Words of a Rookie

Bourne Ultimatum - Movie Review

2010-05-25T23:44:00.000+05:00

IMDB Rating: 8.2/10, Top 250: #151
Cast: Matt Damon (Bourne), Julia Stiles (Nicky), Joan Allen (Pam)
Genre: Action/Mystery/Thriller
Released in 2007.

Summary
This movie is based on Robert Ludlum's novel by the same name.
Bourne is once again brought out of hiding, this time inadvertently by London-based reporter Simon Ross who is trying to unveil Operation Blackbriar--an upgrade to Project Treadstone--in a series of newspaper columns. Bourne sets up a meeting with Ross and realizes instantly they're being scanned. Information from the reporter stirs a new set of memories, and Bourne must finally, ultimately, uncover his dark past whilst dodging The Company's best efforts in trying to eradicate him

Excellent direction and action sequences maintaining the trilogy's tradition.Damon's action supremacy continues as his great acting.

You can further view information about The Bourne Ultimatum on IMDB.

Rann - Movie Review

2010-05-25T23:37:00.001+05:00

IMDB Rating: 7.1/10
Cast: Amitabh Bachan (Vijay Malik), Ritesh Deshmukh (Purab), Paresh Rawal (Mohan Pandey)
Genre: Drama/Mystery
Released in 2010.

Summary
As the news of a bomb explosion in the Muzaffarnagar area spreads, two leading news agencies, India 24 & Headlines 24/7, deal with their respective ratings and content to attract more viewers and boost advertising revenue. Purab Shastri is hired by India 24, managed by Vijay H. Malik, while the other agency is run by Amrish Kakkar, Vijay's former subordinate. Purab, an ardent admirer of Vijay, changes his views after the later dramatically exposes Prime Minister Digvijay Hooda's hand behind the explosion, and starts to gather evidence that may end up implicating Vijay and the agency.

Amitabh, as usual has been good throughout, but Ritesh's body language and acting surely has surprised me.

You can further view information about Rann on IMDB.

Bheja Fry - Movie Review

2010-05-25T23:31:00.002+05:00

IMDB Rating: 7.6/10
Cast: Vinay Phatak (Bharat), Rajat Kapoor (Ranjeet)
Genre: Comedy
Released in 2007.

Summary
Ranjeet Thadani lives a wealthy lifestyle in Mumbai along with his wife, Sheetal, who is a singer, while he manages Soundtrack Industries. At the request of his friend, Jagdish Verma, he decides to invite a singer and Libran, Bharat Bhushan, to his residence for dinner, as well as listen to him sing. Ranjeet, suffering from back pain, does not realize that Bharat is also an Income-Tax Inspector, and upon arrival at Ranjeet's residence, will virtually and hilariously turn his life upside down.

Vinay's and Rajat's acting is outstanding throughout the movie, as usual especially Vinay's expressional act, and once again the team has put on a great movie together.

You can further view information about Bheja Fry on IMDB.

Taken - Movie Review

2010-05-25T23:26:00.002+05:00

IMDB Rating: 7.9/10
Cast: Liam Neeson (Bryan Mills), Maggie Grace (Kim), Famke Janssen (Lenore)
Genre: Action/Crime/Thriller
Released in 2008.

Summary
Seventeen year-old Kim is the pride and joy of her father Bryan Mills. Bryan is a retired agent who left the Secret Service to be near Kim in California. Kim lives with her mother Lenore and her wealthy stepfather Stuart. Kim manages to convince her reluctant father to allow her to travel to Paris with her friend Amanda. When the girls arrive in Paris they share a cab with a stranger named Peter, and Amanda lets it slip that they are alone in Paris. Using this information an Albanese gang of human traffickers kidnaps the girls. Kim barely has time to call her father and give him information. Her father gets to speak briefly to one of the kidnappers and he promises to kill the kidnappers if they do not let his daughter go free. The kidnapper wishes him "good luck," so Bryan Mills travels to Paris to search for his daughter and her friend.

Neeson's acting and action sequences are excellent, which makes this movie great to watch.

You can further view information about Taken on IMDB.

Shutter Island - Movie Review

2010-05-25T23:11:00.004+05:00

IMDB Rating: 8.1/10 (Top 250: #224)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy), Mark Ruffalo (Chuck), Ben Kingsley (Dr. Cawley)
Genre: Drama/Mystery/Thriller
Released in 2010.

Summary
Shutter Island is the story of Teddy Daniels, a U.S. federal marshall sent to the island with his partner Chuck Aule to search for the disappearance of a patient. They are investigating the disappearance of Rachel Solando, a patient said to have vanished from a locked room. Dr. John Cawley, the head psychiatrist, explains that Rachel was institutionalized after drowning her three children. Each scene provides a turn against their leads and compels them to look for more whilst searching in places we couldn't comprehend, including their minds.

DiCaprio's and Ruffalo's performances are outstanding along with Kingsley with his usual great acting, no doubt that the movie has made it to the top 250 on IMDB.

