Crumbling of mighty towers in my city

and our chance to live towering lives

Or, "What the WTC and Manhattan's skyline meant to me"

WTC & Skyline from "NARGIS" October 14, 2000

Dear friends of today and yesterday,

I do not know where to begin but I hope you will take a moment to share with me my feelings about the WTC tragedy. I will start not from when I visited America first in 1987 but from when I came to America in 1989 with scholarships to attend either Stanford or Columbia Business Schools.

Even then, I chose Columbia - to be in the global metropolis, NYC and Manhattan. And I fell in love with NY. Even when I left Manhattan, on finding my dream home in Long Island, I never left NY state, where I got to meet and get to know some of my new and most beloved friends and even mentors, Jews and Christians, many that I am fortunate to know and love to this day.

I could be what I wanted to be. I could do what I wanted to do. I could be with whom I wanted to be. It did not matter in NY. We could be Muslim or Christian, support or oppose Israel, we could support or oppose US policy, but we always loved each other as equal, special, unique people God blessed us to get to know.

My mother, who passed away unexpectedly in Pakistan aged 51 in 1992, had visited me in NY in 1989 for 2 months. Since I had been away from home since I was 6 years old, I never got the chance to spend time with her in Pakistan.

So, we spent the time in NY together just to make up for lost times. The ONLY place we made it a point to go together in NYC was the top of the World Trade Center because she, as much as my Father, gave me the freedom to be what I can be and want to be, to soar and dream of new heights. Nothing symbolized that to me more than the World Trade Center towers before I came to America, and even more when I moved here.

What makes America great is not its military might or tall structures. Instead, it is that with the right ability, the right attitude and the right effort, you can reach as high as you want to go, and in no place, including your own home country, can you do it faster than in America. The Towers symbolized that too. 59 seconds to get from the lobby to the top floor when my Mom and I went up top.... it was and remains my fastest elevator ride ever, much like how I look upon my life in general and in America in particular.

The place was beautiful. The views were stunning.

At that time, as a pilot wannabe, who has loved aviation since I was born, I loved showing my mother how incredible it was to be at the top of a building and have planes and choppers flying below us.

She never made it back to the US and a few years later I lost her forever - so the memories of that afternoon spent with her became even more indelible, more special. I went back to the WTC, many times in the following years, partly to show it to special friends, partly to recall the memories of where she and I had stood or sat and ate our sandwiches, or later watched the setting sun and the skyline, the people and the cabs on the streets, and even the planes, below us.

Any trips I took, while living in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, (or later living in Long Island), flying back to LaGuardia were always memorable. I always took window seats, as I have for all of my 33 years of flying, for the pleasures of such sights. No matter how comfortably I was sitting, I would figure from the route which side the NYC skyline was on, and on most flights I would move to an empty window seat on the side that would give me the best view. Despite dozens of landings and views like that, I cannot remember when I did not try to snap one more picture when we would fly abeam the WTC and the skyline.

Later I found the most perfect apartment in a high rise luxury building, next to a beautiful mosque, on the Upper East Side, which became my dear home. My memories there, including the spectacular views of the Manhattan skyline, are some of my most special memories. Even with 210 degree panorama views from my North-East-South facing apartment, (the building was almost circular on my side), I could see the Empire State but not the towers, without risking falling out the 21st floor apartment's windows wrap-around full size windows. So, I would sometimes go to the rooftop on clear nights to see if I could make out the World Trade Center from there.

Even when I moved to Long Island in 1995, to my dream home on the Great South Bay, and even took up boating, my love for that view and that skyline did not diminish, even though I delighted in not having to commute. More than once I made the trip by boat, from Patchogue to Manhattan, 6-8 hours each way, just to see the skyline and enjoy and share with other special people the joy it brought to my heart.

At other times, any guest from out of town, or from Pakistan, no matter how tired, was made to see it - even if it meant a detour. A friend from Chicago who visited and was picked up at JFK was once shown the view. He said, "Yeah, it's like Chicago." The only reason he was not thrown out of the car was that traffic was moving too fast for me to pull over. "I've been almost EVERYWHERE in this world. Nothing," I bellowed, "comes close." He got the point and actually later moved to NY.

Anyone whom I took into the city would find me driving them as an unofficial guide, from Times Square to the Intrepid, showing the beautiful SR-71 on its deck, then down the West Side Highway, until the WTC stood looming above us. Looming, but never threatening, or overbearing....much I liked to think of myself in the lives of those that I touched. The towers could be viewed through the windows or the moon-roof. Just in March this year my brother (an MD, technologist, and now also a senior Police Official in Pakistan (IDIOT)) and his assistant were here from Pakistan to work with the FBI on something as their guest.

