The beginning of a journey

Alhamdulillah, yesterday, February 12, 2016, I finally defended my PhD thesis successfully. I am grateful to Dr. Zartash and Dr. Ihsan for sparing time for rehearsals and feedback during the entire last week.  Also, Dr. Tariq Jadoon was there in the mock presentation and gave excellent feedback. A special thanks to my sincere friend Kamran Nishat for being there throughout the last week or so. He lent a great and invaluable helping hand. He was there with excellent suggestions just as he has been throughout my PhD studies at LUMS. Irteza was also there with encouragement in the tough last week. A special thanks to Zeeshan Rana, Akeel Faridee, Umar Suleman and Fahad Javed for being there to attend the defense presentation.
I will write more details about it later. One might think that this is the end. In fact, it is a beginning. Conference of this degree symbolizes an expression of confidence in my ability to do independent research. It is not a farewell, but a welcoming ceremony to the club. Hopefully, a spectacular journey of discovery lies ahead. I pray that Allah may help me in that journey more than He has during my PhD, in particular, and in the rest of my life in general.
One last reflection in this post is that I did not feel "that moment" to be one of pride. It was more of a humbling one. In fact, my entire PhD experience has been a humbling one because it made me realize not how much I have learnt, but that there is a vast amount of things that I do not know.

Online component stores in Pakistan

EVSElectronics
DigiPak
The Engineering Projects
Robotics PK
Taraz Technologies
Art of circuits
ELab
Proveedor
Electrobotic shop
Robocave
Microsolution
ArduinoPak
IC Master
Barqi Lab

Open source cloud platforms

If you think that OpenStack is one of a kind, you need to update yourself. There are several open source players in this area. Please read this interesting article (not written by me) about open source cloud platforms. 

Latex -> PS -> PDF profile for TeXnicCenter 2.01 Beta

I love using TeXnicCenter for writing my conference papers. I am presently using v 2.01 Beta of it. Other software versions are:

dvips - 5.992
latex - 2.9.4535
ps2pdf wouldn't tell me which version it is

I created the PDF of a paper and not all fonts were embedded. I had to modify the default output profile. I've extracted the .tco file for the latex => PD => PDF profile that you can import to your install of TeXnicCenter.

Party?

I just saw this piece in Dawn. I don't see how one can celebrate when everything around us is falling apart. People are going hungry and shivering in cold nights. Streets are littered. Traffic is rowdy. Just because I have earned some money, or gotten pocket money, I have the right to party? Instead of a few moments of music, laughter and fun, which produces nothing concrete in the end except memories, wouldn't it be much more enriching and useful if we did something creative?

The rich will party for sure, because they don't have a problem. They've created their own Amreeka right here in Pakistan. This local Amreeka is better than the actual one, because this one comes with a "get out of jail free" card so they don't have to follow any rules. That's why you see them still living here with their dual and triple nationalities. They can buy anything here. I'm sorry about this blanket statement here, many rich people are responsible people, too, I'm sure. But this is the overall picture that you get in the society.

So, if you're planning on going to a concert or a not-so-underground-anymore farmhouse dance, drugs,  drinks and sex party ask yourself this question: Do you have a different choice? How about planting some trees in public places? How about talking to your neighborhood marketplace shop owners to coordinate on keeping the area clean and green? How about visiting your neighbor and asking how they're doing? How about sitting with your parents and asking how they are doing? How about collecting sweaters for schools children's uniforms who can't afford them? How about fixing some street lights? If you're so full of energy and you've got so many similar friends, how about taking some cartel-ing traders to task who are charging unreasonable prices for stuff?

Is there something worth your while in that list? If not, I'm sure I've missed quite a few good deeds that you can do and it will be fun in it's own way and much more rewarding. So, what will it be? The red pill or the blue pill? Choose wisely, for your choice will have ramifications not just on a few hours of your life, but on the lifetimes of our generations to come.

Ubuntu 12.04 server crash and recovery

Wow, my last blog entry was over an year ago. I've been real busy. Anyway, I had a server crash last Friday night and I had to work hard and careful (yea, right!) to recover it to a good state. I found a few useful resources on the web for this task, so I thought I'd blog about it so that the method is handy for my future use as well as for others. Let's look, first, at what the problem was.

