“In the car” was my reply.

“Roll paratha khanay ka mood hai?”

“Kha laitay hein!”

Hassan paused and I imagined his trademark wicked expression. “Khilanay kay baray mein kya khayal hai?”

I chuckled. “Whatever happened to paying your own bills?”

After some random nonsense about trying to decide the venue, Hassan told me that he and Rehan were on their way to the Jinnah Super Market, and they will be waiting there for me.

I must admit that when I had first heard of a roll paratha, I had found the idea to be quite funny. Mainly because it was a brilliant idea. It only replaced the regular bun of a burger with a paratha, but that gave it such a desi touch that people couldn’t help feeling a certain fondness towards it. I must also admit that despite thinking that roll paratha is a nifty idea, I have never really enjoyed it other than just on a couple of occasions. Maybe I am one of those people who always admire but never fully appreciate.

When I reached Jinnah Super Market, the sun was about to set in the western horizon. Hassan and Rehan were sitting around a table in the “eating area” — a sort of open-air place with benches and chairs and tables — and were listening to the constant growls of an electricity generator. Somehow, if you don’t hear the sound of generators when you are outside these days, you feel like you are missing something, no matter how irritating it might be.

Across the road on my right was a plaza, which sported on its first floor the wide glass wall (or huge glass window, if you prefer) of Pakistan Electronics, a “music” shop famous for its display of musical instruments, specially guitars. I had once visited this shop with Talha. He had been saving money for buying an acoustic guitar, and I tagged along with him because he needed a driver and some “moral support”. I lived in Rawalpindi back then, and both Talha and I had just a vague idea about Islamabad and its markets. Thankfully, when we asked a young man if we had reached Jinnah Super Market or just Super Market, he told us that we were at Jinnah Super. Finding Pakistan Electronics was then a relatively easy job. The trip back home, I am sure, was quite a sight: It’s not every day that you see two teenagers riding a Suzuki 100 motorbike, with a guitar wedged between them in a box that looked more like a miniature coffin than a guitar case.

Winamp sometimes tells me that Jon Bon Jovi’s guitar lies bleeding in his arms. I always try telling back that Talha’s guitar lies broken under his bed.

Anyway, last evening when I was looking at Pakistan Electronics and the row of guitars that was displayed in its glass window, I remembered my visit and smiled silently. I was about to mention it to Hassan and Rehan when I noticed something else.

A middle-aged man, dressed in the familiar dark blue uniform of private security guards, came into the frame of that glass window. He was holding a prayer mat in his hands. He paused, probably to take his shoes off, and then stretched that mat on the floor. As he raised his hands for saying takbeer, I saw that when he would prostrate, he would be right under the hanging guitars.

“Look at that, guys,” I said. “Saying prayer under shadow of guitars.”

“Wah!” Hassan exclaimed. “Saaz bhi aur namaz bhi!”

“Deen bhi aur duniya bhi!” I added.

It was only this morning that I realized that the image of a man saying his prayer right under guitars will remain burnt into my memory for quite some time.

Also, when I choose the slogan of arguably the most damned organization of Pakistan as the title of this post, I don’t mean it as a compliment to them. I mean it as an ironical device. Because, let’s face it, there is no difference. None whatsoever.

When I closed the public access to this ulta seedha corner about a week ago, I had a quick plan of action in my mind: Create backups. Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Upload the newly created theme. Make all those little changes as required. Install the plugins. Brush up the posts and pages. Write a new post. And open the access again. Plain and simple. Shouldn’t have taken more than 48 hours.

Except that PTCL wanted me to feel the difference.

The night I created all the backups, I slept and dreamed of a new version of Ulta Seedha that was smashing. The morning after I woke up and found the phone line gone dead.

“Sir ji, what can we do? The workers are all on strike. It’s been over a month.” A person at the local PTCL exchange office told me when I went there to “complain”.

I sighed and then told him that, strangely, I could still connect to the Internet by using PTCL Broadband. His face lit up, “Acha? You go and do this: There’s a dibbi through which the DSL line connects to your home. Exchange the wire of that dibbi with your regular phone line and it will work!”

I still have no idea what he was talking about.

I didn’t try to locate that miraculous dibbi, though. It turned out that the DSL connection that was running on a dead phone line was of no practical use. It kept on disconnecting after every 5 minutes (with a special consideration for mornings and afternoons, when it disconnected after every 10 minutes), and the only reason that FileZilla, the nifty FTP client that I use, didn’t jump out of the computer to slap me silly on my face, was that it was a piece of soulless software. Otherwise, I am sure it would have refused to work for a master who couldn’t even arrange a stable Internet connection.

