something

then let us dive, deep
into the arms of an ocean in slumber,
deprived and derailed, marked in numbers,
as the bells chime and the waves splash,
to mark a dire occasion and a dash

the winds circle above and howl,
as the hearse goes round and round,
worshipping this sullen ground,
stuck in a quagmire and within a stone

they come and go, singing hymns and weeping more

the casket lies, six feet under
our lives entwined,
our deaths bind,
a life austere, to welcome crows,
and their immortal noise

then let us walk, through this hallowed ground,
the streets of stone with lamposts of bones,
of men leaning against and whispering,
of women sitting and silently pointing

and let us stalk the minds of the many dead,
as the walls collapse to compound our dread,
and to hear lazarus, to speak and to hear,
to hear him say “this is your time”

emaciated fingers tap,
on the walls and the wood,
unforsaken and tiresome,
welcoming us with their pity,
frightening and frigid,
with the smell of rank blood,
and stale bread and crud,
to feign interest and lust,
and lust for disease and dust

and i’ve counted my lives on my fingers,
and slinked across the bottomless seas,
to discover and err; as souls
are tainted and selfishly lost

to weave through the forests and to climb the ancient peaks

to an end so lonely and inherently meek.

holy shit

FUCK ME, FUCK FUCK FUCK x100000000000

we just got nani and anderson.

holy fucking rabbits on a tricycle!!!!!!

yes, young.

yes, raw talents.

but this is united, and this is sir alex.

*bows to queiroz and david gill*

early days yes, but seeing as how talented both of these are and the potential they undoubtedly possess, an attacking front comprising of ronaldo, nani, anderson, rooney and rossi/huntelaar (my personal favourites) sounds so ridiculously mouthwatering (though unfortunately midget-esque, unless its the hunter).

honestly though, what a coup. we now have 4 (if not 5) of the best young attacking potential on the planet.

YES! some hyperbole! BUT BITE ME. i think its a must for me to get cable now in the univ residence or something

:D:D:D:D:D:D

ah, our country

listening to: The Cinematic Orchestra – Ma Fleur

we’ve been allotted a home since august 2006, a home under the possession of a guy named riaz rai, who has been in india for the past three years. now, as normal rules apply, whenever you’re transferred (within or outside the country), you’re supposed to vacate your house. however, this guy being one of the hair’s clinging ever so tightly onto shaukat aziz’s testicle managed to get an extension and ‘easing’ of the rules, which allowed him to keep the house for his term out of the country for a monthly rent.

during those 3 years, his brother lived in that house, something that is a complete violation of the rules and subsequently the law.

in august (or around), once the house was allotted to us by the housing secretary, riaz ria (grade 20 office, serving as press information minister to india) said that he was leaving for hajj, so it would be much appreciated if we could give him some more time to effectively vacate the house.

my parents agreed, only to realize that the guy and his wife had instead of going to hajj gone to court to get a stay order, and had succeeded (somehow).

roll on may 2007. once the stay order was nearing its end, this wanker decided to go to court again (because he was ‘pissed’ that my dad was pushing for him to vacate the house). this time however, we got a judge who had balls and brains and he ruled against this idiot and gave him 15 days to vacate the premises. those 15 days were over on saturday.

on saturday, my dad was sick since he caught something for kuala lumpur and thus had to stay at home. my mother, in her ex-DMG glory decided to go and throw that motherfucker riaz rai out once and for all.
since it by decree of court, there were officers from the state office aswell as 3 policeman who were supposed to help riaz rai and his family vacate. upon arriving, we saw that that guy had gotten some “ghundas” over from his ministry to try to effectively scare us into either running away or giving them more time. during this time, that son of a bitch also had the temerity to come out from his house and into his garden while yelling into the phone how my father was a corrupt officer and assorted profanities; an attempt to ’show-off’ how cool he was abusing others, like all 13 year olds.

after that, the state officer who was another sordid slug along with a police officer talked to him and then came to us telling us “hum ney unn ki rai bhi sun li hai aur aap ki bhi”, without realizing that its not their job to hear his fucking views or ours, and that their ‘job’ is to make sure the guy vacates the premises as issued by the fucking high court!

anyway, end of the day i got to talk to his son who said how they need 2 more days, all the while sounding incoherent and downright stupid, stating that the reason they need more days is that they weren’t clear about the court’s written notice stating they had 15 days to effectively “get the fuck out”.

btw, all this while riaz rai managed to call up the housing secretary and tell him that “we” had beaten him up.

this is a guy who whenever he came out of the house made sure my 5′5 mom was atleast a 100 yards away. kudos to him.

anyway, he’s supposed to retire in an year and basically wants to hang onto this house for reasons beyond me. he already has 3 personal houses, but he’s renting them and it would surely decimate his family if one of those 3 houses were to be occupied by him, depriving him of his ‘fair’ and ‘honest’ income.

unfortunately, i believe the only thing that will get him to leave is good old pathan insanity, complete with trigger happy mohmands sporting m16s and kalashinkovs.

