Last evening when I went to nurture the plants on the rooftop, the sky was hazy with intermittent clouds covering the sun. The sun kept hidden behind a veil of clouds playing hide and seek. I am not a weatherman but my instinct told me that it might rain. I announced it to my wife. I twirled my moustache as if I had made that rain forecast. There were times when the weather department predicted rain but there was none and when they projected clear weather it rained. As usual around 4am in the morning, I thought I heard the pitter patter of rain in my dream. It wasn’t my dream but it was actually raining. ‘Jhirmir-Jhirmir’, a very slight drizzle or ‘bareek fuaar’, not intense rain but a continuous drizzle with very tiny rain droplets fell. Due to rain, the temperature dipped. Rain meant that one could delay watering the plants. For Adeniums rain means trouble. These plants are so sensitive to water that a little over watering and they rot without...
There were two incidents that shook Pakistan last week. One was the attack by the Baluchi people; I am on purpose not calling them militants or terrorists which the Pak army spokesperson has declared them. The second was the bomb blast in a mosque in Islamabad, their capital, under the very nose of all kinds of security agencies. The Paki Army claims that more than 200 Baluchis, 25 Armed forces personnel and about 36 civilians were killed in the first incident spreading across the length and breadth of the district of Baluchistan at 14 locations ( figures would be much higher). 60 killed and 176 seriously wounded in the bomb blast. This means more than five to six hundred people were wiped off the face of the earth. Massacre, butchering, killing, murdering, extermination, slaughtering, slaying, like terms can be used for this mass scale elimination of one's own people to heaven or hell depending on which side of the fence you were. Innocent souls got caugh...