Road to Prosperity - Presentation and White Paper

Around 2 years back, I wrote this lengthy blog, detailing how we can put our country on road to prosperity. The blog was more like a brain dump, and might be interesting if you want to understand the thought process. Since then, I've refined the ideas, put them together in the form of a white paper, and made a presentation on it. Moreover, I've tailored the numbers for PTI's provincial govt, but the vision is generic in nature and can be adapted by different regional and national level governments.

I am sharing both documents at the following locations. Kindly take a look and leave your feedback on the Google docs or in the comments section below. Will be much appreciated.

Road to Prosperity - Presentation
Road to Prosperity - White Paper

Recommendations for Higher Education Policy in KPK

PTI has kicked off skill development program and knowledge city projects in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa per its manifesto. However, IMHO, these approaches will not provide a long term solution for the dire lack of skilled workforce in the province. The reasons being that:

- While gaining some technical skill is important to make a living, it is not enough to compete with the world, and its important to acquire deeper knowledge - and likewise, build a stronger knowledge base. 

- Building Knowledge City (KC) is a good initiative, but the limitation will be that the people of far flung areas will find it prohibitively expensive to afford the boarding and lodging costs - in addition to the tuition fees for KC universities. 

Also, we cannot wait for primary and secondary education problems to be solved before starting work on higher education. We need to work in parallel on higher education, have a long-term plan in place, and start executing on it.

We need a wholistic, comprehensive, long term policy for taking higher education forward - and help us reach where we want to be in a reasonable time frame. And, I was unable to find one on KPK Govt official pages, on Higher Education Department Pages and on PTI website (insaf.pk).

In order to fill in this gap, I've put together a draft of recommendations for taking higher education forward. Feel free to comment on it and let us know what can be done better. Here is the link for the document:  

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UKLAK96gv-ac3nmp6ZV739zwjXeM2rcbN4FQn_g33GE/edit

The Crazy Adventure of Olympic National Park – Part 2 of 2

Alright – I am back!

In the break, I became dad of a lovely, cuuuutuu cuuutuu, smiley smiley baby, then there was Ramadan and then I had to do some research on distributed file systems (yeah, I did that in BART) – but finally, I am back to blogging :)

So – when the car was stuck in snow, I just stopped the car and looked at my wifey. She looked cute when she was worried and afraid – I kinda enjoyed that ;)

After thinking about the situation for a moment, I knew what needed to be done: Reverse at 45 degree angle. The rear side of front tires seemed to be in less snow and I had a gut feeling that reversing at angle will not fail. So I tried it. The car started budging! I was like – wowww – nice!! To be fair, wifey’s prayers probably played some role in this too.

So we took the narrow U turn, sent a flying goodbye kiss to Hurricane Ridge and started descending.  The snow was as heavy as ever and I knew that the way back wont be as easy. I used to enjoy driving in snow in Redmond – but here, the skids were dangerous: there was mountain on left side of road and cliff on right side. An uncontrolled skid could be bad for our health. And unfortunately, descent is much harder than ascent in snowy conditions.

As a precaution, I was driving in the middle of the road instead of driving in lane. The car kept on skidding on the way back – but I had mastered the driving in snow – or so I thought: There was one skid where the car just wouldn’t stop. The ABS was trying hard and I had the tires angled – then straightened and then fully angled again – pumped the brakes despite ABS but it just kept on sliding towards the cliffy side. Thankfully enough, it stopped just in time. Phew!

The remaining way back was slow and cautious. “No more adventures for the day” was the motto and we reached hotel safely in Port Angeles. We were fearing for the worst for the rest of the trip – whether we will be able to see anything at all or not. I thought “better luck next time” and slept – rather, tried fruitlessly to sleep.

The next two days brought the biggest surprise: The remaining trip was really beautiful, pleasant and smooth. We saw the lovely Lake Cresent, Ruby beach, hot springs at Sol Duc, Lake Quinault. Lake Crescent was probably the loveliest part of the trip – with majestic voice of Rahat FatehAli Khan playing in background, mystic peaks including Mount Storm King surrounding the lake and road right at the perimeter of the waters – it was probably one of the best memories of our life.

After a few months – I became daddy of Rayyan who happened to visit ONP at the age of -3 months. Life is good!

