An interesting...

...article. I like this sentence: "Being a moderate Muslim has now become a viable career option - there are government taskforces to serve on, journalists to talk to, advice to give to charitable foundations and thinktanks, innumerable conferences to attend". He He.

Further freedom of expression!!!

Mayor suspended over 'Nazi' jibe.

I would tend...

...to read news articles like this.

There are a...

...few reasons why I don't have comments enabled on my blog. A main one is summed up here, and I quote:
"...My blog is my space, my publication..." and that "...if you have something to say please email me..."

The 20D is...

...old now. New is the 30D. I am not drooling though. Its some lenses that have me still drooling.

I wonder how...

...many of our own fears and demons we infect our children with. I have always been afraid of heights, but I now think this fear has increased a lot. Maybe this has to do with age, I don't know. And somehow, when I have my children with me at some height, for example at our rooftoop, (our house is a three-storied building, though the rooftop does have a short-height boundry wall), my fear of heights is nothing less than a panic. And the result is that I am pulling my son back away from the boundry wall of the rooftop, even when he starts moving near it. Sometime ago we went to a picnic place, and there was a very high tower there to get a view of the whole scenery. Now somehow I did take my son to the top, but I was pulling to keep him at the centre of the top platform, even though he was fearless, and when coming down the stairs I was absolutely terrified, holding my son's hand tight. Whether it was my own fear, or a morphing of my own fear into a fear for my son's safety, I don't know. But I do have a feeling that if I keep doing this, I am going to, due to my behaviour, instill my fear of heights into my children, subconciously or conciously.

Freedom of expression!!!

1. The largest cinemas chain in Germany takes a Turkish film out of its program. The funniest part in this report is the mention of the "fear, that some youngsters could be ideologically manipulated".
2. David Irving, a British historian, jailed for 3 years for lying about the Holocaust.

a rose...

...in our garden, snapped yesterday.  

Two days ago...

...we, i.e. me and my family, in true Lahorite tradition, went at night to watch the damage done to buildings on an important Lahore road earlier in the day during rioting. Surprisingly enough, there were very few cordons in place, and we were able to go right up to where the main damage was done. Even at the time when we went there, a huge fire was burning in one of the buildings, and there were fire engines and ambulances everywhere. We turned away quickly from the scene only to avoid the questions of my three-and-a-half-years old.
The noticeable thing was, though, the really palpable sadness and gloom in the air.

It was also...

...great to meet old friends and colleagues in Hamburg. It was a good feeling to be back in the place where I had spent so much time. Also, nothing seemed to have changed in Hamburg ( or at least the part of Hamburg that I used to frequent), except perhaps for the new building at the university campus which was under construction when we left Hamburg. Its been an year since we left Hamburg, but I guess an year, long time it may be, is not long enough for things to significantly change, though I wouldn't copyright this statement.

One interesting part...

...of my visit to Germany was experiencing really really cold temperatures. The lowest temperatures I remember while I was living in Hamburg were in the range of -8, -9 degrees. And that too at night. But this time it was -17 celcius in Berlin in broad daylight. And man, it was cold. The night I landed in Berlin it was even colder. During the brief walk I had while I was searching the location of my hotel, the water bottle hung outside my rucksack froze.
This makes me remember an incident from many years ago when I was studying in Hamburg. At that time too in the winters the temperature had dropped to -8 celcius, and one evening I asked a classfellow of mine, who was from Mongolia, whether he wasn't feeling cold. Now this question was prompted by me seeing him wearing just a flimsy leather jacket. What he replied was that the weather for him was very pleasant, since the winters in their part of the world have temperatures in the -30 celcius range!!!

I now have...

...a new lens for my 20D. Well, the new is a replacement of the old, whose autofocus had stopped working for no good reason.
A good thing was that I was to visit Germany a few days before the one-year guarantee of the lens was to end. So I took the lens with me to Germany, and went to the shop in Hamburg where I had bought it from. Now a friendly woman at the shop asked me what was the problem, and I told her exactly that (in german, which pleased me that I still can manage some german). Now her first response was that the camera would have to be sent to the Canon workshop in Hamburg. This wasn't really a good solution, I told her, since I was in the country just for 2 more days. I guess she was inclined to replacing the lens, but asked a colleague of hers, who very dryly suggested the workshop solution. Well, there are a-holes everywhere, aren't there? After a little more discussion, she called someone up, I guess her boss, and eventually gave me a replacement.
I have used the new lens just once since coming back from Germany. It seems to be working fine, which I hope it will continue to do, so that I could maintain my faith in the L-series lenses.

stumbled upon this...

...,a page about "mathematical photography". Seems interesting.