You can further view information about Shutter Island on IMDB.

Mobilink's GPS in Pakistan

2010-05-23T14:37:00.001+05:00

Mobilink has recently launched MobiTrack which provides GPS services in Pakistan. If you have a GPS enabled cellular phone, you can easily use MobiTrack to find locations and get directions to those locations. I found it very useful as it has the latest data of GPS in Pakistan.

The support is limited to particular handsets only e.g. Blackberry curve 8310 is supported but Blackberry curve 8520 is not supported. You can check for handsets compatibility here. And for more detailed information, you can checkout the Trakker NAV website for MobiTrack.

The GPS services include finding a location, the search is pretty good and it has good coverage of areas at least in Karachi. I tested it to find "China Town", Clifton and it even has the blockade information near Bilawal house. The directions are voice enabled and very accurate. You can also view the maps of different areas of Pakistan and you can search for a location by typing it in search box or locating it on the maps.

I'd like to see other GPS services in Pakistan with latest data, especially during these times during which one cannot find many things which doesn't disappoint us Pakistanis.

Furniture shops in Karachi – Part 2

2010-05-22T13:16:00.001+05:00

Almost a year back, I was searching for furniture shops in Karachi to build my kitchen, get furniture for drawing, dining, living and bed rooms. I had a budget and I managed to maintain it with the desired quality. One year down the road and I am satisfied with my choices. Below are my suggestions to help you out, if you have an above-average budget and require good quality, giving you some ideas on furniture shops in Karachi:

Kitchen

You have a choice to hire a carpenter to construct cabinets. This will be less costly but requires a lot of your time. But, if the carpenter is good enough, you can control the quality and I found this the most suitable within my budget. You’ll also have to manage polishing. If you like to be very selective in terms of best wood and design, plus other apparels, this is the best option for you.
Order kitchen from Ashary’s, Clifton (expensive), Interwood, Tuaheed Commercial (expensive), Italian Kitchen, Shaheed-e-Millat (moderate), Habitt (moderate) etc.
If you go for a carpenter, appliances such as Built-in Oven or normal Oven, hob (stove), hood (chimney) and microwave will be managed by you; plus electrician and plumber for respective sockets.

Bed room

Well, you have a lot of choices here. As per my limited knowledge, the best bedroom furniture in Karachi market is available at International (Tipu Sultan) and Victoria (near Abdullah Haroon road). International’s quality and service is excellent. They provide life time support at your doorstep and have a very skilled team. Though furniture is very expensive, but when you see it, you’ll know the worth, especially if you want to own it for over 20 years!
Wellcome furnishers (near old sabzi mandi) has a lot of variety as well and they also provide good support, but again it’s expensive. You can also have a look at Habitt (Nipa, Tipu Sultan, etc.) which is less expensive and ready-made.
The furniture market in Nursery, Karachi is the cheapest of all I’ve mentioned

Drawing room

Wellcome Furnishers is the best value for this kind of furniture. The price is moderate as compared to the expensive ones and obviously you’d not like to spend a lot on drawing room where you don’t spend your time that much. They have the right variety to satisfy one with a above-average budget. If you have a higher budget, you can visit International and Vicrtoria.
Kalamkaar (Clifton) is another option, I found their way of showing the catalog great. The price is above-average, but they have good choices. They even hand over a CD to you for your brief reviewSam Abbas (Tuaheed Commercial) is another choice, but I didn’t find a lot of variety there.

Dining

Again, Wellcome is the best value in terms of quality and price. Kalamkaar has good choices as well
Nursery is another option which is less expensive

Living room

Nursery. Why? Because I’d like to have my living room furniture replaced after 3-5 years. Habitt is another good choice balancing the price and comfort. But, I’d go for cheaper furniture because living room is very roughly used. Just ensure that you get the right material keeping in mind Karachi gets pretty hot during summers.
If you like to go for higher value choices, International, Wellcome and KalamKaar might be worth looking.

In addition to this, you will need to buy curtains, manage lighting, doors and other appliances. I’ll be writing on the same in the near future.

Small Tutorial on Torrents

2010-05-18T22:34:00.005+05:00

Torrent (or BitTorrent) technology is arguably the best; if you need anything ranging from games to movies to songs, you can download through very easy and simple steps. If you are new to it, here's how easy it is:

Download a torrent downloader software. I find uTorrent quite easy and feature rich
Goto a torrent site. I usually access isohunt
Search for anything you want to download, click on download and it'll open up uTorrent automatically
Save it to your desired destination path

Just ensure you get the torrent with right language version from the website.

As for uTorrent, it also has features like controlling bandwidth (upload and download both) plus scheduler mode as well, using which you can easily turn it off during various timings, if you require more bandwidth for web browsing or other applications.

Chatroulette

2010-05-18T14:44:00.002+05:00

Chatroulette is a website that pairs random strangers from around the world together for webcam-based conversations. Visitors to the website randomly begin an online chat (video, audio and text) with another visitor. At any point, either user may leave the current chat by initiating another random connection.

