Landlords built Lahore in a haphazard way over centuries. They didn’t concern themselves with city grids or sensible mapping. As a result, Lahore is renowned in Pakistan for being almost impossible to navigate. And that’s where Asim Fayaz and Khurram Siddiqi come in. Fayaz and Siddiqi won a $10,000 grant from TED, the U.S.-based foundation […]
TED, in addition to their genre-defining conferences, also awards the TED Prize each year to a game changing idea. It is usually awarded to individuals, like Bill Clinton and Bono, but in 2012, TED decided to award it to “an idea for continued flourishing: The City2.0, an exploration of the intersection of ingenuity and urbanity”. Omer […]
SMS-all, previously known as Chopaal, happens to be the pioneer in text based group messaging service in Pakistan. Idrees Butt, company COO tells me that SMS-all now houses over 400,000 established communities, with 1.5 million registered users, 2.5 million users through corporate clients and has exchanged whopping 4 billion text messages on its network till […]
In the BS program at LUMS, you declare your major at the end of the freshman year. I was invited by Hasnain Lakhani, class of 2013, to speak with the class of 2014 to encourage them to opt for Computer Science (CS). I had also majored in CS. I remember lots of jaws dropped on […]
TEDxLahore provided the perfect platform to celebrate and honour the work of Pakistanis who may not have always been in the spotlight. This week, the city of Lahore got under my skin. It wasn’t just the idiosyncrasies and beauty of the city that crept into my resolutely Karachi-heart, but the people that I was able […]
On July 31st, 2010, over 450 people from all over Pakistan congregated at Ali Auditorium for TEDxLahore, Pakistan’s largest TEDx event. In only its second year, TEDxLahore, has arguably become Pakistan’s largest forum to share ideas that can help change for the better. TEDxLahore 2010, operated under license from TED, was filmed live at Ali […]
A TEDx organizer says goodbye to apathy and reactive behaviour as she discovers heroes all around her. The upcoming event inspires her to believe that the ‘truth is out there.’ Organizing an event like TEDxLAHORE is no easy feat. Imagine pulling a ship over a mountain with nothing but your inexhaustible belief that you will do this […]
For my senior project (aka ‘Sproj’) at LUMS, I chose to work on scaling chOpaal‘s message processing backend. We didn’t have the time, knowledge, or guidance, to move from a polling architecture to an event-driven architecture. Instead, we experimented with various caching methods, and finally implemented memcached. Here are the slides from the final presentation: […]
The rapid rise of online social communities in Pakistan, such as Orkut and Facebook, have revamped the concept of pen pal’s to fit the modern 21st century. They have created a new paradigm for personal networking and given valuations in hundreds of millions of dollars to these networks. However, the ‘connection’ provided by these international […]
I was invited to speak at TEDxKinnaird, the first university-style TEDx event held at Kinnaird College in February 2010, themed Believe in Tomorrow. There’s no video, but here are the slides and transcript of my talk that should have been titled “19, free and ambitious”. About 2500 years ago, Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, said something […]