When I took them on this drive, I stopped at the base of the WTC (my brother had been there before 10 years earlier while I was a student at Columbia Business School) and asked his friend and him to walk around and literally look up and see what it FELT like to see the simple, elegant, silent (that is where they differed from my talkative nature) strength of the twin towers from right below them. It took me 3 times going around nasty, heavy, construction-compounded traffic before I found and picked them back up on the other side - but it was worth it to me to know someone else was appreciating the towers as I did - and always would. Little did I know.

The towers were even more personally dear to me. If someone would joke about my super-sized ego, I would joke back and say that as a Gemini my ego was like the Twin Towers of the WTC. Seeing what happened to them, and how many innocent people lost their lives or loved ones, was as shattering to me, inside me, as if the planes (that I so love to fly AND see fly, often slowing down my car, if I see one taking off or landing close to an airport) had been driven into my heart as arrows, of misbegotten hate, ignorance, and evil.

When I learnt to fly, ( http://www.imran.com/flying/ ) it was not knowing that just around that time others had finished taking lessons to destroy what I loved so dearly. All in the name of the same religion that I love and that taught me love for mankind, knowledge and justice. I do not know how they learnt death and destruction, of innocent civilians from all over the world, from the same books I read for solace and comfort and believe in for guidance.

I always enjoyed flying over Long Island, over my house or the places I go boating, or flying to upstate NY or to Connecticut in the day, or on a starry night, or over Rhode Island and to Massachusetts and back. O, what a feeling to fly, and what a God Blessed beautiful land and country to live in. O, to Thank God for all the blessings we enjoy.

Each flight was beautiful, memorable - a miracle of how childhood dreams come true, even for an immigrant in this great nation. I flew over Montauk and later could not believe the beauty of the sights of Block Island and Shelter Island, (http://www.imran.com/boating/), which we have also so loved visiting by boat.

But, I knew that the only flight that would be more special and memorable than all of these would be to fly the "VFR Corridor" over the Hudson River, along Manhattan's skyline....at the same altitude and distance as my Mother and I had seen flying planes below us, so many years ago.

Alas, even if that VFR Corridor remains open, even I make a flight there some day, it will be just that....just another flight on just another day. For my city and my view has changed, and the dream, lost, forever.

Above is a picture I have had on my web site since my last trip there, last year, on a stunning day, October 14-15, 2000, which was as warm, and balmy as any day in August would be. During the day, and even in the pictures, I caught all of my hobbies and loves......photography, WTC, Manhattan, boating and flight (blimps in the air and an airliner in the distance)....all in one.

It was a perfect day, a great place, but as we saw at the Towers, not all great things can survive in the face of anger and conflict no matter what the intentions. This year, I had trips planned for next month, by boat with some friends, and then on a small plane, but I do not think I will want to see the skyline without the towers, MY towers, there.

God Bless the souls who were lost - and God give solace to the hearts whose losses are so much more painful than my crying for "my" childish losses above .

We never realize how tenuous our grip on life and how insignificant even our existence is. I feel, and remind myself, of that every dark, starry night that I stand at the beach, pointing out galaxy clusters and nebulae, trying to put their size into the context of our tiny dust speck of a planet on the sands of time and space.

The instant cessation of existence, of thousands in the WTC tragedy, shows how insignificant, we, as individuals, are within the scope of even this tiny planet, much less God's Universe, as life and the world go on just fine without us.

Not only can we live one day and die the next, as we saw from the planes hitting and later collapsing the twin towers, sometimes we can simply vanish.... ashes to ashes, dust to dust.... in the blink of an eye, before a heart or mind or soul can even formulate a wish...."I wish I had told someone this or that, or what they meant to me." Or even simply, "Thank You."

Poof. We are gone. Merely a memory in someone else's heart, a twinkle in somebody else's eye, even decades later, dependent on someone else remembering to say a prayer for us - for we are unable to say one for ourselves.

The mightiest structures can become an inferno in a flash, crumble in an instant. The only thing that can tower above it all, and remain standing, forever, besides true love, is how we treated our fellow human beings, how we touched other's lives and how they remember us while they live, after we are gone.

So, for your attention today as always, I thank you. For remembering me, in and out of your prayers, I thank you. For having been a part of my life in one form or another, as beloved friend or online acquaintance, as correspondent or business associate and mentor, I thank you.

Even if we have not spoken in a while, or will never ever see or hear from each other again, I thank you for however you touched my life. I trust I did the same, or hopefully better, for you. And, if I did not, I regret that and I ask you, and God, to forgive me. No reply or acknowledgement, nothing, is expected or required from you, in return. Feel free to share this message with others, which is quite simple, really.

All we can choose to do today and tomorrow is live, but differently from how we lived before. In our own special way, besides our beloved near and dear, I hope we can choose to touch others' lives, those we know, and especially those we are yet to meet...for the better, for as long as we are given the marvelous opportunity, of life.

Thank you God, for keeping us among the ones who still have that opportunity - and that choice.

Let us pray for peace and justice for everyone, everywhere, and a better world for all of us to live in as good citizens. Amen.


Imran
(below, at the WTC in 1989-90)

http://www.imran.com