The Chatroulette website was created by a 17-year-old high school student in Moscow.

The website uses Adobe Flash to display video and access the user's webcam. Flash's peer-to-peer network capabilities (via RTMFP) allow almost all video and audio streams to travel directly between user computers, without using server bandwidth. However, certain combinations of routers will not allow UDP traffic to flow between them, and then it is necessary to fall back to RTMP.

However, one has to be beware of controversial content while accessing the site, as there're multiple possibilities of the same.

Trip to Malaysia

2009-12-10T12:56:00.004+05:00

It was June 2009 and I was wondering which place to plan for our honeymoon. I could name a score of people who recommended Malaysia as the ideal place for the trip, especially within the budget.

I started off with visiting the websites hosting the places to visit in Malaysia and finding out the hotel rates. Finally, I was able to create a list of billable items and to define my budget and then finalizing the package with my travel agent. We decided to visit Kuala Lumpur, Langkawi & Genting Highlands, whereas dropped Penang and Borneo from our list.

We set off towards the airport during early August for the flight at 11:59 pm for Malaysian Airlines which travels on Thursdays and Mondays only (Karachi-KL or vice versa). From Karachi to Kuala Lumpur is a 6 hour flight and we had our connecting flight towards Langkawi after a short stay at the KL airport.

Once we reached the KL airport we observed a lot of greenery outside the airport, which reminded me of the greenery which Islamabad has, where greenery just needs a reason to grow. After a short stay, we got onto the 1-hour flight for Langkawi. As soon as we reached above Langkawi we noticed the exciting landscape and the shores.

As soon as we landed, we headed towards the taxi stand and reached our hotel in the Pantai Tengah area. Apart from the sandy beaches in Langkawi, which is a nice relaxing way to spend your time, there are a few places worth visiting:

Underwater World (Aquarium)
Crocodile Farm (Lots of crocodiles)
Eagle Square (a monument representing Langkawi)
Mangroove Forest (resembling Amazon river)
Cable Car (reaches a good height with a suspension bridge between two mountains)
Seven-Wells Waterfalls (very refreshing)

After Langkawi, we headed towards the heights of Genting Highlands, which is approx. one and half hour drive from KL. It's a good place with indoor and outdoor theme parks. The indoor theme park is located inside the First World Hotel, the ground floor of which is a city in itself. The outdoor theme park has medium scale thrill rides along with children rides. The overall atmosphere has an aesthetic value as the clouds cover the park almost all of the time, with rains after irregular intervals.

After spending a couple of days, we headed back towards Kuala Lumpur. It's a highly developed city with good transport infrastructure such as hop-on/hop-off tourist bus service, monorail, KL Express (train service to and from airport), etc. The hop-on/hop-off bus service is a good way to visit all the tourist places with a pass for full day. One can hop off the bus to a tourist destination, spend and enjoy some time and get hop back on the next bus. Few of the places we visited or intended to visit are:

KL tower ( is one of the tallest communicatons tower in the world) with binoculars on the top
Petronas Twin Tower (skywalking on the bridge between the twin towers). There's a science section inside plus an Aquarium as well
Zoo Negara
Bird Park & Butterfly Park
Shopping Malls

The information is readily available on different websites as well as the brochures in the hotels and at the airports which help you to plan your trip. Malaysia has all the aspects of a tourism place within the budget and is surely a place which is highly recommended. Although, Thailand has much better entertainment options, but the overall environment of Malaysia is best suited for honeymooners.

Furniture in Karachi

2009-04-16T15:56:00.004+06:00

Whether you're going to build up a new home or you need to upgrade your current one, you'll find it hard to get great furniture. People like us who work throughout the week and find time only on the weekends during the daytime, find it hard to know where to go and have very little time for exploration. I have been trying to search for good furniture shops on the internet, the locations and the quality for each vendor, but one way or the other have hard time in locating one and finding quality within budget.

While the quality of furniture in the famous Furniture Markets (Nursery & near Garden) is controversial :), established brands seem a better choice if your budget is above average.

I, for one, didn't even know the names of the places where we can buy good furniture. While the search is still on, here goes my evaluation so far:

International Interior Designers & Furniture (Tipu Sultan Road)
Bedroom Furniture. Is very expensive but Teak wood variety is present which is termite-proof). Takes around 2-3 months to delivery based on the quantity.
Sofa sets and other furniture is also available, not too sure about Kitchen.
Sam Abbas Design Studio (Tuaheed Commercial, DHA, near Gelato Affair/Biryani Center)
Mainly Sofa sets, is expensive but affordable to people who desire better furniture. Mostly Sheesham
Interwood (Tuaheed Commerical, DHA, besides Mosaajees)
Kitchens are great but very expensive. Other furniture also available in good ranges
KalamKaar (near Schon Circle, Clifton)
Bedroom, Sofa Sets & other furniture is available, but again not cheap, but affordable prices. They dealt with us in a very nice manner and the catalogue is very rich.
Habitt (Tipu Sultan & somewhere in Gulshan as well)
Generally everything is available on less expensive side as compared to the branding. I was not comfortable about the quality of some of the items e.g. the wood being used is not that durable.