Fast forward to seven days after the phone line went dead, and it was still dead. That dibbi person had now started greeting me with a sheepish smile and a sympathetic shrug. Then on the 8th day, he asked me to go and see some Chowdhury sahab.

I found that Chowdhury sahab, a man who didn’t look even remotely like a chowdhury, near the main gate of the PTCL building. He listened to me patiently, and then asked me who had told me to see him. He then motioned me to follow him and entered the complaint office.

The next five minutes were amusing. The way Chowdhury sahab scolded all those guys, including the dibbi person, was a perfect example of an officer gone mad in a Pakistani sarkari office. I did feel sorry for the dibbi person, though — he was always so polite. Within the next 10 minutes, a technician was fiddling through the telephone wires of our home, and the phone line went live. Just like that. I later found out that Chowdhury sahab was the SDO (Sub Divisional Officer, or whatever the hell it stands for).

Now that I think of it, there was a difference that I felt. I had to go to the upper management if I wanted my phone line repaired in the past, and I had to do it again. But this time, I was sent to an officer by one of his own subordinates. Feel the difference, really!

Anyway, feel free to extract a moral out of this story. I am just happy that I managed to do almost 75% of the work I had intended to do for Ulta Seedha. To users of Internet Explorer 7: The new theme will look jittery at some places, I’ll fix it soon. To users of Internet Explorer 6: Stop using it, you are destroying the World Wide Web. To users of Mozilla Firefox: I love you. And if you are one of those rockstars who subscribed to this blog’s feed, please update it to this one. (If everything is working fine, the previous feed will automatically redirect, but who knows.)

So this was the story of a different PTCL, and a different Ulta Seedha. Let me know if anything is not working as it should be, and I’ll try to fix it soon. Meanwhile, I’ll also pray that the remaining 25% of the work that I haven’t been able to do remains hidden from the visitors.

If there’s one thing that sets this blog apart from any other blog in the whole blogistan, then that is its author’s (that is to say, my) ability of not updating regularly. And when you consider the fact that this post that you are reading right now should have been uploaded about a month ago, you can realize that when I say that I don’t update regularly, I mean it!

I know. I am probably the greatest procrastinator of recent times. And it’s not just blogging; there are loads of things in my life right now that are highly messed up just because yours truly is a lazy giraffe. But anyway, I wouldn’t want to talk about them while (sort of) celebrating Ulta Seedha’s 5th blogiversary. Instead, as is the tradition of Ulta Seedha, here are some random statistics.

Posts

Ulta Seedha has seen 93 posts in the five years it has been online. That makes an average of 1.55 posts every month.

Wow.

Sigh.

Of course, this post count does not include those entries which were lost in the Diary-X crash. (For those who don’t know: before Ulta Seedha got its own domain two years ago, it was hosted on Diary-X.) The post count also does not include those posts (mainly poems) that I wrote before I started blogging, and the pages which fall out of the regular blog timeline (About, FAQ, etc). All of the statistics that I provide below are based on these 93 posts.

The most lengthy post that I have written in these five years is also the last post of these five years: An Evaluation of Popular Time Wasting Algorithms, which contained 1653 words of brilliant nonsense.

The shortest post contained just 6 words and two photographs: This Morning. The shortest, picture-less post was Glass of Water, containing 14 words.

Average length of a post turned out to be 424.1290323 words.

Comments

Despite my rarely updating attitude, I have been very fortunate to have a great readership in these five years. They might not know it, but I have always learnt a great deal from every one of my readers and the comments that they left on my ulta seedha stuff. And some of the readers are also my good friends now. I guess I have just been very lucky.

Before I tell you the stats regarding comments that this blog received, let me tell you something interesting: I have not used the comment count reported by WordPress. Instead, I have re-counted the comments excluding my own, and have considered the unique number of people who commented on a particular post. In other words, if a person XYZ has commented three times on a post, I have counted those as only one. The results are quite amusing.

Total number of comments is 975. This makes an average of 10.48387097 comments for each post. (Going by the regular count, there are 1632 comments, with an average of 17.5483871 comments for a post.)

The post receiving the highest number of comments, 27, was Yet Again. The regular count says that it received 43 comments. (Runner-up is “میں کام کرتا ہوں”, which received 25 comments, and which tops with 54 comments of regular count).