i’m pretty patriotic when it comes to pakistan (read wasting two years of my life trying to stay in the country than go abroad), but i cannot wait to get out now. everyone i know questions why i don’t go into CSS like my parents did, only to be appalled when i tell them my parents scream at the very notion of me going into civil services. its because of events like these. for anyone who wants to be remotely honest and work in government, pakistan isn’t for you.

from the hospital and back

so, my migraines this time landed me in the hospital. interesting.

so what do i do when i get back? why, some phillip glass ofcourse!

here’s an absolute peach from his album ’solo piano’, the track “metamorphasis two”.

fennesz

 here’s an absolute master of ambient/noise:

fuck it

listening to: The Appleseed Cast – Mare Vitalis

this band is genius. absolute genius.

shame about the FA Cup final. the chavs nicked it. once again the better team lost (though we were barely better). unfortunately it was a snooze-fest, but we did have a perfectly legitimate goal ‘not’ allowed. from rooney’s pass giggs somehow contrived to miss a clear connection with the ball and the stumbling ball did cross over the line, but to be fair in real time it would’ve been hard to give not to mention how cech’s body covered the ball.

what are the odds on mourinho coming out and stating that we really should introduce goal line technology eh?

vidic was immense, as was scholes. giggsy’s form has been waning ever since the capitulation at the san siro, so it was no surprise to see him disappoint immensely today. however, seeing as he is fucking 33 and for more than 3/4ths of the season was absolutely class, he should not be held responsible. it was nice to see ferdinand laugh at the ridiculously petulant cunt that is drogba though. you must be really really pathetic and ‘twatty’ if rio ferdinand laughs condescendingly at you :\

pfft, now the plastic chelski brigade will be out in full force after recuperating in their hideout while we pwned them in the league. hahahaha.

silly season starts now however.

interesting

from CNN:

BAGHDAD, IRAQ (CNN) — Authorities in northern Iraq have arrested four people in connection with the “honor killing” last month of a Kurdish teen — a startling, morbid pummeling caught on a mobile phone video camera and broadcast around the world.

The case portrays the tragedy and brutality of honor killings in the Muslim world. Honor killings take place when family members kill relatives, almost always female, because they feel the relatives’ actions have shamed the family.

In this case, Dua Khalil, a 17-year-old Kurdish girl whose religion is Yazidi, was dragged into a crowd in a headlock with police looking on and kicked, beaten and stoned to death last month.

The rest and the accompanying video which is absolutely grotesque and astonishing is here.

Sarkozy’s set a fairly broad cabinet too; a leftist foreign minister? Evidence of his innate desire to “fix” things within the stagnant nation perhaps?

Hopefully i’ll be back later tonight to post a happy update regarding the FA Cup

PS: oops.

Karachi and Gaza

and so we hide. musharraf’s is reign entering (hopefully) its last throes of an existence sometimes celebrated, sometimes berated, and almost always controversial. though it would be rather ‘postal’ to insinuate that the MQM’s actions in karachi were on the behest of musharraf, his apparent hesitancy to immediately carry out some legitimate form of action to control the violence does him no favours.

His political rhetoric is now worthless, but alarmingly, his refusal to accept that he has nowhere to go from this is astonishing. Culpable, and now oblivious to his fallacies and the fact that the intelligentsia he counted upon to herald his ‘enlightened moderation’ is no longer with him, his end cannot be rendered without suffrage.

Though ostensibly premature, called his reign a disaster would be naive and outright ridiculous. Many claim that his attempts at making Pakistan more secular have failed, but they inevitably point to the gang-rapes and honour killings of rural Pakistan, not to mention the conservative stronghold that is the NWFP. What they also inevitably forget is that 8 years is 12 short of the time needed to weed out such ‘behaviour’. What they will fail to acknowledge is that the british had no control over the NWFP, so what makes them think that with the influential taliban occupying FATA musharraf’s government can fare any better?

Unfortunately, we are sinking farther into this mire than we currently believe. A headless Government led by a general who has surely lost the plot; the complete lack of a politican capable enough to run this country, let alone pull it out of this mess; the taliban’s influence growing ever stronger; and our country not far away from falling over itself.

oh, to be pakistani and to herald the virtues of being one. atleast though, we have falsas.

This, is what i want to know:

• Where is the outcry amongst muslims when the rival factions of Fatah and Hamas continue to obliterate each other in a violent and comic display of what they call a “mutual government”?
• Where is the outcry amongst muslims when Hamas fires a rocket into the town of Sderot damaging homes and a school and injuring upto a dozen Israelis?
• Where is the outcry amongst muslims when Hamas continues to encourage Palestinians to take arms against Israelis? When those Palestinians with their adrenaline and recently accessed arms take to the border posts against Israeli soliders and get shot, will these same people then rise up against a “hostile display of Israel’s military might and their hatred of the Palestinian people?”
• Where is the outcry amongst muslims of the fact that a Hamas cartoon that looks eerily like Mickey fucking Mouse is supposedly teaching kids how to hate the “jews”?

