Hello people,
I have this great friend Salman Mehmood. We first talked on 20th of January this year. I started this site on 6th of January. I was adding widgets and plugins to my forum and blog and came across a lot of plugin problems. I am a PHP beginner and it wasn't really easy to fix the things. Looking for a solution, I reached at
http://www.bloggers.pk where all of us Pakistani bloggers unite. Reached the bloggers.pk forum and
created a topic to get some php help. 20th of January was the day when I posted it there looking for help and received a quick reply from Salman. Salman asked me the name of the plugin, fixed the file and gave me the file with the right code. I was really happy at the quick free service the guy just gave me. I tried the file and it didn't work as expected. It was then Salman added me on MSN and we solved the problem in real time and the plugin worked out for me. I was really happy how Salman took out time for someone he didn't even know. When I thanked him for helping me, he replied "Just keep the wheel rolling" which meant I helped you so please help others. After that we had a little intro chit chat which kept happening every once in a while and Salman became a really good friend of mine.
I am mostly awake at nights and so is my 24 year old friend Salman, who happens to suffer from a dreadful disease called Thalassemia. Salman was born with this disease and suffered throughout his life. By the time he reached college, the pain couldn't really let him study further and he had to spend a lot of time in hospitals. It was then he started learning html, css, php, mysql and all other web languages and turned out to be one of the best web developers I ever met. I am mostly awake at nights because I take evening classes at university and Salman's reason was that he worked online on web applications for a US based company called Directors Advantage. When we would have time we would just gossip at the nights. The more we talked the more I came to know about my friend. We talked about his disease, how he lives with it and how he fights it. When he was a kid, he lost his elder brother who suffered from the same disease. It was then he did promise with himself that he will make every move to minimize this disease and will not let another person die. He came up with foundation called "FAiTh" which means Fight AgaInst THalassemia details of which can be found
here.
He also happened to appear on the TV for his wonderful campaigns for Thalassemia (I encoded this video
)
<![CDATA[<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/iTnCJFMMALE" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/iTnCJFMMALE</a>]]> Even though Salman is a great professional with decent salary and living, he still wanted to complete his college and so he appeared in the exams this year
I also happen to know his twitter crush #twitdiva
(but that's going to be our little secret)
In these ten months, Salman has helped me more than a hundred times whenever I needed him. We have never met but he happens to one of my closest friends. He would always offer me Barfi online because he knew I can't take it
Right now my friend is at Agha Khan University Hospital, suffering from the
Meningitis. The doctors say he is brain dead and will be taken off the life support after 8 hours. In last one week, we prayed, we begged Allah but Salman didn't respond. I just hope to see a reply here in the morning by my friend. Salman I miss you man, come back and drop a reply here. I also have some CSS woes
I tried my best praying, and asking others to pray for him. Allah save the guy or he will let a lot of people crying which he would never want to do.
Hamad.