I am still short of all the furniture except for the bedroom and looking for options, mainly for affordable Kitchen building and will be visiting Ashrays, ST (or Estee?) and Dreams in DHA area. There's one other shop by the name of Prestige Kitchens which I plan to explore as well.

Once I am over with the whole deal, I'll write on the summarized analysis of the same so that buyers have consolidated knowledge in one place.

Efficient or Impatient?

2007-03-12T14:37:00.000+05:00

“Pomp, Pomp”, a sound which is usually heard from behind while I am sitting in my car waiting for the signal to turn green. This is pretty common in Karachi, the mass-operative city; though very rare in Islamabad, the so-called dead city. This is not the only noise which is disturbing; one can see many vehicles breaking signals; coming from wrong side of the road; and changing lanes quite drastically.

One can easily say that this trend of traffic is due to the fact that people don’t have enough time and they value it too much that they can even risk their own lives for it. But, quite interestingly the trend is almost 180 degrees when you enter a shop, office, governmental department or any other operational place where time actually matters. There, one can clearly observe wastage of time in gossiping, slowness of activity and simply sleeping; though these are not limited as you can find lots of other time-wasting activities and discussions going on which are simply useless and which is not what our country needs.

Most commonly discussed areas are cricket, politics and religion; which can be termed as healthy discussions if you see it from a higher level. But, my experience after being parts of such discussions (for the sake of knowledge) , was disappointing as I found these as just blames and complaints to those who are simply not hearing us. In addition, nothing can be done about it, as opposed to the workplace where one has some authority and can do something constructive.

Some people might believe that these are past-times for people and can be treated equivalent to sports or any other leisure activity; as for some people things like gossiping are recreational. To some extent, this can be agreed upon, but not wholly as people sacrifice their work for the sake of such activities whereas they’re not ready to sacrifice their time for the sake of safety for travelers.

What good is the impatience normally taken as efficiency which saves you just 2 minutes with lots of risk and tension; as compared to the hours of time-wastage coming under inefficiency but assumed as pride by many?

Comments are welcome related to the usage of semicolon

Life is what it's meant to be..

2006-09-02T12:33:00.000+05:00

There's this uncomfortable feeling since a very long time now. No it's not that I am not busy in things, infact I am very very busy lately. But somehow, everything seems like nonsense. No, it's not that I'm depressed, just that life doesn't seem to make sense. Maybe I am not good at accepting limits.

Let's talk about depression for a moment and move ahead. I think it cannot be stopped, but can be dealt with, and the best way to deal with it is to expect nothing out of anything. For me, the definition of depression is that things are not going along the lines as expected and you are helpless and this results in depression, hence it can be termed as a symptom that something is wrong and you are unable to fix it, hence helplessness.

After all life has its own turns and tricks and one can only accept these and understand why things happen. I have lost all the interest in life almost 5 years back, maybe because something happened and that unveiled life altogether and since then things have been revealed for me gradually. At this point in time, I think I have understood some of the basics and to cut a long story short it's nothing but observation. You observe life and understand it. But then, I think you can change it to some extent, but again everything could be pre-written and you're just discovering it.

I think I have found how to remain calm, just by accepting that it's just learning and by the end of it, you'd have learnt everything required. We might think that we can change everything, but how can one tell that the change you brought in wasn't written? Once you understand what life is, it doesn't matter how much challenges come to you or how much you are tested, it's just a matter of time and will pass by. For many, life can be wonderful and operational things matter, but really the concept seems to be different and then there's no interest in it and then it doesn't matter what happens and you feel nothing.

Life is as it's meant to be and for me somehow it doesn't make sense at all. Maybe my standards are very high and that's why I have kept aside my feelings altogether and I want nothing for myself and just prioritize what others want and try to achieve those. Some might call this foolishness that I'm not selfish at all, but I have developed into this gradually.

After all, are there any other options?

Praying for alternate paths?

2006-04-25T16:25:00.000+05:00

Often times a situation comes into somebody's life where prayers are the only hope towards achieving something important in the world. When nothing else seems to work, praying seems to be the last resort.

The concept of praying becomes very ambiguous at times, specially when you have strong belief that things will go on as written in fate or if one believes the saying "what is written will happen". To me, this is somewhat conflicting at times: What'll happen is already written, then why pray? Will prayers lead to alternate paths in life? e.g. if I had to attain a degree and this is written as my fate then whether I work hard and get it with flying colours or I don't work hard and get it for the sake of just getting it, I'll get it.

If I were to do something and its quality depends upon my effort and concentration, then what role does prayer play? Or to be exact of the conflict I am in right now, what if I am not certain of getting something I really want, do the prayers play any role?

