Category: Alchemy stuff

I have gotten in trouble before by professing my weakness for the Zong campaign on this blog before. I think it’s time that I start another round of excitement. What do you say about the power of a brand recall when my 5 year old hyperactive attention deficit child with selective recall, who speak only…

Adnan (Iqbal, not Haider) first pointed me towards Khan Academy about a year ago. I took a quick peek and was suitability impressed. Then this evening Nida sent in a small note with a link to a slice of MIT article describing the work Salman has been doing and then a Google search dug up…

But despite the misery, it was a great year in many ways. It was the year… Taha learnt to write his name and graduate from therapy to his Kindergarten class at CAS. It is also the year in which he started making eye contact and speaking in clear sentences and statements. Fawzia, Taha and Salwa…

Seasons come and go, markets move, react & retrench but every once in a while you get touched (more like hit) by a year that will mark you for life. And so it was for 2009. Admittedly, things were already quite bleak for us in December 2008, but it was in mid 2009 that this…

If 2009 was tough, the first week of 2010 seems to indicate that this year is going to be so much tougher. Different kind of pain though. While ’09 was depressing as our businesses self destructed around us, ’10 at least from initial appearances is going to be about staying power and persistence; hard work…

Welcome to the new Great Game. As I explained to my cousins last night, we are all pawns in the new Great Game and the only thing we can hope and pray is that the powers that be either get bored, get booted out, or find something else to while away their time and let…

It takes travel during the holiday season to truly appreciate home. And since we were lucky enough to head home a few years ago that whole wrenching, yearning, leaving loved ones behind thing is thankfully no longer a part of our lives. Still early morning on the 25th, Fawzia, Salwa and Taha woke up to…

Three friends, one client, four locations, 12 hours. The trek started with Zafar at Lahore airport in his new ride, a combat green, four wheel drive with pit stops at Lahore Gymkhana (morning bites), Hardees (Lunch), PC (client meeting), Royal Palm (last chat of the day) and the airport. Thankfully there was no fog. Early…

There was only one thought in my mind as I took the taxi back home past midnight on the morning of 18th December: It’s been a while since I saw a movie and didn’t know that an entire three hours were gone. That and it was three hours well spent. When you add the fact…

I first met Zayd at the PASHA Tech Crunch Gong Award pre-event where among several twenty and thirty year olds he stood out as the only high school dropout. The next day it was very surprising to see that he had incorporated most of the comments I had made about his presentation at the Tech…