The server is being used for course labs, assignments and exams. Students write, compile and run C++ code on this machine. The server had accumulated some updates and needed to restart to apply them. Friday night, we had a midterm exam where students worked live and interactively on the server to solve the exam questions. After the exam was over, we decided to shut the server down for a few minutes so that the exam end time could be policed and students wouldn't be able to continue working on the problems. After shutting the server down, I came back to my office and turned it back on. But the server halted during the bootup process. I had to recover the server to a working state. I had to do it without losing data. It would be nice if the user account information (passwords) would remain intact. So, those are the parameters of the job. Now let's see what went wrong and then at how I fixed it.

When the server rebooted, it stuck during the boot process complaining about something like "cifs_mount failed with exit code -101". I knew that there is a NAS that I am mounting over SMB through /etc/fstab, so that must've been the culprit. But how do I remove that line from /etc/fstab when the server wouldn't boot up. After googling, I determined that one get the system to drop me at a root shell prompt by editing the kernel arguments at the GRUB boot prompt. So, I hit 'e' to edit the kernel parameters and typed "init=/bin/bash" at the end of the kernel line. The machine started and dropped to the root shell. But when I tried to edit the /etc/fstab file, it was read-only. Of course, the hard drive hadn't been mounted in read-write mode, yet. Some more googling revealed that I should do a "mount -o remount,rw /". Having done that, I was able to get the line that mounts the NFS commented out of /etc/fstab. Reboot, but still, the boot didn't complete and the server was stuck at an error message which complained of pre-start process terminating with some error code. I did some more googling which led me to a bug report about upstart in a past versioin of ubuntu. But apparently, that bug didn't apply to the version I am using (12.04).

So, it seemed that recovering without a reinstall was out of the question. To get data backup, I booted with a Ubuntu desktop live CD. But how do I mount the server's hard drive. For that, I followed the steps on this page. Then, I connected my NAS on a USB port and did the following:

sudo mkdir /mnt/lg
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/lg

Then, I copied all user folders to the NAS:

cd /home
tar /mnt/lg/homes.tar.gz *

Having done that, I also backed up all contents of the /var/log and /var/www folder onto the NAS. To get backup of the user accounts, I followed the steps outline on this page. Note that you'd have to intersperse sudo with most commands on that page. Also, where the page talks about piping one command's output to another, I had to use a sudo at the beginning of the command as well as somewhere in between. I guess we can do a hit and trial next time, too, until we stop getting a permission denied.

Finally, I unmounted the NAS

sudo umount /mnt/lg

and rebooted the server with the 12.04 server install CD in the drive. I re-installed the server and selected to use the existing LVM partition on the hard drive without formatting it, so all data was safe anyway. I decided to turn off automatic udpates this time. Then, after the server booted up successfully, I connected my NAS and mounted it. Then, I followed the restore instructions at this page.

That's it! The server was back online, with all passwords same as before and no data loss. Of course, I had to install g++ and ncurses again. Plus, I made a few mess ups in between so I had to follow the same steps as above one more time almost from scratch. Also, when the server crashed and I had the path traced out, it was 11:30 pm before I could do anything useful and I had a class early morning for which I hadn't even started preparing, so I left for home and only started working on the server recovery at about 2 pm next day. So, the server was offline for about a full day.

New province

You might have heard the complaints of how the southern Punjab is far from the Takht-e-Lahore and hence the former must be made a separate province. This is a very bad and dangerous reasoning for doing something that might be legitimately necessary. Unfortunately, it is being used as the prime reason to do so.
Can't you take this same argument and apply it in the context of the Balochistan province, for instance, being far from Takht-e-Islamabad. Hence, I presume that the federal government should feel that just as Southern Punjab should be separated from Takht-e-Lahore, Balochistan should also be separated from .....
A very dangerous precedent is being set here.

TeXnicCenter and Adobe Reader 10

I have recently installed the free TeXnicCenter IDE for working with LaTeX documents. It is a nice frontend. However, getting it to produce PDFs and preview them in Adobe Reader 10 wasn't a breeze. I easily found help on how to configure it to produce PDF documents on some forums (google around, if you're stuck at that stage). But the preview was broken. I would get failure when the DDE command was run. Adobe Reader would open but sit at it's main splash screen.
I opened Adobe Reader's preferences (ctrl+K) and set the "Show splash screen" (not sure if that one helped), and unchecked "Enable protected mode on startup" on the "General" tab. That solved the problem.

