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...

[ Continued from Part 1. Click on the photos to get larger views in a new window, there you can also drop your comments on the individual photos.] The World Peace Stupa (Pagoda) is another popular destination in Pokhara. Part of the attraction is the large gleaming white structure of the pagoda with a golden statue of the Buddha at the very top of the hill, but it also draws people being one of the key vantage points providing stunning views of the Pokhara landscape. The drive up to the top was pretty scary indeed, our sturdy old jeep was twisting and turning its way upwards over the winding hilly path, the road only a bit wider than the vehicle itself. Had to walk up by foot for about 10 minutes to get to the peak. But just like in Sarangkot the previous day, the weather wasn't on my side. But here I had a good chance of putting my newbie photography skills to the test, trying out some real Panoramas. The result wasn't so bad. Panorama of the World Peace Pagoda. Cou...

This just shows how good I am at procrastinating, it took me a month to start writing a blog post about my Nepal tour. At first I thought I'd make a really descriptive post, but I'm just too lazy for that. So I thought I'd make it a photo blog instead. Makes the job much easier for me since many of the shots are already uploaded in G+/Picasa . Click on the photos to get larger views in a new window, there you can also drop your comments on the individual photos. My father is the kind of a person who doesn't wanna wait for something he's decided upon. It might be really hard to convince him into something, but once it's set in his mind, he just can't wait. So when one fine noon he casually informed me that they (my parents) are going to Nepal within a few days and I should let him know if I wanted to accompany them, I knew it was just a matter of time, and a very short time at that. So I was off to making a list of places to visit :D. Also, since I didn...

I know it's a happy day, and I should be in a joyous mood. But today for some reason, what I'm feeling above it all is how much I miss the Eid days when I was just a kid. Things were so much simple back in that time. Eid was all about having a good time with family and friends. In the neighborhood, going from one friend's place to another in the morning, enjoying the home made mouth watering food cooked by my mom together with my family at lunch. Nothing bothering my mind. Nothing bugging me. Nothing irritating to see and endure. No constant pressure splitting my mind in half. No complications whatsoever. Plain, simple, clean merriment. Why in the world did I have to grow up? Why in the world did everything had to become so much more complicated these days? I wish I could become a kid again. A school going kid who loves to have a blast with friends and family. I really, really wish I could go back. Sorry for this grim kinda post in the joyous day for Muslims all over the ...

It's always great when a new gadget is added to your arsenal, right? Well about half a month a ago, I've got myself a new laptop, Thanks to Allah. It's a netbook rather, an Asus EEE PC 1215T . Despite being tagged a netbook, which is usually synonymous to a low-end laptop, this little machine has a pretty decent configuration (surely you've checked out the specs by now via the above link). Well, I haven't bought this thing to play Crysis 2 right? It does whatever things I expect it to do pretty smoothly. Hey, it even runs AutoCAD 2012 nicely as well (which I'm currently learning). In an age where everyone's going for the latest android tablets or the iPad, buying a netbook might not sound very tech savvy. But IMHO, despite being super duper cool and great tools for browsing, communication, note-taking and awesome time killing entertainment, neither Android nor iOS are good enough to replace windows or mac, as far as productivity is concerned. May be all t...