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.
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.
