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. …

Debian on Old Hardware

Saturday, December 20, 2025

I recently revived an old laptop with an Intel i3, 4 GB RAM, and a standard disk drive by installing Debian. The motivation was simple: Windows had become unbearably slow on this machine, and I wanted to see how a modern Linux distribution would perform on limited hardware. From Windows to Xubuntu—and Beyond Initially, I replaced Windows with Xubuntu. The experience did improve, but not enough for my son to actually start using the laptop. After checking the hardware, I found that upgrading the RAM to 8 GB and replacing the hard drive with an SSD would cost under PKR 10,000. That seemed reasonable. …

From Madina to Margallas: A Coffee Contemplation in Karachi

Saturday, December 13, 2025

Back in 2011, on a journey from Madina to Mecca, I had a sensory experience that stuck with me. After the last prayer, someone was distributing “chai” and “khawa.” I asked for khawa. I am not a coffee fanatic per se, but that specific taste stayed with me the whole journey. I know enough to distinguish instant granules from freshly ground beans, but that cup was something else. Now, as we enter the few fleeting months in Karachi where the weather allows us to enjoy coffee without worrying about the heat, I’ve started reading God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest For the Perfect Coffee by Michaele Weissman. It was part of a Humble Bundle I bought ages ago—I don’t even remember what the bundle was for—but the book sat in my library waiting for this specific winter. …

If You Are Like Me

Friday, November 28, 2025

If you are human, it’s natural to dream big to plan out each day, each year, and then regret it all when New Year’s resolutions arrive. We’ve all been there. But this constant cycle of planning, failing, regretting, and planning again can slowly drift you into a zone that affects your psychological well-being. It’s not healthy. A quiet, steady life can also be a meaningful one. One of the first “gems” I ever received came from my khala, my maternal aunt. She would say: …