A very good resource

A very good resource for interesting problems and their efficient solutions.

Air quality

Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO) has this Air Quality Monitoring program. I've been seeing a truck parked between the girls hostels and faculty apartments at LUMS for several days. A couple of days ago, it moved to a different place on campus, between REDC and the physical plant.
The quality being monitored is neither "space" nor "upper atmosphere." I wonder how they can justify the millions spent on that truck. Maybe they have more of those. I'm glad they're doing it, but I wonder if it will result in some positive impact. It makes no sense, however. I'd be happier if the EPA or some such agency were doing this work, and SUPARCO were concentrating on what their real job is.

German muslims

I agree with the German premier on this. What she and most others don't know is that according to Islamic sharia, obeying the law of the land is part of one's faith. And unfortunately, most muslims don't appreciate this either.
So, muslims in Germany should follow the law of the land. If they find it in contradiction with Islam, then they can either legally influence rationalization of the laws or migrate somewhere else.

Accountability

The whole point behind accountability or any law for that matter is to maintain a balance in society. That is the whole point that our premier forgets when he wants us to leave Mush to himself. That is the point that he forgot when he let him go. They had other stabilizations in mind. Society can go to hell.

Sure, try all the past culprits. By all means. And not just the corrupt, the killers, too. But here's one example that we could have set. Here's one example that would've set the stage for accountability in days to come. Here's one example that would've deterred the worst of plunderers, and yet, we should leave him to himself. To borrow from "Scent of a Woman"

What a shame! What kind of a show are you guys puttin' on here today....

Addendum

I wanted to post one more photograph from the Namal trip mentioned in my earlier post. This is relevant because Mr. Umar Suleman (extreme left) was not visible in any of the photographs I had uploaded earlier on. The reason was obvious. He had taken all of the photographs that I had uploaded in the said post, himself.

Reality or perception

I was thinking last night. What is reality? Whatever is "really" happening anywhere in the universe has only one reality, right? And yet, different people will perceive the same situation differently. They will debate over it and give convincing arguments about it. Are they all correct? Are their multiple realities? It can't be, unless their are simultaneous overlapping, yet parallel universes, each with it's own reality.

ARGGGGHHHH, I'm confusing you, right? Let's take an example. Two cars collide on a Pakistani street, something really common. One incident, one reality. The two drivers will disagree and present their own version of reality. But there is only one "true" reality. One side note: both drivers could be arguing for a false version of the reality.

Why does this happen? Bias! All of us have our biases, no matter how neutral we may claim to be. Our biases make us perceive reality differently. Enough philosophy. Let's leave it at that.

Mobile Internet and the trouble with filtering

You might recall some recent attempts at Internet filtering in Pakistan. You might also have heard that some users reported were still able to access the blocked websites even though PTA had ordered ISPs to modify their access control to restrict access to these sites. You might also recall the complaints that Blackberry users made about Blackberry browsing not available at all. Why did that happen?

Well, Blackberry devices use what is known as Blackberry Internet Services (BIS). The device does not fetch the Internet resources using the service provider's network (such as Telenor or Mobilink). It sends the request to RIM's (the company that designs and makes Blackberry devices) servers. These servers fetch the resources for the device, does any preprocessing that may be required and compresses the response before sending it back to the device. Everything travels on the Internet, sure, but you can't do anything about it, because the requests are not destined to any "blocked" website. All you can do is block all access to RIM's servers, resulting in a complete blackout of Blackberry Internet access.

A similar approach is taken by the Opera Mini web browser, which is resident on most cellular phones. The Opera Mini web browser sends web requests to Opera's servers, which fetch the resources, preprocesses and compresses the resources before sending them down to the cellular phone. Again, can't do much about filtering such web requests, unless you block access to Opera's servers altogether, which would mean total blackout for Opera Mini's users.

Saving simulation results

Recently (now that's a big lie, but, oh, well...) I've been running long running simulations on a remote machine. I used to connect to it using an SSH client. The trouble was, that due to intermittent faults in our Internet connectivity, the SSH session often gets disconnected. When it does, the simulator process is history. I couldn't see what output it produced to the console, because there isn't any console anymore, and the process itself is killed due to the sad demise of its parent.

