End-ing

Lubaina gave up and I gave in, and so I lay this place into an internet-ey grave.

But, more on that later.

Friends and not-friends, we've come a long way and there are a lot of places we can look at last year from.

\We're a fifth of the way through.

\\We're past first year.

\\\We're no longer the junior batch so we can rag people now. Yayy!!!

I prefer to think of it as a learning experience, much like this little venture.

See, we know we learned something when the way we used to see the world no longer holds true. That happens almost everyday when you're a med-school student, especially a mediocre one who believes that the next PBL would actually have more than 2 hours of preparation behind it but then you learn that you can barely put a single hour there despite the gallon of coffee burning your nerves off and boom! New worldview.

I still remember how the prof prep went. I thought I could get some sleep the day before the actual test but my night was haunted by flashes from the entire year.

I remembered the days of the great decline, the era of the lakeside and the rise and fall of Age of Empires. There was the devolution from diurnal-ity and the many hours wasted battling bureaucracy. There was happiness, there was sorrow and there was so much loss.

Because, Sami left, you know. That was pretty damn sad.

But, anyways, I remember how the prep went. I spent two weeks going through all the books and all the notes (not mine) I could get my hands on and then I learned that the prof had 75% of its questions repeated. If I had just done my totes I could have done so much better. So, I go and exclusively learn totes for the next paper and I do pretty good on it.

I learned so much that day, mainly that I was barking up the wrong tree for the whole year.

The days after were laced with disillusionment. What's the point of learning anyways if marks come from another source entirely?

But, learning is not just something academical.

I learned many things that do not mean a lot to most people, but made a world of difference to me.

Life takes a lot of energy to live effectively. What that means is that if you plan to go to the gym and study for your next PBL and do your laundry and clean your room on the same day; you're fricking high. All that you're actually gonna accomplish is that you'll toss clothes off of your bed, on to your floor, go to sleep and then cram the entire PBL in 30 minutes and almost get a U.

In short, you can never do everything you plan to do.

I came here with a lot of plans, even hatched a few when I came here. I was only able to accomplish, like, a third of them. Couldn't even do them that well.

Which brings me back to the start. Why didn't this idea work?

\I could think of some reasons from the top of my head (No-one really cared about this).

\\I could go around and ask people and get some more (People were so busy the entire year and it was forgotten fairly early on).

\\\Then I could ruminate over it and get another few right there (We never put a lot of fervor into this project anyways; assuming that submissions would come by eventually was probably not the best way to do this and the idea was fundamentally flawed) so there's really no point answering that question.

But I thought it would and it didn't. That's a learning experience right there.

Just like the time Lubaina said that the only people who would post here are me and herself, so iss puri cheez ko miss karao.

Well, okay. Fine. Kara detay hain miss. It's not like I was sitting on a windfall of things to write anyways. And, it makes perfect sense

I'm looking at the post I started this with and the enthusiasm is somewhat sickening and full of naivete. I assumed to high heck but all we have to show for our sense of batch-hood is an overflow of absolute crap (aku cunfeshunz pls).

I couldn't rest without giving this place a proper burial and so here we are. I guess we don't need a publication to keep these years alive in the distant future. Facebook selfie-albums and statuses and all the posts here and on whatsapp and wherever will have to suffice.

Sigh.

A happy new year to all of you and may you never run out of the will to do stuff because god forbid we end up with more failed endeavors.

Start-ing

So, I was sitting in a lecture hall the other day with around 20 or so other wonderful friends of ours. I was just watching you guys, you understand; seeing who’s doing what, thinking about the things you might be thinking about, and then it came to me. Wouldn't it be simply amazing, I thought, if I could freeze this moment in my imagination, render it as full of life as I could and spit it back out on a keyboard so you could see it and say, Damn. This is what we were doing and that is what we were thinking about? Well, it would be amazing. Amazingly amazing. But sadly, I am only one pair of eyes, one pair of hands and one single mind. I can only do so much. Then sometime later on while I was sitting with a lot fewer friends eating stuff, it came to me. Again. I wasted no time in telling the closest person around me about it (who happened to be a super avid blogger - thank god for that) and whelp, here we are. I mean, a hundred people, chipping away at the same old books in the same old place at the same old time? You are bound to come up with thoughts and experiences that are just too good to not preserve, too shiny and interesting to not collect and place somewhere where they could stay for all to see. Life at AKU can be boring as heck sometimes, though. You might not be brimming with inspiration all the time or even most of the time or for any length of time that you yourself might be aware of. But it’s still a part of life at AKU. Think back to the early HASS days when barely any of you were friends. There was one thing you all had in common though. One place, more like. The Quad. It was the heart and soul of your social lives. It was the place every one of us went to find each other. And when the Karachiites left (zealously wanting to come back for another exhausting 12 hour day, no doubt), us hostelites would sit there for long periods of time and do nothing. Hmm. It’s not exactly true, I suppose. I mean, you could say that the SRC is a much more heart and soul-ish place for us all. Or that you never really stayed long in the quad. Maybe you think that the library represents the spirit of AKU survival a lot more. Pheh.

It matters not!

Like a vast expanse of concrete covered space where everyone can see everyone and talk about what they want to talk about, this blog is a Quad. The Quad. The 18th Quad. Cuz we’re the 018’s, and if you don’t see the beauty behind that name you’re an awful person so I’m just going to stop explaining, thank you very much. …where was I? Ah. Shiny thoughts. So this is what the basic idea was. A. You are going to look around. Sounds simple enough, right? B. You are going to have a thought. What sort of thought, you might ask? A shiny one. Something you’d like all of us to see. C. You are going to write about it and you are going to post it. You will not be hesitant because it would be the saddest thing ever if we never got your insights. They could be life changing, ya know. D. We are going to read it and go all ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ at the amazing amazingness of whatever we’ve read. And at the end of the year, once we’re all sad and nostalgic and feeling old, ta-da! We’ll roll up all the posts the quad accumulated into a single publication and you can look back on the year with as much fondness as you want to because you would have the best of it right there in your hands. So, there you have it. This is what we’re trying to do, and hopefully Lubaina and I will go a long way with this. Make us proud.