I Am Asif

Up there in the cloudy tip of Penang Hill, which you can reach after a visually stunning inclined train ride, you get to a point where you find hundreds of 'Love Locks' on an iron grill. Inspired by many different locations around the world, I guess they started this in Penang Hill not too long ago, judging by the number of locks. Lovers write their initials on padlocks, and lock it in the grill and throw away the key, hoping their love would be locked forever. Although the concept seems nothing more than a sham to me, I was still having fun looking through all those different initials and names painted on the locks with bright colors. But I wasn't looking just randomly, rather I was searching for a very specific message, and I was hopeful I would find it, at least one. And I did find just one, but it was enough for me. Because it spoke my words. Penang Hill, Penang, Malaysia. It has happened to me so many times, that I'm travelling in the most spectacular of t...

Thesis Valley is a place of melancholy. A place where day and night are the same. You don't get to care if the sun and the moon are replaced by other planetary objects. Time is only the count of hours, how many you've passed and how many left, there's no time of day! In Thesis Valley, you trudge along, reluctantly, yet relentlessly. A few inches from your head, dangles a white curtain with ever increasing strange black symbols. In the first days of your time here, the curtain is mostly blank. And it's that emptiness that panics you! It drives you on with a hunger, a strange intrinsic urge in the gut to fill that white curtain with more and more symbols. That's the first village in Thesis Valley. Here you dig up the ground, you look into every alley, you turn every rock to find more things to turn into symbols to add to your curtain. And the more you walk, the more you pick up and more is the curtain filled with black. You soon find there are other sources to fi...