Trains and Dragons

Snobby, yeah, but I still had to ask whether or not the railway station would have a phone. It seemed funny at the time. Later on it turned out they had a computer as well (which apparently "speeded up" the ticket-giving process by a factor of -5.3 (yeah, that's a minus)). How fascinating. As snobby as people can be, thanks to the "efficient" computer system, I was fortunate enough to witness a train going through the station minutes after a crackly, barely understandable announcement. The train went past at 1.07 pm. Me and my chowkidaar went up to the timetable and figured it to be the Quetta Express, and it was 2 minutes early! Wow. How efficient. Turned out the train that went past was the 12 noon one, and the one the announcement was for was nowhere in sight. Apparently the announcements/schedule and the trains themselves have no connection.

In other news, the dragon slayer doesn't complain about the size of the dragons. If the dragons weren't that big compared to him, he wouldn't be a dragon slayer. He'd be just another guy.

There's a new Roxette mix "The Rox Medley", which has all their songs choruses put into one remixed song. It's not that great, but I love it for some reason. I seriously wonder why some songs strike a chord in my mind even when they're not that good :/

Onto more concrete things, Musharraf's controversial book is easier to get a hold of than I thought. My sister ordered it from the Liberty Books website using her credit card and it arrived in one day (and she got a discount too!). As astoundingly efficient as that was for a Pakistani company, I got over the shock long enough to read a couple of pages. The prologue was quite fascinating and involved Musharraf evading Mango trees and assasination attempts to live on to be the destined ruler of Pakistan.

Don't get me wrong, I like the guy, he's a practical ruler. You can go blue in the face calling him arrogant and a dictator and what not, but in a less than perfect world, I think he's done a good enough job to keep us from being "bombed into the stone age". Sure he isn't perfect, but he's sure as hell better than the majority of rulers who have come before him, all things taken into account.

In other news, people need to write a HOWTO manual for understanding and writing Social-Sciences-English at LUMS. It's apparently different from the English that's used in everyday life.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.