Fishy

Ingredients

5 tomatoes
2 onions
3 cloves of garlic
Fish (Pangasius)
Peanuts
3 potatoes
Cheese
3 Tbsp cream
4/5 Olives

Directions

Roughly chop the onions and garlic
Heat oil in a pan and cook onions and garlic for a few minutes and season them
Take out the fish from the fridge and season it with salt and pepper
Grind a couple of tomotatoes along with  peanuts, salt, pepper and olive oil and pour it on the fish
Add 4 tomatoes into the pan of onions and garlic while roughly sqeezing them with hands
Add a pinch of sugar to the pan and reduce it for 5 min.
Now pour this reduced material, cream, potatoes, olives, cheese on the fish
Cook the fish in an oven for 20/25 minutes at 210 centigrade

* Do not forget the sugar, otherwise onions can have a very dominant flavor.

For the original recipe see here!

Did you tear his heart...

It is narrated on the authority of usama b. Zaid that the Messenger of allah (may peace be upon him) sent us in a raiding party. We raided Huraqat of Juhaina in the morning. I caught hold of a man and he said: there is no god but allah, I attacked him with a spear. It once occurred to me and I talked about it to the apostle (may peace be upon him). The Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) said: Did he profess "there is no god but allah," and even then you killed him? I said: Messenger of allah, he made a profession of it out of the fear of the Weapon. He (the Holy Prophet) observed: Did you tear his heart in order to find out whether it had professed or not? and he Went on repeating it to me till I wished I had embraced Islam that day. (Sahih Muslim, Book #001, Hadith #0176)

I don't know but this hadith keeps haunting me. The words 'did you tear his heart in order to find out' keep repeating, keep reverberating. They make me question my judgments about people every day, every time.

Not unless you are cheated that you realize how much you trusted

On the other side

If you haven't buried them already then make sure that while crossing the bridge of time you throw away any expectations into the stream below. Someone else is always there with the proclivity to take a sip from this stream of life. The moment the water touches the lips the expectations will curse him, fool him to live another day...and when you reach the end of the bridge, you will see that time has not spared anybody.

If you had wanted me to be there at the end, if you had not been insouciant; you should have held my hand and taken me along with you.

A "thousand-star hotel"

"She describes spending nights sleeping on the forest floor in a "thousand-star hotel", applauds "the ferocity and grandeur of these poor people fighting back", and says "being in the forest made me feel like there was enough space in my body for all my organs"."

The Booker prize-winning novelist on her political activism in India, why she no longer condemns violent resistance – and why it doesn't matter if she never writes a second novel. Here!

Khuda Sai Naumeedi - Haroon ur Rasheed

• Part 1
• Part 2

Great Difference

" 'The mind,' Bacon says, 'presupposes a greater unanimity and uniformity in the nature of things than there really is.' Thus, for example, astronomers have assumed that the heavenly bodies, being 'perfect', must move as the mind deems it most fitting for a perfect celestial body to move, namely in perfect circles; observation, however, shows them to move in ellipses. 'It is incredible,' he exclaims, 'what a number of idols have been introduced into philosophy by the reduction of natural operations to a correspondence with human actions; i.e. by imagining that nature acts as man does.' Why are the stars in the sky arranged as they are?--or rather, why do they appear not to be 'arranged' at all? 'If the grand architect had acted a human part, he would have ranged the stars into some beautiful and elegant order, as we see in the vaulted roofs of palaces....so great a difference is there betwixt the spirit of man and the spirit of Universe' "

Willey, B. (1965). The English Moralists. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

I Can't Think!

I Can't Think!  by Sharon Begley

"You need to pull back from the constant influx and take a break.”

So what are you? Sufficer or Maximizer? 

Personally it feels like...

" ... a dangerously fragile veneer , and when that veneer cracked, man became one with the beasts again, falling back into the same slime of the primeval abyss he prided himself on having climbed up from..." (Sidney Sheldon)

Telenor TalkShawk

There is a Telenor talkshawk advertisement running on television these days. A wife tells her husband, "Suna hai college mai ap barai dil phaink thai". 

Just wondering, what if it was the other way round?

Such a thing would be unacceptable to our local morality but where does that leave us? 

Early Fool

Someone: So when is your wedding anniversary?
Wife: 31st March
Husband: Han, mai aik din pehlai he fool ban gya tha...

Interesting Reads

• Recounting the  Milestones:  An  Appraisal  of  Islam's Encounter with Modernity

                    Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

• The Reality of Tasawwuf In the Light of the Prophetic Model

• Iqbal, The Sufi Epistemology and the End of History

"And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my souls without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people's heads..."

Fitzgerald, F. S. (2004). This Side of Paradise. New York: Prometheus Books.

  

We should have a human obligations movement instead of a human rights one.

Patience

If you want to teach patience to your children, give them unpeeled pine nuts.

Illness

Illness can become the best or the worst of what this world has to offer

The Lahore Zoo

These pictures were taken a couple of years back and I thought about sharing them. Went a little bit overboard to insert the lens inside the cages at times so as to get the clear picture. The turkey was not from the Lahore zoo rather it was taken at one of the rest areas on the Lahore Islamabad motorway.

Inherited Knowledge

There is this seemingly indefatigable reliance on inherited knowledge. Makhi pai makhi martai ja rahai hain hum log. We are not letting anything novel come in and that is creating an absurd stagnancy in our lives.

Half Knowledge

Partial knowledge is perhaps the worst of all mental states; a person can find himself in. We read and listen with our minds shut and only let that information filter through which reinforces our already preset notions.

Pride is the only thing which doesn’t allow us to listen to a subordinate at the office or a maulvi at the mosque. Just because one of us has got a degree from a better institution or has read the Quran a couple of times makes one reject everything contrary to personal beliefs. We hold so dearly to our views that we don’t ever let the prejudice take a backseat and give the conflicting idea a fair chance. We go on to claim that our knowledge is perfect without even realizing what the heck we are blabbering.

Criticism is valid and healthy but I observe that we are scared that our beliefs might crumble. The defensiveness and haughtiness which accompanies arguments is only this fear manifesting itself.

Suo Motu?