So, one solution suggested to me by my advisor was to prepend the simulator invocation command by "nohup" and append an "&" to it. That will ensure that the simulator keeps running even if the SSH session dies. I put in statements to write simulator results to a file. Now I can periodically poll the simulator using a "ps aux | grep" command and when I see that the simulator is no longer working, I can access the results in the results file.

A neater solution was suggested to me by my collaborating researcher in the US yesterday. He advised me to start a VNC server on the remote machine using the command "vnc4server :x" (where x is an integer) and then use a VNC client to access an xWindow session on the remote server. You just need to point your VNC client to "remotemachine:x" (where remotemachine is either your remote machine's IP address or DNS name, and x is the same integer used in the vnc4server command). This is much neater.

But the story doesn't end there. I had an interesting problem. My VNC client keeps telling me that "no password configured for vnc auth." I kept scratching my head and noticed that there is nothing in "$HOME/.vnc/passwd." At that point, I sought help from my collaborator who told me that we're running out of disk space on the remote machine. I deleted several debug files from my home folder and that fixed the problem. Now that was hard to figure out. No error messages and nothing to suggest that it could be a disk space issue.

Enthusiasm

During my recent trip to Namal College, I learnt quite a few things that I've been wanting to blog about. Some of them, I've already covered, and others I will cover in this and some future blog posts.




This post is about the excitement and enthusiasm that I saw at Namal College. The student's excitement is quite obvious. Some of them probably couldn't have continued their education, had it not been for Namal College. You see, Namal College waives all or part of the students' fees on a need basis, and focuses on remote areas where education is really lacking. Namal itself is in such a locality, making it accessible to a large section of the higher education deprived community. But I'm drifting from the point, here.
Like I said, the students are really excited. One of them was telling us that when he first came to Namal College, the other batches were on vacations and their was not much activity on campus. After his first visit, when he went home, he complained to his parents that they had sent him to a place where he feels really lonely. But when he returned from that visit, the older batches had returned. The activity on campus excited him and he no longer wants to go back home. Many undergrads at other institutions also share this sort of feelings, but I found that the level of excitement at Namal College was quite high.
But that's not all. It's not just the students at Namal College who are excited about it. The feeling is shared across the board all the through the staff, the faculty and the Board members. The senior most faculty were telling me that due to malfunction in the water supply system, the previous day they had carried buckets full of water to the dorms, and washed them with wipers themselves. I can relate to that kind of enthusiasm, because I had my first job at the Department of Computer Systems Engineering, N.E.D. University of Engineering and Technology, right after it was formed. Nothing was on the ground, just like Namal College. No processes were defined. We felt no separation between ourselves and clerical and janitorial staff members. We worked shoulder to shoulder with them, never shying away from laborious work nowhere in a faculty member's job responsibilities. Now Namal's situation is amplified over ours. They have higher bars to jump over, simply because we were in Karachi, they are at Namal and because we were part of a larger university, and their university is only as big as they are. Everyone there is ten times as enthusiastic as me and my colleagues were at the Computer Systems Engineering Department at N.E.D. You should go and see them. You'd feel the urge to share the hard work with them.

In addition to being incredibly excited, the students at Namal College are really intelligent. They area also not shy and come forward with their questions to you and you wouldn't be able to leave them without a satisfactory answer. Some people would be surprised to see that kind of openness and sharp intellect in students coming from such remote areas where primary education is, supposedly, really lacking. But, the reason Namal was envisioned was the abundant presence of such brilliant minds in the remote areas and the relative shortage of higher education facilities for them.
Namal College has progressed very rapidly. I wish them plenty of success in the future and pray that they realize their dreams.

Van powered by CNG

On yesterday's trip, we traveled on a rented chauffeur driven, Nissan Caravan. I didn't get the make year, but here's the interesting thing. The 9-seater van was running on CNG. That, with the airconditioner running full speed ahead. For a vehicle on CNG, it was running quite well. We could never have guessed its fuel source, until the driver stopped at a rest stop on the motorway and headed towards the CNG station. We thought such vans were almost invariably on diesel. I guess rising diesel prices have made the switch over to CNG cost effective. For a CNG-driven vehicle, it was running pretty nicely.