It's not certain that: "If you pray for something it's just a matter of time that you'll get it" because of the reason that it might be good for you but not for everyone. Again this is logic and my question still remains the same: What do prayers do?

If we limit this discussion to the result of the prayers as: "I will get it or not" rather than "I will surely get it, but I pray that I get it with lesser obstacles", etc. If we are to think upon whether prayers really make it happen or not, we can come up with the following combinations, after praying:

You get it IF you pray, not otherwise
You get it regardless of praying
You don't get it regardless of praying

The last two combinations are solely based upon logic and prayers don't work. Let's talk about the first one, can this be true? If yes, then this statement: "Whatever happens, happens for the best" becomes false. And if this becomes false, then the alternate path which occurs after human praying is better than the original path. This implies that human path construction is better and leads to a weird state of mind.

Coming back to the last 2 points above and assuming that our last paragraph is just false, then we arrive to a conclusion that praying does nothing. Again, a weird state of mind.

All these questions can be answered if we think of this:

This world and its events are based upon humans, but God's intervention is there whenever required. Requirement is posted through praying.
There's no such thing as fate, everything is done by humans, except for maybe a few things such as birth & death? Maybe a few more?

The Software World..

2006-01-26T11:43:00.000+05:00

Software Engineering, a term commonly used nowadays and easily comprehended by most of the people in this world, is a world in itself. Just for the sake of mentioning, it means to develop software or a program which models a subset of reality onto a machine. The skills required for developing software are not only the analytical ones but logic plays a major role as well. On the other hand, creativity is required as well as the empathetic sense relating to the user. Hence we can easily say that Software Engineers are one of the most skillful people around, in this world.

When I say “Software Engineering is a world in itself”, it means that it’s a virtual world and not a real one like Earth. The mapping of the real world onto this one is what Software Engineers do. Let’s limit ourselves to the design & coding phases of Software before we move ahead, generally termed as programming. The difference between the task of a software engineer and other engineers is the presence of this virtual world. If one is good in this virtual world, this means that he’s doing his job well.

Coming from a different direction, I would like to highlight that when a person indulges into some environment, he develops some familiarity initially, moving forward he becomes smooth and then he gets used to it. One gets so much used to it that sometimes it feels like it’s the only world (or sub-world) and he’s not able to comprehend the situation (or environment) outside it. For example, I used play Unreal a lot (sometimes more than 5 hours a day) and it happened many times that I dreamed about it during sleep.

Now, if a software developer works for many hours a day, spends a few hours in sleep and spends the rest of the time in the actual world, there seems to be a high probability that most of the developers would confuse these 3 different environments.

Putting all of this on the plate of our discussion, is Software development changing the lives of the Software engineers by making them used to this virtual world? After working for more than 10 years in this arena, can the developers manage to segregate the virtual & the real world? One extreme example of this world is the game development line, supported by the statement that game is a modeled virtual world which is derived from reality or illusions, and is closer to being called a world than any other software.

Some updates..

2005-11-13T03:25:00.000+05:00

Ah, finally passing time in Karachi for 2 weeks, 1 week to go. The weather is pleasant and as usual I have got used to the atmosphere in a week, now I am starting to enjoy. I'll return to Isb on 21st, InshaAllah. It's good to see a lot of roads being constructed in Karachi, but at the same time the ever-increasing traffic remains a problem. Though I've been to some areas within Karachi in the mean time, I haven't seen any relief camps here as yet, wonder whether the relief work is carried out as required or not. Meanwhile, LMKR is still into the relief work, may Allah bless them for their work.

If you are interested in the stock market business, have a look at BlogShares. It's a virtual stock market, but on a very initial stage. A tip for making quick money right at startup (once you have registered and are playing) is to get chips by answering the survey questions on the right side of the home page. Once you have some amount of chips, register on the forum and goto the Chip Auction House and auction your chips or sell them to some willing buyer. You can easily get 50 million per chip, at least :). A neat site for business minded people and also for those who like to understand the stock business.

I'm gathering my thoughts to write about something which might derail the thoughts of some of the readers, just waiting for the time to come and being patient, thoughtful and observative. It'll be a post which'll try to unveil some things which are covered by our society carelessly, related with Islamic teachings. If you can, have a look at Tanzeem-e-Islami headed by Dr. Israr Ahmed. I hope to write it soon..

Show The Objective..

2005-10-31T16:47:00.000+05:00

Often times you tend to be aggressive or get into bad mood, get into difficult conversations at the company or in the family, can't get over something you really miss, are confused or into any other state of mind in which you really don't want to be, but due to human nature, you find it difficult to control your emotions.

Keeping the objective in mind is the key. No matter what you do, you have to know what you are getting from it. You might think that this seems materialistic and only applies to materialistic actions e.g. by helping someone you are not getting anything. But, you are getting something and that is the internal satisfaction, the happiness which comes when you make someone else happy. This is by no means materialistic, and if it's then everything is.