The least number of comments is, well, ZERO. 3 posts share this count, and no, I am not mentioning them. They are highly immature. (That’s not to say that the rest of the blog has anything mature to offer!)

Miscellaneous

On past blogiversaries, I had also calculated the maximum and minimum number of days between updates, but for the 5th blogiversary, I won’t. I’ll only embarrass myself if I mention them.

Which brings us to the next thing…

E-book

Yep. An e-book.

I know, I know. I am not a prolific author. Heck, I am not even a proper author. This blog is certainly not a masterpiece, and has nothing to offer except long hiatuses. Still, I thought that an e-book containing a collection of posts from the past five years would be something interesting to do.

Also, I wanted to say ‘thanks’ to all of you who have been reading and supporting Ulta Seedha. Couldn’t think of any other way.

(I apologize for the ridiculously large size of the e-book, specially to dial-up users. Sadly, that’s the smallest size I could achieve even after all the PDF compression techniques.)

And now, dear friends, let’s just see if I can make it through the 6th year.

This paper evaluates and compares five time wasting algorithms which have become popular among today’s studentkind: idling, sleeping, strolling, movie-watching, and web surfing. In order to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of these algorithms, a set of carefully selected real-life benchmarks was used. The amount of time wasted, alongwith the quality time enjoyed while wasting it simultaneously, are calculated and analyzed, and recommendations for improving the performance of the mentioned algorithms are also offered.

1     Introduction

Time wasting has been one of the most time consuming activities of mankind ever since time itself started. Over the centuries, different algorithms for efficient wasting of time have been devised and implemented, and have been passed down to junior generations by time-wasting experts of their eras. Studentkind, in particular, have been extremely creative in inventing novel approaches to solve the problem of time wasting, and thus have achieved a cult status among time wasters from all walks of life

Recent studies have shown that a majority of studentkind favors five certain algorithms over the rest: idling, sleeping, strolling, movie-watching, and web surfing. In this paper, we evaluate each of these five algorithms and presents their pros and cons. It should also be noted that some of these algorithms may qualify for being meaningful activities in themselves; however, we chose not to extend this study into that domain, because the definition of a time wasting algorithm (see next section) rules such studies out. (The reader may observe that the creativity of studentkind shines outstandingly as they convert legitimate activities into time wasters.)

The outline of this paper is as follows. First, in Section 2, fundamental defnitions are provided, and various benchmark parameters are laid down that are used for evaluation of the five algorithms. In Section 3, a brief review of each of the algorithms is presented. Section 4 describes the experiments and their results, and is followed by Section 5, which presents some recommendations. Section 6 concludes the paper.

2     Definitions and Benchmarks

We begin by defining a time wasting algorithm, A.

Def. 1. A = { N | N ≠ required N at time t }

Informally, a time wasting algorithm is an algorithm which is run when it is not required to run. In the rest of the paper, we shall use the words algorithm and activity interchangeably.

We also define another quantity, critical time (t_c).

Def. 2. Critical time is the point in time when the algorithm finishes.

Since all time wasting algorithms are recursive (that is, they never end), their stopping criteria is almost always the critical time.

A number of different benchmarks for evaluation of each of the algorithms were selected, and they are described below.

2.1     Amount of time wasted (t_w)

The most important parameter for any time wasting algorithm is the amount of time, t_w , that it lets the user waste. However, t_w also depends on the diligence of the users themselves, and is, therefore, a rather subjective parameter. We have thus kept t_w fixed during the experiments, using it as a common ground for evaluation of other parameters.

2.2     Amount of generated entertainment (e)

A time wasting algorithm is practically useless if it does not provide its user with a way of having fun. Formally,

e = A (t_w) (1)

where t_w is the amount of time wasted using a time wasting algorithm A, and e is the generated amount of entertainment.

It might be argued that one is not wasting any time if one is having fun, but studies have shown that time wasting for its own sake should not be void of joy. Also, by Definition 1, any activity that should not be engaged in at a given time is a time wasting activity, regardless of the amount of joy it holds for its participants.

2.3     Amount of guilt induced (g)

A time wasting algorithm which induces the least amount of guilt for its user is highly favorable, since the amount of guilt can greatly reduce the entertainment achieved. Thus,

e′ = e − g (2)

where e′ is the actual amount of entertainment. Time wasting algorithms keep evolving to reduce g, though most users rely on their own stubbornness to ignore any amount of g induced while wasting time.