Speed breakers on Lahore Ring Road

I had earlier blogged about the dangerous U-turns on Lahore Ring Road. Yesterday, during the trip to Namal College, I noticed something else. This time, unlike my previous outings on the Ring Road (on my way to Sialkot), we did not get off the Ring Road near the Ravi bridge to head on to GT Road. Instead, we went on towards the Motorway. We were obviously travelling fast when all of a sudden the driver noticed a speed breaker. He braked hard and managed to avoid a dangerous take off. We noticed several speed breakers along the way on our return trip at night. Wouldn't these cause road safety issues? I know that otherwise pedestrians would be endangered, but they aren't using the overhead pedestrian walkways anyway, and not adhering to crossing the road near the speed breaker.

Meeting with a celebrity

I was teaching a class at N.E.D. University when I touched upon the matter of priorities and keeping things within the limits that they deserve. For instance, there could be a really great actor, you might really like him/her for the wonderful acting. But don't take it out of proportions and make a god out of it. Don't idolize him/her and start imagining that he/she is all good and no evil. More importantly, don't disrupt your own life over him/her. Studies, work etc all should have priority over that cricket match, or that movie.

A student of mine at that time asked me, "Sir, who's your hero?" My hero, I told him, are my students. Nothing pleases me more than seeing them go out in the field and making a name for themselves and making achievements. I stand by that thought to date.
However, there is one person who I really really regard highly. I met the great Khan himself in person yesterday. It's obviously not Genghis Khan, and definitely not your favorite lollywood Khan. I don't give a rat's ass about the latter. It was Imran Khan.

A few of my friends have been working with Namal College, an affiliate college of the Bradford University. There were several obvious ways in which we could help Namal College. The first, is by assisting some of their relatively less experienced faculty members with academic planning. The second, is that all of their faculty members are bound to enroll in a PhD program at Bradford University, we could help them gain from whatever experience we've had being graduate students. Thirdly, we can help Namal students capacity building by offering workshops, seminars and guest lectures. A group of my fellow PhD students at LUMS have been contributing towards at all of these efforts. I've also contributed a little bit. I think we are trying to do a little bit of our dutiful contribution to society.

Namal College faculty and administration have always shown a lot of gratitude to us for working with them. Recently, Namal College joined the Cisco Networking Academy program, and launched Bachelors degree programs in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Yesterday, they had the launching ceremony and we were
invited.



So, four of us set off from LUMS at 8:30 am. On the map, LUMS is the marker A and Namal College is the marker B. I haven't highlighted the route, but we took to the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway, M-2, exitted at Balkasar interchange and headed through Talaganag on to Namal. It took us about 6 hours and thirty minutes to get to Namal. Along the way, the inflight entertainment consisted of screening of the movie, "The Pink Panther" on Zeeshan's laptop.


Along the way, we ate at a restaurant, which is said to be famous for its daal. Rumour has it that whenever Imran Khan travels on that route, he eats at this restaurant. Well, he was obviously not there when we arrived because he'd be busy with meetings at Namal College at that time.

Well, we had our daal and ate it, too. In this photo, you can see me and Junaid on the right handside and Zeeshan flanked by the driver (the latter enjoying a smoke). This, by the way, is several "garaibees" after our arrival.

The daal itself was tasty and the desi ghee tarka on top was amazing. Towards the end of the meal I discovered that the achaar served along with the daal went really well with the daal.

After doing justice to the daal, we went on to add our fellow PhD student, Malik Jahan to the caravan. Malik lives in the area. We stopped at a Masjid and prayed zuhr. It's fun having to pray only two rakat when traveling.

After the prayers we went straight to Namal College. When we arrived, we were greeted very warmly by the Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Director Administration, Faculty members and Namal College board members Dr. Arif Nazir Butt, Mr. Abdur Razzaq Dawood and Aleema Khan (Imran Khan's sister). While we were having chit chat with the Deputy Vice Chancellor, talking about our trip, the great Khan emerged out of the conference room. It is hard to describe his charisma and how one feels humbled in his presence. For a moment, I couldn't decide if it would be fitting for a mere mortal like myself to say Assalamo alaikum to him, but I did. Dr. Arif Nazir Butt introduced us to Imran by telling him that we were the LUMS students who have been working with Namal voluntarily. Imran immediately smiled and shook our hands, said Assalamo alaikum and asked us how we were. I had been imagining how shaking his hand would be. I had been thinking if I'd say to him, "A great fan." But I think that is meaningless. He doesn't need to know that. It's already understood. What did that handshake feel like? Was that a soft hand or a tough hand? Funny thing is, I can't remember it at all. The awe was all too much.