Aggressiveness is one of the wide spread negative habit which most of the humans have, at least most of the people I have seen. Aggressive nature, esp. at work is quite harmful to none other than the aggressor himself. Not only at work, but in family dealings as well, this may result in disruptions in family relationships mainly due to both parties being aggressive. What can keep you from getting aggressive? It's the objective!

Nonetheless, being cool-minded all the times is not that easy, but it's not that hard too and it's necessary for one to be successful and this applies to every aspect of life i.e. there are lot of advantages. After all, who likes a person who offends and charges other people every now and then?

Whenever you are in a bad mood, you need to remember the objective..What’s the use of being into such a mood? You are just wasting time and energy, which could've been utilized in something more important to you. Controlling your emotions is one of the main elements of leading a leader's life and realizing the fact that others don't like to be taken up by someone, an element of respect has to appear in everything you say or anything you perform.

Everyone is unique or at least wants to be, distinction attracts every human. So, realizing the fact that you are in a state of uselessness is the first step towards realizing that you need not be in that state most of the time. Don't you think everyone does the same when he's in a bad mood or when he loses his temper? So, you either want to be the same as others or you indulge into something which makes you distinct.

You might want to read about EQ (Emotional Quotient), plus there's a book which you might have heard about "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" and the sequels to it as well.

Something off-topic, a 3D First Person Shooter named Commando 4 has been developed by some FAST Karachi students.

Imagine..

2005-09-13T00:23:00.000+05:00

Imagine a 10 year old girl with two pony-tails, with lots of oil on her hair, a lolly pop in her mouth goes jumping, hopping along a street carrying a megaphone and calling out the table of 2, 3 & 4 in a loop, at 6 pm.

Unconventional uses of Sack

2005-09-06T20:05:00.000+05:00

Sack (known as "bori" in Urdu) is one of the most commonly used containers for multiple things, at least in Pakistan. It's commonly used for grains, coal, wood, metal utensils, etc. It can also be used to cover slippery floors and is also used in sack racing where a team of two people put their legs in it and run towards the finish line, a sport usually for kids. A sack full of sand is somewhat bullet proof, so it can be used in that way as well e.g at smaller posts.

But, there can be other unconventional ways to utilize it as well, some of which can be:

You can cut a sack into pieces and use instead of tissue papers in case you catch cold
You can make an umbrella out of it, which won’t last long though
Since there’s an increase of population of pick-pockets, you can create internal pockets out of a sack; at least it’s difficult to cut
A mobile pouch
A hat or a bed sheet or a rug, which can be useful in winters
Can be used for cleaning glass
Clothes for yourself or your pets or for a scare crow
You can punish your kid by keeping him into it for an hour or so, do make sure that there are enough holes to breathe though
Car cover, seat cover, or any other cover
One can try constructing a bridge all made with sacks

It’s upto your own imagination what other uses of a sack you come up with.

Business business

2005-08-13T11:48:00.000+05:00

I've always wanted to be a businessman and have tried a few things on a pretty small scale, and have been extremely successful. After a few months on job right after graduation, I've been thinking hard to setup my own business in parallel, but haven't tried at all.

This urge is getting to the point where I think I'll just start something on a very small scale (this time the time-scale won't be small). According to my analysis and imagination on an initial level, I have arrived on a few tips for a person to start a new business, specifically speaking of those who are on a paycheck and don't have much finances to invest. I am the rookie of rookies in business, so it's pre-mature to list down the points now, but here I go, hoping to get some comments:

You have to have a very vague starter vision
Try a smooth transition from job to business. Setup the business in parallel to your job, don't quit your current job to start it
Try to cover finances with knowledge & talent, try starting from something which doesn't need much financing
Consider starting something from a very small scale, but which can be scaled lower or higher as the need arises e.g. service provider business
Find references among your family, relatives, friends, colleagues, etc. who can guide you towards anything, ranging from advice to clientele to suppliers

Plus, you need to have the following positives to start something:

Motivation
Time Management
You should have a thing about numbers
Effective Communication Skills
Thinking in terms of customers & finances
Long term planning skills, yet having short term planning skills for bonus seasons/events

Have a look at Life without a paycheck, I've read it, so I assume anyone can read it :)

Is everything Balanced?

2005-07-26T17:00:00.000+05:00

How many times have you experienced that you don't do anything wrong and still something wrong happens with you? Now imagine how many times have good happened to you, even if you don't deserve it? If consequences were dependent on actions, then logic implies 180 degrees from what happens, sometimes.

This leads to a question: Whether everything that happens is the consequence of what you do or it's just discovery of what's already been decided and written down as your fate?

Too complex, but hints are everywhere. Relating to my post Luck vs. Details, is it just the lack of detail that we call it or we put it into the category of luck? As I move ahead in the dimension of time, this fate thing is making more sense to me and it feels like the action/consequence thing is just there acting as a decoy. But it might be the state of mind which also comes into play e.g. a batsman might be in some good form one year and in a really bad form in the next year.

