About

About S A J Shirazi

S A J Shirazi is a Lahore based writer. His writing on diverse subjects appear in Dawn, the News, Nation, Spider, BootsnAll and other A list publications. Shirazi holds an MPA (University of the Punjab) and Linguistics (Russian Language from National University of Modern Languages) degrees and is working at one of the leading universities. He has authored two books (Izhar, Ret Pe Tehreer) and translated Din Mein Charagh by Abbas Khan into Light Within.

Okay, now that we've gotten that referring-to-myself-in-the-third-person part out of the way, here's the more human, less quantifiable description. I am trying to make sense of blogging and other, still new, forms of social media [Facebook, Twitter and more]. I'm always looking for friends. You can always contact me at sajshirazi@gmail.com. I also blog at Doodh Patti and Logic is Variable. 

Updates: No, I am not trying to change the world. I am only changing myself!


About Doodh Patti

Traveling whirls you around, turns you upside down and stands everything you took for granted on its head. We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.” Doodh Patti is about this philosophy.

I also get quires, mostly from my foreign friends, about what is Doodh Patti. The term Doodh Patti (doodh walli chai) is very well know all around in this part of the world we call home and even among those who have travelled as a backpacker to Pakistan, maybe it is new for some.

Here is my explanation, “Tea is taken in Pakistan more than any other drink. You get a cup of tea made by boiling teal  leafs (patti) in water and mixing with lots of milk (doodh) and sugar anywhere. Those who prefer more milk  ask to boil tea leafs in milk instead of water and call it doodhpatti.”

This is my cup of tea. How you make yours? Read more About Me or ask.


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