2.4     Reasonable Excuse Factor (REF)

REF is the ability of a time wasting activity to be presented as an excuse for not engaging in the required activity. Theoretically,

REF ∝ 1/g

i.e., lesser the amount of guilt induced, higher the REF. However, our experiments (Section 4) show that this theoretical concept does not always hold true.

3     The Algorithms

In this section, we describe the five algorithms that are compared in the next section. It should be noted that all of these algorithms are very self explanatory and we do not feel a need to explicitly define and state them.

3.1     Idling

Perhaps the most fundamental algorithm for time wasting is doing nothing, or idling. Over the years, a significant decrease in the practical application of idling has been observed, which is not unsurprising due to the lack of creativity and less t_w (as we show in the next section).

3.2     Sleeping

Sleeping has always come naturally to the sloths among us, and they are rightfully credited for the widespread use of this activity as a time wasting algorithm. It is, like idling, one of the fundamental time wasters.

3.3     Strolling

Strolling is the alternative algorithm to sleeping for those who find it hard to lock themselves in their bedrooms. It is often accompanied with eating icecreams or french fries, but can be performed without them. Most students like to run this algorithm in teams.

3.4     Movie-watching

This algorithm has evolved from sneaking out of one’s home to attend the late night show in the local theater to the convenience of one’s bedroom, thanks to the advancement in technology. Moreover, the choice of watching movie clips on handheld devices such as mobile phones has immensely increased the usage of this algorithm.

3.5     Web Surfing

Web surfing is the most recent in the mentioned algorithms, but studies show an exponential growth in its application. Just like movie-watching, web surfing has also benefited from the increase in handheld device usage, and some researchers even predict that this algorithm will join the most fundamental ones in near future.

4     Experiments and Results

We conducted test experiments for each of the five algorithms in five consecutive days. Test activities used as required Ns to be neglected (see Defintion 1) included writing a report that a professor demanded, revising lecture notes, installing productive software, updating a blog called Ulta Seedha, and doing the laundry.

As explained in Section 2, the amount of time wasted (t_w) was kept fixed, and was assigned the value of 120 minutes. e, g, e′, and REF were measured on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest.

Table 1 summarizes the results.

Table 1: Results obtained after testing the five algorithms

Please note that the amount of guilt induced was measured during t_w, and not afterwards.

It can be observed that both movie-watching and web surfing showed similar behavior, with web surfing ranking higher as a reasonable excuse. Indeed, a student can always tell others that she tried to search the worldwide web for hours before finding something useful. Sleeping also performed in a satisfactory manner with the least amount of guilt due to the sub-conscious nature of the
algorithm. Movie-watching also showed a closer amount of g to sleeping, since there is very little room for guilt when enjoying an on-screen action sequence or romance. Unsurprisingly, idling shows the highest g, and consequently, the least e′. This was inevitable because the mind is set free to think of the consequences while running the idling algorithm. Strolling may perform well for some users, and improvements maybe suggested for reducing its g.

All of these algorithms performed poorly for REF, with the slight exception of web surfing. We recommend that the interested reader explore the algorithm of baby-sitting if a higher REF is desired. However, baby-sitting is widely avoided due to its very low e′ — even lower than idling.

5     Recommendations

We now present some recommendations based on our observations during the experiments.

1. Movie-watching and web surfing may be combined together to enhance the time wasting experience. Wesbites such as YouTube may prove to be highly useful in this regard.
2. To reduce the g for strolling, listening to music while running the algorithm is highly encouraged. The interested reader may consult the user manual of Apple’s iPod or similar portable music players.
3. Web surfing may also be enhanced by contributing to meaningless message boards. This may reduce the g.
4. A significant increase in the REF for sleeping may be made by catching a virus, but a certified physician should be consulted beforehand.

6     Conclusions and Future Work

In this paper, we presented a comparative analysis for five popular time wasting activities. We showed that fundamental activities such as idling are now being replaced by more recent developments in the area of time wasting algorithms. We also provided some recommendations for improving the current
performance of these algorithms.

Readers may observe that we have not included a recently emerged and heavily implemented time wasting algorithm of gaming. We believe that this algorithm deserves a separate paper of its own, and we intend to work on it in the near future. Also, TV-watching was not included in favor of movie-watching, and research may be carried out to assess its merits and demerits.

References

This paper does not cite any references because, ironically, we think that they are a waste of time.

