I Am Asif

I've always had a thing for personal websites/landing pages. It's been a really long time since I started my first one, which was made using Google Pages. I dug up my old emails to figure out that it's been almost nine years since I launched that! I remember I was the first one among my friends or family to have such a site online, and it made quite a stir. Soon quite a few of them started to make their own. After the folks at mountain view discontinued Pages (like many other services they used to offer), I switched to Weebly. But by then, social media sites had already become quite popular, and your Myspace, Hi5 or (a bit later but more importantly) Facebook profile became the most common address to hand out to others. I was into these platforms from the early stages, being quite active and growing my friends list in Hi5, Orkut and Facebook. Quite a while later I was introduced to LinkedIn and fell in love! Also, I was part of the beta group for trying ou...

As the train that takes us to the top of Penang Hill started to climb up, the trees and rock faces on both sides started to move away. And all of a sudden I'm high above the tree tops, and the sparkling city of Penang Island and the distant mountains are spread open before me, while the train track cracks a line between the green. Breathless, taking in the scenery while being unable to say anything but SubhanAllah , I remembered I need to start taking shots again! Penang Hill, Penang, Malaysia. Didn't expect the photos to turn out so nice to be honest. The train was moving at a considerable speed and was jam packed with tourists. Alhamdulillah, the time spent there was absolutely amazing and I enjoyed the splendid look and feel of the environment while trying to photograph them to the best of my ability. I highly recommend this spot to anyone travelling to Malaysia. Enjoy and Share.

When I asked 4 year old Abdullah what he's gonna become when he grows up, I got an answer that made me laugh, and think.

It's really given me big jolt. One of my dear friends back in UTM, Malaysia, and Deeni bro, Abdur Rahman from Gaza passed away last night. He was one of the most selfless characters I've seen among my friends. He's the kind of a guy you would call in any need, any time of the day, any day of the year. He'd be there for you. The kind of a person with a perpetual smile on his face; a companion in all the jokes and jibes friends throw at each other. It's really hard to find such an active, selfless and joyful bro like him. He was about 30 I guess. I think I know what you're thinking. 'How did he die?' . Yeah, that's what everyone thinks of when he hears of someone else's death. So if I answer that he died in the sea, pulled away from the strong arms of his dearest friends completely out of sight for hours, only to be found floating on the surface the next morning, we feel like 'oh yeah that's why he died' . As if he wouldn't die if h...

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...