The Crazy Adventure of Olympic National Park – Part 1 of 2.

These days, har kaam puthha ho raha hai – so I guess this blog will be no different. I’ll start with the lessons learned during the trip first – and then maybe then will write about the trip itself. 

Here they are:

1. Always plan crazy trips – they are memories of lifetime (if you come out in one piece, that is)

2. Always choose a borderline bad time of the year. There is really no fun if everything is sunny :)

3. Hurricane Ridge sucks big time. You will find out later :p

4. Dew na kia to phir kia jia.

It so happened that I was thinking about switching jobs, but wasn’t really sure if I would eventually switch or not. But there was one thingy I was sure about – that we got to see Olympic National Park before we quit being its neighbors. The only small caveat was that my wifey was ding-ding at that time.

But – she wanted to go more than I did – so the plan was final in no time. It was April this year and we were hoping that we would get nice enough weather. Luckily, we were able to see a couple of days of clear forecast and off we went!

We decided to see Hurricane Ridge (HR) first. It has the reputation of being the most majestic place in the park. So we packed our stuff and started our trip. In accordance with the forecast, the day was bright and sunny and we took a ferry towards HR.

After getting off the ferry, we took the highway towards the area, and on then took the branching road towards Hurriane Ridge. On the way, there were beautiful views of the lakes and as our car climbed the altitude, we could see valleys down. We stopped the car at a nice point and took some pics – will share them when I get over my laziness next time ;)

After that, we continued our journey towards the ridge. On the way, suddenly, the weather appeared to change and there was a stormy shower. I told my wifey not to worry about it, as rains come and go in these areas – I like to play Mr. Cool.

We continued proceeding further. The rain stopped and the life seemed to be lovely again – but little did we knew what lied ahead.

After a few more minutes, I noticed that snow has started .. What? Snow? In April? Man! – why did I forget that our altitude was constantly rising. The snow did not “start” – we drove into snow! I tried to brush aside the snow again by saying that it will go away soon. I asked my wifey how much distance is left. She said “thora sa” (means, little bit). Hmm – 10 more minutes perhaps. We kept moving forward.

 The snow did get a bit lighter – only to get ever more thick again. But we were determined to reach Hurricane Ridge. The car kept on climbing – and the snow kept on coming down. I increased the heater level in car to keep us warm.

“How much distance is left?”

“Thora sa”

Kept on moving ahead – now there were hardly any other vehicles to be seen. There were a couple of tire tracks visible on the road – giving me some hope that someone else was at least as crazy as me too. OK – maybe lesser, but still crazy enough.

On the side of the road, I saw a couple of snow-plough vehicles. But they were just standing still collecting snow. Didn’t they know its easiest to remove snow when it is fresh? Looks like they were in no mood to move at all. We kept on moving forward.

“Now, how much distance is left?”

“Thora sa”

The road was completely covered with snow – and the car had started skidding a bit. Thanks to ABS, things were not too bad though. Personally, I love to drive in snow with skiddy conditions – I had done plenty of adventure with my Yaris in the last few winters, and my Yaris did not have ABS. But those were Redmond streets, and this was ONP wilderness. There the road would be visible at least – here there was complete snow. My wifey was ding-ding, and on top of that, we were constantly ascending.

But we really wanted to reach Hurricane Ridge.

10 more minutes passed ..

“How much?”

“Thora sa”

This time, I decided to take the phone from her and look at the map myself. I stopped the car and looked at the map closely. What!?! We were only a little more than half-way into the hurricane ridge road? There was at least 30-40 minutes of more dive left! And on top of that, the map said that the last mile or so was not really a carpeted road. I asked my wifey what she was looking at? The ridge seemed to be much farther than she thought it was.

The snow was coming down and we felt that even if we reached there, we wont see anything because of heavy overcast conditions – and there appeared to be no chance that the conditions will get any better. Sense prevailed and we decided to back.

I tried to move the car into U turn, but – the car seemed to be stuck in its place. The tires were kinda just spinning in place. I tried again, but same result! Oops! My wifey stopped the songs in car and started praying. Why do we always remember God in bad times?

I tried to joke with her when she stopped the songs, but the gravity of situation was becoming clear to me: We were in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone signals, in the middle of a storm, my wifey needing something to eat every couple of hours and the car not budging at all!  (to be continued …)