Hajj 2011

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

I never quite had it in me to write about my Hajj experience, but lately, I’ve felt the need to place it in context—particularly around my religious life and the anxieties of that period. This reflection was prompted by an argument I heard recently: that the current ulema have created a myth that Hajj is for everyone, when it is, in reality, only for the elite. My answer to that is simple. My father-in-law was a car electrician. I was a software engineer. Both of us had limited means, but we had enough to cover the trip, and neither of us had many dependents at home. Hajj, for us, was not a luxury; it was a spiritual experience rooted in sacred texts, an obligation that is mandatory when one can afford it, regardless of social standing. …

How Old Are You?

Tuesday, May 26, 2026

A long time ago, on a writing forum, they started a story submission contest. I submitted a story about a young graduate whose parents decided to leave him on his own while they traveled the world. I’m not much of a writer, and the story was very raw, but someone on the forum said it read like it was written by a child. It was an honest review, but for an adult who was just trying to find their footing, it landed hard. Somehow it never occurred to them that the person writing it might have the heart of a child — and might not have been ready to hear that. …

WAR

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

People die. A select few make billions. And the world calls it geopolitics. I can’t write about that. Not because I don’t have opinions — and not because I can pretend to be neutral, I live in Pakistan, I am not outside this — but because the moment you name a country or a conflict you become a camp. And I’ve written before about the ease of not belonging to a camp. …

The Underachievers Manifesto

Friday, January 16, 2026

Normally, I don’t write much about books. Mostly because, honestly, I don’t read much. But The Underachiever’s Manifesto by Ray Bennett is a different story. What makes it interesting is the source: the author is a medical specialist in Seattle and a recovering overachiever. It’s refreshing to see the advantages of “doing enough” from someone who has actually been on the high-success side of the fence and decided it wasn’t worth the cost. …

The Sufi Way and the Echo Chamber

Friday, January 16, 2026

Normally, when I return to this blog, it is an act of reflection. There is a specific rhythm to it: I read my words multiple times before posting, allowing the thoughts to iterate in my head until they settle. Today, however, I find myself holding two seemingly contradictory concepts at once. I want to “regurgitate” them here to see how they might fit together. The First Concept: The Sufi Way To me, the “Sufi Way” represents the perpetual struggle to be truly content with the present. It is the belief that whatever situation you find yourself in is a result of a Divine decree. …

Unheard Words

Friday, January 16, 2026

We speak because we must. Not because words guarantee understanding, but because silence threatens to erase us. Every sentence is an attempt to bridge the distance between minds between one consciousness and another. Words defend, accuse, clarify, persuade. Sometimes they change lives. More often, they vanish. Speech is powerful only on one condition: that it is received. Remove the listener, and language collapses. Isolate a human being long enough, and even their screams dissolve into nothing—sound without consequence, pain without witness. …

Tsundoku

Friday, January 16, 2026

Back in university, I bought books recommended by my courses or by people in general, which eventually led to a cupboard overflowing with volumes. One day, long after university and tired of the realization that I might never read them, I gave them all away to whoever wanted them; the rest went to the raddi wala to be recycled. A few years after doing that, I remembered that one of those books was a book which i needed. I searched for it locally and then on the internet, finally finding it online. I asked a friend to fetch it for me, a process that took approximately a year. Now, I have read the initial part of that book and it sits on my shelf, but it is one of only a few technical books remaining there. Most of my technical collection is now digital, stored on Google Drive or in my HumbleBundle library. My physical shelf now hosts Islamic books which I plan to read one day. …

The Year of the Blog

Friday, January 16, 2026

For years, my biggest obstacle as a writer wasn’t a lack of ideas—it was my refusal to let anything be seen before it felt finished. I treated drafts like private property, revising them endlessly and publishing almost nothing. The result was predictable: long silences, a stagnant blog, and money spent maintaining a site that rarely spoke. Over the past four months, I kept the blog technically alive by leaning on AI to help complete posts. It worked in the narrowest sense—the site wasn’t empty—but it also made it easier to avoid the harder task of writing and committing to my own words. I don’t even know how those posts performed; I never bothered to measure. …

The Ease of Just Being

Friday, December 26, 2025

In a world that demands we pick a camp, a party, or a masalaq (sect), I have found a strange kind of liberation in being “none of the above.” People often ask why I am apolitical or why I refuse to anchor myself to a specific religious school of thought. The answer is simple: Peace. When you join a camp, you become an accidental spokesperson. You find yourself defending policies you didn’t write, leaders you don’t control, and complex theological arguments you may not have the authority to settle. …

The Night Algorithm and I Went Back in Time

Sunday, December 21, 2025

I couldn’t sleep last night. Instead of fighting it, I did what everyone does: I grabbed my phone, opened YouTube, and started looking for some instrumentals just to quiet my brain down. What happened next was pretty wild, though I guess it’s common now. YouTube did its thing and started digging. Slowly, my feed shifted from “relaxing beats” to stuff I hadn’t heard in years. One click led to another, and suddenly I was deep in a rabbit hole of my own past. It’s crazy how these algorithms don’t just track what you like—they track who you were. I ended up sitting there in the dark, rediscovering tracks I used to have on repeat, each one bringing back a specific memory I’d totally forgotten about. …