After that, he went on to do a press briefing before we all went to the canopy where the launching ceremony was to be held. There was a lovely breeze which sometimes managed to squeeze its way into the canopy. It was a bit warm in there and I was sweating slightly, but it's funny how I never noticed that until later. I guess I was still too awestruck.

After recitation from the Holy Quran, Dr. Irfan Awan, Vice Chancellor, Namal College delivered an introductory speech. He told the audience that Bradford University had other affiliate colleges, but Namal College was the first affiliate college established at an under-developed location. He talked about how this presented a unique opportunity to deliver education and transform the lives of people of rural areas. He mentioned that being an affiliate college meant that the college's operation as well as student assessment and performance was monitored strictly by Bradford University. He gave credit to the students for having stood out in this scrutiny by mentioning that Bradford staff had found Namal students to be at least at par with Bradford students and in some cases, even better.

Dr. Lucas, Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bradford University was the next speaker. He spoke instead of the Bradford's Vice Chancellor, apologizing on his behalf for not being able to attend the ceremony himself. Dr. Lucas echoed Dr. Irfan's praise of Namal College and it's students' performance. He said he wished if Bradford were at as picturesque a location as Namal College is. As you can see in this photograph, he wasn't exaggerating. The Namal Lake is right next to the Namal College.

Dr. Aamir Mateen, Country Manager, Cisco Systems praised the Namal College for its vision. He said that while his company had been a bit late to join the effort, he would do everything in his powers to help Namal College realize its vision. He promised to convince other major IT companies to enter into similar partnerships with Namal College. He also promised to assist Namal College students with internships at Cisco and other IT companies where he had personal or professional leverage. He also promised to help Namal College by sending Cisco employees to deliver guest lectures every once in a while, an offer he claimed that he had not made to any other Cisco Networking Academy in Pakistan.

As the Master of Ceremony put, next was the man himself. Imran Khan started by thanking Cisco for entering into a partnership with Namal College. He thanked Dr. Amir for taking personal interest in Namal College and for the promises he had made to help it. He described the vision of Namal College and thanked the Board members individually by name. He also thanked Dr. Arif Nazir Butt for all his efforts for Namal College. Can you guess whom he thanked next? He thanked us, the LUMS students who have been helping Namal College voluntarily. He wondered where we were in the audience and asked us to raise our hands. We complied to a big round of applause. Imran went on to thank the local people who had helped his vision by offering the land on which Namal College was built. He spoke of the plans for the college's future and how it was destined to nurture the future leadership of Pakistan.

After Imran's speech, the audience were requested to proceed to tea. Well, it was more than just tea, it was a quite proper lunch, if you ask me. I'm sure many delegates would have traveled to Namal College that day and it must've been a welcome sight for them. As for us, we'd already had lunch. After tea, Imran Khan talked a bit more to the media and was then surrounded by the students. He walked around with them and talked to them.

Meanwhile, we took a few photos. The first one shows the radio link tower put up very quickly by PTCL to get enhanced Internet bandwidth to Namal College, which will be quite useful for the Cisco Networking Academy program. The next photograph shows the main entrace to the College building. Imran Khan is standing in front talking to some students. The next picture shows us with Dr. Arif Nazir Butt (wearing the jacket) and Mr. Abid, who is a very hard working part of Namal College, Imran Khan Foundation and Shaukat Khanum Hospital. The last picture, of course, is us, with the Namal Lake in the background.

At 5:30 pm, we set off on our return to Lahore. We prayed asr at the same mosque where we had prayed zuhr. We, then said good bye to Malik Jahan who returned to his house nearby. After various stop overs for CNG, saying maghrib prayers and another stopover for a cup of tea, we arrived back at LUMS at about 11:45 pm.

We decided that it was too late to go home and wake someone up for dinner, so we decided to dine out. We went to the Red Apple restaurant at DHA, Lahore and had dinner together while watching news on the restaurant's TV. We then said good bye and went our separate ways home.

Boy it was quite a day. A day when I met a celebrity and shook hands with a hero who wasn't my student. Going isn't particularly easy for us Pakistanis to make achievements. However, when a Pakistani makes up his mind to do great things and works hard against all odds and is successful, I believe he/she should be appreciated. Especially if the success touches other people's lives and makes them somewhat easier to live.

I ask myself, will I see him again?