 

October 18, 2009  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff  No Comments

The joys of working for yourself

In 1993 and 1996, I was too young to care or know the difference between a booming economy and a recession. In late 2000, I was too close.

Come 2008, this is my third down cycle. Things are hard. At one level they are much harder than what was eight years ago – [...]

December 6, 2008  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Alchemy stuff, Desi Startup, entrepreneurs  5 Comments

A child is a lamp…

A child is a lamp waiting to be lit, not a vessel that needs to be filled…
Some of you, the oldest and closest of my readers, remember BBS; Baby Boy Salahuddin born on 19th February 2005 at his grandmother’s clinic and then rushed to AKU’s neo natal ICU on his first day on planet [...]

September 16, 2008  Tags: , , , , , ,   Posted in: Personal shit  12 Comments