Here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I personally think that the original author of this tag has a pretty intimate relationship with the numbers 3 and 5 (and probably 6 as well, since 1 + 2 + 3 = 6), but if I were him (or her), I would have spread the tag as going to page no. 123, finding the 4th sentence, and then posting the next 5 sentences, because this seems more harmonious with regular counting.

Anyway, after my useless commentary, let’s move on to the tag.

The nearest book that I can pick is a dictionary, which is out. Second nearest are two books: one is about digital image processing, and the second is Mushtaq Ahmad Yusufi’s Zarguzasht (زرگزشت). The choice is simple!

And here are the three sentences:

حُجرے کے سامنے اسی کھدبداتی دَلدَل میں دس بارہ لڑکے اور مینڈک مثالِ صورتِ خورشید “اِدھر ڈوبے اُدھر نکلے، اُدھر ڈوبے اِدھر نکلے”۔ لڑکوں کے بے تحاشا بڑھے ہوئے پیٹ نیلے کانچ کی طرح چمک رہے تھے۔ ایک لڑکا پاجامہ پہنے ہوئے تھا، لیکن قمیص ندارد، باقی ماندہ لڑکوں کی نِیم برہنگی کی ترتیب اس کے بر عکس تھی۔

Update: Since A asked me to go ahead with Digital Image Processing as well, here are three sentences from the famous Gonzalez & Woods:

Sampling this function into 256 equally spaced discrete values produced the desired specified histogram. The transformation function G(z) obtained from this histogram using Eq. (3.3-14) is labeled transformation (1) in Fig. 3.22(b). Similarly, the inverse transformation G^-1(s) from Eq.(3.3-16) [obtained using the iterative technique discussed in connection with Eq. (3.3-17)] is labeled transformation (2) in Fig. 3.22(b).

And now for the hardest part. I tag:

1. A
2. Beautiful Stranger
3. Bhaijan
4. Saad
5. Take this spot if you wish

It was in 3rd grade when our teachers slowly but steadily started to challenge our writing abilities by leaving gaps in their dictated essays and letting us fill those gaps on our own. As a result, new realizations started dawning upon us. For example, I discovered that the hobby I was extremely passionate about was stamp-collection. I also discovered that my favorite sport was not cricket, since everybody in my class had declared that they would write on cricket. Always trying (and failing) to be different than others, I thus chose to write on field hockey. And since our teacher had asked us to mention also our favorite sportsman from our favorite sport, I suddenly found that I loved the way how Shahbaz Ahmad Sr. dribbled the ball, and thus crowned him with the honor of being my favorite field hockey player.

In 6th grade, we were blessed with a strict disciplinarian of an English teacher, and it was after I left that school that I realized what a tremendous teacher she was. She would just sit there in her chair and ask us to come forward with topics on which an essay could be written. After the whole class would agree on one topic, she would give us a brief overview about it, and that’s that. No dictations, no spoon-feeding. We would finish our essays over the weekend and then recite them one by one so that the whole class could listen, and she would point out the strengths and weaknesses of our masterpieces. Of course, at that time, the thought of reciting our essays to the most strict teacher of the school used to scare the hell out of us, but the process did make us learn.

I should probably mention at this point that my intention today was not to give out tips on essay writing, as some might conclude so from the title of this post. In fact, for a graduate student, my essays are still very childish, and giving out pointers on writing good essays will be a very neem-hakeem‘ish thing for me to do. The real purpose of writing all the stuff above was to provide you with a preamble for the actual content of this post, which you can see by clicking on the images below.

These masterpieces were forwarded to me by a friend a long time ago, and I came across them today while browsing through the contents of my machine’s hard disk. I just wish I had the spontaneity of that child, whoever he is, who has written these essays. His teacher might think that he needed to focus on the title (and, let’s be honest, his teacher is right), but I am willing to bet that even my strict English teacher wouldn’t have denied that that child has got style.

Of course, she would also have crossed his essays with her trademark slash of red ink. She was, after all, a strict disciplinarian.

There’s a very peculiar feeling attached with being a Pakistani: you see it all. You grow up in this country — land of the pure — and the amount of purity that you see around you is simply tremendous. You see hate, violence, greed, corruption, restlessness, and death — all in their purest forms. And you see them all so many times that whenever you see them again, you nod to them in polite recognition and even smile at them. A smile, which doesn’t warm up your heart, but rather makes it hollow every time. And when your heart reaches the point where it can’t be more hollow, it stops. You cease to exist as a citizen of land of the pure, and start to live as a citizen of land of the dead.