In any case, what I have conceptualized since 10 or so years back and still believe is that everything is balanced instantly or some time later. A small example is that I cheated in one of the exams during my studies and I got away with it. Some time later, I was caught by an invigilator for something I didn't do, and I was speechless. At that time, I thought something wrong which I did earlier, was balanced.

Time after time things happen, opportunities come and are availed, bad times come and pass by e.g. you might be having conflicts with your family, but you might have a good reputation at work. You might be physically weak, but mentally tough. You might be financially poor, but religiously rich, etc.

Summary is that if you sum up all of your negatives & compare with the sum of your positives (after assigning weightages), everything might just come out to be balanced!

Words and inside..

2005-06-30T18:54:00.000+05:00

So, long time no post. I finally got some time out from work and got some motivation as well. It's been over a month since I have been managing this new simulation project, handling a team of around 14 people including programmers, graphics designers, testers, etc. The team is very good, mashaAllah, alhamdulillah. It's gonna take some intelligent hard work for 3 more months or so. Here's another piece of abstract theory which I would like to share related to comprehending and understanding what other people say to you..

At times, you are being fooled by someone and you regret it after you have been manipulated. Instead of finding out afterwards, you can be proactive. There's something you can do about it and that is to judge whether what's said to you is the truth or a lie. For that you need to know the driver behind the person's words.

Whatever you comprehend about something that other person says, depends on how you interpret and process the information. If it doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to the person saying it. This means that you are missing something which that other person is thinking about.

So, you have to find a reason as to why that other person can think or not think about something. You might want to use your own head as well along with the other person's words, because it can be true and it can be false or it can be somewhere in between. Why he might lie is something which you have to think about e.g. he might lie because he might have superiority or inferiority complex or he might be a status conscious person or simply a psycho. Psychos are abnormal about something, but otherwise normal, so you can't really tell. But, it's not necessary that a negative reason is behind it, always.

Suppose a person is over conscious about his intelligence. He would always try to prove himself to others and hence sometimes he might lie about something. You can't simply go on believing what he says, you have to process the information correctly. Why he does that? Because he wants other people to recognize him as an intelligent person.

The question now comes that whether this judging matters for you or not. When you want to judge the other person and when you simply ignore whatever he says? I suppose you'll know when to do it and when not.

You might not be able to fully understand the rationale behind this post, and I don't expect it either. You might find it helpful when the need actually arises.

Busy bee..

2005-05-19T16:12:00.000+05:00

Not been able to write anything for the past few weeks, have been pretty busy at office. Working on this new gaming project, which will be built upon C++/OpenGL, seems like a dream coming true, inshaAllah. Might be the team lead for this project which is right now in its initial phases such as requirements analysis, resource hiring, technical research, etc. While hunting for resources I have found that it's pretty hard to get "all-in-one" resources, but fortunately we've found a few bright people matching almost the criteria set by us. Let's see how things work out.

Also went to Karachi last week, enjoyed every bit of it and stayed for 3 days, again seeing how time flies. Have been playing snooker and table tennis and that's all the activity after office apart from sleeping and relaxing.

A friend recommended this link http://del.icio.us Have a look.

I am aiming to write a lot of technical stuff on the technical blog, but still finding hard to get some time out. As far as general posts are concerned, I am looking forward to write the next part about Spiders plus something about dealing with people.

Controlled Outlaw

2005-04-20T16:50:00.000+05:00

It's time to become an outlaw, to do whatever you like, not constrained by anything, not even laws or policies. The pleasure in breaking all the laws and nonconformity to the policies of the surroundings is awesome. Liberty, strength & control are the necessary ingredients. If you have these, why not do it? Yes, just do it..do it!

Man, it sure feels good to stand out completely for yourself and do what feels right to you and ignoring what others have to say about right and wrong. It's fun when you look at the astonished faces of other people, the expressions out of disbelief, surprise and somewhat envy. Just come out of the phase of dependency on others and being weak, invert the thoughts by becoming strong and making others dependent on you, you'll surely enjoy the benefits.

The people won't like you for that, but only those people who are the victims of you becoming an outlaw, but again it's for your ownself, you have to become a bit selfish for this, and you have to be mentally tough and need to have backup to take such an amount of risk. Once you have the entire skills and resources, then there's no harm in taking this risk and experiencing this phase, but in a controlled manner. Of course, somethings are wrong and shouldn't be targetted, here's where maturity comes into play.

This is what's going on in my mind these days, I am breaking many policies within the company I am working at and am really enjoying this phase, but I have set the limits first!