So, Israel has double standards and so does the US. The West too, with its proclamations of free speech and freedom of expression (all the while imprisoning david irving for publishing a book about holocaust revision).

But we, are no angels.

Muslims killing muslims is unfathomable yet evokes no responses from the general public and your average neighbour. Jews, or indeed, “kafirs” killing Muslims evokes displays of unimaginable hatred and abhorrence.

So, we can kill our own people, but God help us if someone else dares to, cause THAT is what’s worse.

Here’s to us, in our faith and our manifold aberrations, for as long as we are muslims, our path to heaven is littered with saints and angels.

And here’s to us and our existence in this frail world, livid with tensions religious and political, armed with the ostensible armstice that will soon cease to exist.

atleast, though, we have falsas.

Feist – The Reminder

what an album. i feel the need to slap myself a multitude of times for putting off getting (read downloading ) this album.

the mainstay of the album is leslie feist’s disarming and on first impression ‘controlled’ voice. delve into the album and you’ll realise that her voice is hardly controlled as it forays into a myriad of dimensions accompanied by instrumentation as eclectic. the album opens up with the hushed so sorry, as she sings “we don’t, need to say goodbye/we don’t, need to fight and cry” you can barely feel like you’re listening to a record as the song envelops you with its comforted, lounge-esque sound. though never really hitting the singer/songwriter works of ane brun or britta persson, the song might be a throwback to the jazz era of the 40s with the subtle background choruses.

just when you’re lulled, up pops the indie-pop gem I Feel It All. that’s perhaps why feist is thought of so highly, he ability to change direction and sound yet make you feel like you’re listening to the same artist and the same album. My Moon My Man could very well be a dance track with its rising and syncopated synthetic rythms, yet feist’s vocals bring it down to earth in a wondrous mashup. stuff like The Park complete with birds chirping and other assorted sounds soothes one again and displays feist’s ability to serenade as well as anyone.

full of strong tracks, some of which regale you while others make you want to dance, you can understand where broken social scene (of which feist is a member) gets its magnificent indie pop sensibilities (though seeing as how the other 12 members are also equally gifted artistes, that statement may be doing them an injustice). this is a fantastic album, least of all because of feist’s musical range and endeavours. if only we had more artists that could be ’playful’, yet ’serious’ within the same musical scope and album. 

Leslie Feist – Intuition (live black sessions)
Leslie Feist – So Sorry (live)

ps: unfortunately, i can’t seem to find proper mp3s and i can’t be arsed to upload any either, so you’ll have to satiate your thirst (if any) with these live mp3s. surely though, you shouldn’t go solely on these mp3s cause i haven’t even heard them. regardless, get the album! highly unlikely that you’ll be disappointed.

premierleague champions 2006/2007!

listening to: Bright Eyes – Cassadaga

4 years on, we finally win again! after arsenal spectacularly raised the bar with their unbeaten season and the abramovich funded juggernaut that is chelski *cough*bought*cough their last two titles, finally jose’s men have been showed how to win in style. in all his rantings about not getting enough respect (coupled with kenyon’s erratic rantings on how he’ll make chelsea a “big club”) it must hurt to see united not only win the league but get the respect that their play deserves also. still, nice touch with the guard of honour and with the lack of excuses and ostensibly subconscious ranting it seems that jose does know what ‘humility’ means. it’ll still be funny how chelsea plastics will now inevitably come up and start mentioning their two previous ‘titles’. yeah kids, go on now, i’ll see you in a decade when you won’t remember who got you those two titles.

what made this title even sweeter was how united were written off at the start of the season with people criticising either the purchase of carrick or the exorbitant amount paid for him (which personally i still believe hasn’t been proved worth it). also, how every liverpool fan was berating anyone who questioned their challenge to chelsea; most of all mourinho who rightly (thumbs-up) said that chelsea’s biggest challengers would be united and not lpool. also, the ronaldo-rooney world cup controversy. oh how ronaldo showed them on the football pitch! the re-emergence of scholes and giggs and larsson’s cameo (which was overhyped but he still did us good), all of which contributed.

we had our injuries that decimated our backline, our first choice striker spent half the season on the bench, we had another (smudger) come only during the latter end and fringe players (richardson) who made us want to castrate ourselves, yet we proved all the doubters wrong and won! and no one, sorry, but no one can contest that we don’t deserve it. we had luck, fuck yeah! every team that wins has luck!

anyway, onto the fa cup final and hopefully we can stuff chelsea in that one too regardless, i think we’ve got what we craved most the past 2 years and anything else (like the fa cup), would be a lovely bonus.

oh, and beckham’s praise for fergie along with ruud running towards beckham and going “manchester united! manchester united!” is great too

i also wish my net would stop fucking acting ridiculous.

MOURINHO, YOU’VE BEEN LISTENING,
IT’S NICE TO SEE, THE TROPHY’S GLISTENING,
WE’RE COMING IN THERE, TO BRING IT HOME WITH GLEE
WALKING IN A FERGIE WONDERLAND!