And then something happens. Not very different from what has become a norm for the land of the dead, but the sudden shock of it tremors the very core of your (dead) existence. You stare at the headlines springing up all around the World Wide Web, and you switch from one television channel to another watching the screaming news. And then you see your fellow citizens — fellow deads — transform into zombies. You see them forming groups among themselves and you see them charging at other empty souls, sucking whatever life has left within them out of their bodies. Just like in a horror movie, except that a horror movie has background music and ends after 3 hours; land of the dead has background cries and there appears to be no end to it.

So you sit there and try to comprehend whatever that is happening, and then you realize that your mind has long ago given up on thinking. That you can’t do anything except sit in horror and disbelief at what your fellow zombies are doing to each other. And even though you want to smash the television screen when someone questions the stability of land of the pure, you simply change the channel because you now live in land of the dead. So what if this land of the dead was once land of the pure, you are a zombie now, with a hollow heart and an empty mind, and have nothing better to do except recruiting more zombies and raising hell, or otherwise sitting in your home feeling too numb with the utter atrocity of circumstances.

Which leaves you with just one, single thing: an icy, maniacal laugh.

The interesting thing about tags is that sometimes they provide you with a very good excuse for being narcissistic. Probably that’s one of the reasons why I regret not answering a couple of them in the past. (My humble apologies for that.) Other reasons for not answering them include procrastination and, well, procrastination. This tag, however, may or may not fall in the category of narcissism. After all, how self-loving one can be while describing seven weird things about oneself?

So, as tagged by No One, here are seven weird things about me. (At least, these are what I think that are weird. Feel free to disagree.)

1. I feel thirsty after brushing my teeth.
2. I have some t-shirts in my wardrobe that I bought with great enthusiasm, but I have never worn them.
3. I have labelled each step of the staircase in my home as either a “right-foot-step” or a “left-foot step” (in my mind, of course), and I rarely put my left foot on a right-foot-step, and vice versa.
4. I have a tendency to get confused when I see a “pull” or “push” sign on doors.
5. I like to eat dishes “derived” from meat (like kofta, kabab, etc.) but I don’t like to eat meat in its “unaltered” form (like a simple korma.) Chicken is an exception, and so is goat’s liver — yes, Eid just passed!
6. While writing with a pen, I don’t like to place its cap on its butt. I either keep the cap in my other hand, or put it somewhere nearby.
7. I can roll my tongue!

I tag Stray Angel.

Photo credits:

• no bull by Ann Sam
• Boer Goat Kid by goatgirl
• Mountain Goat by T. Filewich
• Big Horn Sheep by T. Filewich
• Bovine Caricature by Craig Jewell
• Curious Cows 1 by Michael Ring
• .| Cammel |. by Rodolfo Clix

The (much needed) first rain of winter has arrived last evening and now the atmosphere is all clean and tidy. There is, of course, a significant increase in the intensity of weather’s chill, which has forced you to finally fix the gas heater of your room. You have loads of work to do, but you are just not in the mood. Instead, you think of updating your blog (which, incidentally, you haven’t updated for ages). So you call your elder brother and ask him where his camera is. You then grab that camera and get on your home’s roof. And then you do what every amateur photographer does: point and shoot!

Starting the series is a photograph of the sun, the clouds in front of the sun, and a tall structure that is apparently a water tank, but in reality is just a hollow piece of architecture serving as a huge decoration piece for the surrounding area. The sky at that time wasn’t as yellow as it appears in this picture, but I am not really complaining — it gives a great “touch” to it.

Next comes the coverage of a limited overs cricket match played by some Pathan (Afghan?) kids who normally spend their day carrying a large, untidy bag on their shoulders and stuffing it with junk in hopes of earning some cash. The little park in which they are playing is just adjacent to my home, and is also the one where the empty water tank stands. You can see the boys’ “work bags” lying some steps away from the wicket-keeper. Also, it’s not that apparent in the picture, but the cricket bat is actually just a stick. Gotta love the spirit of these boys.

Next picture is a complete fluke. I was actually trying to capture the birds while they were sitting on the top of the water tank, but while I was clicking the button, they decided to fly away. The moment turned out to be the luckiest I have ever had so far in bird photography.

And now comes the turn for the ever attractive sunsets. As you can notice, the clouds which were present at the time of the first picture are now gone and only few have remained. Nevertheless, they make a pretty picture.

The sun after getting really low…

And just a couple of minutes before disappearing…

And thus ends the filmstrip!