Carnival Miracle docked at San Juan, as seen from Castillo de San Cristóbal

Cobblestone street and architectural features, Old San Juan

'Eating Grass' by Brigadier Feroz Hassan Khan

On Sunday, February 10, over 150 people attended the promotion of “Eating Grass”,  a book written on the Pakistani nuclear program from an insider’s perspective by Brigadier (retired) Feroz Hassan Khan.  The event arranged by Sabahat Rafiq and Naveed Sherwani was held at Fremont Marriott.

Sabahat Rafiq gave an introduction of the book and the writer, briefly describing the five phases —according to the author—Pakistani nuclear program went through.

Feroz Hassan Khan said it took him more than a decade to write the book.  He said the idea of the book stemmed from a conversation he had with General Peverz Musharraf.  Khan asked Musharraf the most stressful of the five crises Musharraf went through during his tenure as the head of the army—the five crises being the Kargil war, the 1998 coup, 911, 2002 standoff with India, and the AQ Khan scandal.  Musharraf told Khan it was the AQ Khan ordeal.  Feroz Khan decided there was a need to give a comprehensive account of the development of the Pakistani nuclear program—an account that would go much beyond the caricaturized version of the events summarizing over 30 years of work as a scientist stealing nuclear secrets from the west and selling them to rogue states.

Feroz Khan said critics of his book accuse him of playing down the AQ Khan scandal.  He said his book does not go too much into the detail of the scandal as other books on that subject already exist.

Dr. Syed Rifaat Hussain, a professor of security studies from Pakistan, currently visiting the Stanford University was also invited to give his views on the book and the Pakistan’s nuclear program.

Listen to the audio of the program here: http://archive.org/details/EatingGrassByBrigadierretiredFerozHassanKhanPromotionProgramIn

An old fort, a cruise ship, and an airplane

Visiting Robotics Labs, Private Limited in Karachi, Pakistan

Visiting Robotics Labs, Private Limited in Karachi, Pakistan

Karachi is a city of contradictions.  And it is a big place.  At any given time in the day you may have people being ruthlessly killed in one corner and others working in a modern office environment in another part of the city; you may have a whole locality weltered in chaos and shut out to the rest of the city, and have other neighborhoods where life is going on as normal as it can.  It was a regular Karachi day when I visited Afaque Ahmed’s Robotics Labs—a regular Karachi day sees at least twelve murders.   To watch young boys write computer codes and make their robots move in prescribed ways, and concurrently think about a man getting strapped with a suicide bomb jacket, a few miles away, and target killings going on in other parts of the city, is an eerie feeling.  It is people like Afaque Ahmed who are holding their city together which if left to the shenanigans of bomb blasts and sectarian violence will quickly descend into complete mayhem.

Afaque Riaz Ahmed is an electrical engineering graduate from the University of Texas at Austin.  He is a serial entrepreneur who has founded a number of business ventures including Breezecom (http://www.breezecom.biz/) and the Robotics Labs Pvt. Ltd.( http://www.facebook.com/Robotics.labs?fref=ts)

Read an article by Farooq Baloch, on the Robotics Labs here:

http://tribune.com.pk/story/388829/robotics-lab-a-place-where-five-year-olds-develop-games/

This video was recorded on January 4, 2013

Downtown San Juan architectural features