-Gunda Gard v3.0 ;-)

Lyrics - Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan

2005-04-14T21:32:00.000+05:00

(Male)
Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan, Jaanay Hon Kul Kahaan
Hum Milain Na Milain, Hum Rahain Na Rahain
Rahay Gee Sadaa Yahaan, Pyaar Kee Yeh Daastan
Sunain Gay Sada Jissay, Yeh Zameen Aasmaan

(Female)
Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan, Jaanay Hon Kul Kahaan
Hum Milain Na Milain, Hum Rahain Na Rahain
Rahay Gee Sadaa Yahaan, Pyaar Kee Yeh Daastan
Sunain Gay Sada Jissay, Yeh Zameen Aasmaan

(Male)
Rung Dhul Jaatay Hain, Din Badal Jaatay Hain
Raatein So Jaatee Hain, Raahein Kho Jaatee Hain
Pyar Khota Naheen, Pyar Sota Naheen
Pyar Dhulta Naheen, Haan Badalta Naheen

(Female)
Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan, Jaanay Hon Kul Kahaan
Hum Milain Na Milain, Hum Rahain Na Rahain
Rahay Gee Sadaa Yahaan, Pyaar Kee Yeh Daastan
Sunain Gay Sada Jissay, Yeh Zameen Aasmaan

(Female)
Hum Jahaan Aaye Hain, Meherbaan Saaye Hain
Hum Yahaan Khuwaabon Kay, Kaarwaan Laaye Hain
Dharkanain Hain Jawaan, Gaa Raha Hai Samaa
Pigli Pigli See Hain, Mehkee Tanhaayiaan

(Male/Female)
Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan, Jaanay Hon Kul Kahaan
Hum Milain Na Milain, Hum Rahain Na Rahain
Rahay Gee Sadaa Yahaan, Pyaar Kee Yeh Daastan
Sunain Gay Sada Jissay, Yeh Zameen Aasmaan

-Hum Hain Iss Pal Yahaan from film Kisna

As architectural as a spider

2005-04-07T19:03:00.000+05:00

There are a lot of things in this world, which can be interesting for people who like to give a thought on these and are in search of inspiration. Set aside the universe, an almost infinite number of God’s creations exist in this world only. One such creation is Spider, which is one of the most fascinating creatures of this world, simply because of its uniqueness of actions and the way it’s designed.

Spider is called Araneae in scientific terms. There are around 38,834 species of this excellent creation categorized into 110 families. A few categories of spiders are Tarantulas, Hunting Spiders, biting spiders, jumping spiders & web-spinning spiders.

I’ll be focusing on the web spinners and the discussion spans across two parts. This part covers the web construction, the material and its quality, and the 2^nd part covers how they hunt their prey and how they defend themselves, which will be posted soon.

Silk & Web
The silk is made of protein, which does not decompose by fungi and bacteria like all other proteins. The reason is that this silk contains three substances that are important for its durability: Pyrolidin, Potassium Hydrogen Phosphate and Potassium Nitrate. We conserve protein by cooking, salting, drying or adding acid so that it remains intact.

The construction of web is one of the most sophisticated natural mechanisms that exist in this world. Although all spiders produce silk but only certain types of spiders build webs. The style of web varies from one species to another. Interestingly, there’s also a connection between eyesight & web construction capabilities of different spiders, which will be discussed in the next part.

This is the internal process, which goes through in a spider while producing silk:

Spiders have ducts for producing liquid silk, which solidifies on contact with outside air.
The secretion is drawn into fine threads by structures called spinnerets on the lower side of spider’s abdomen. The spinnerets, which spin the silk, work like the fingers of a hand. A spider can stretch out each spinneret, pull it back in, and even squeeze them all together.

This is the everlastingly interesting high-level view of how the construction is done:

The most difficult part seems to be the first thread, for which the spider releases a sticky thread that is blown away with the wind, of course if she’s lucky. Simple!
If the breeze carries the silken line to a spot where it sticks, the first bridge is formed.
The spider cautiously crosses along the thin line, reinforcing it with a second line.
She enforces the line until it is strong enough.
After this she hangs a thread in the form of a Y below the primary thread.
These are the first three radial of the web. More radials are constructed taking care that the distance between the radial is small enough to cross.
Then the adhesive spiral thread is placed and the web is ready to be used.

Re-engineering the Web
After a night of hunting the web becomes worn out (destroyed by bad weather and by the flying prey). The spider removes the silk in the morning only leaving the first bridge line. After daytime’s rest the spider constructs a new web in the evening. If the catch was low and the web is not heavily damaged the web may stay during the day and be reused after minor repairing.

A lot of orb weaving spiders even recycle their webs. The weaving of a web takes up a lot of the spider's resources. Since they need to renew their web regularly, they eat the silk. Only the main thread of the web is left intact. The cutting and the digesting of the web are done by special digestive juices that contain enzymes rather than by any mechanical cutting. These juices are also used to connect the strands of silk together. They usually weave a new web in the morning.

Material & Quality of Silk
Some spiders comb their silk to a wooly structure. To do this they have a comb like structure near the fourth legs and an extra silk producing organ just in front of the spinners, which appears as a transparent plate. There is no glue on the threads but the insect gets stuck with the hairs on their body in the silk. The thicker threads in the silk prevent the insect from tearing the silk.

Quite interestingly, the quality of the silk which she produces is an extremely strong material and is on weight basis, stronger than steel. This thread is not only strong but also very elastic. The thread of one of the orb web spider type is very elastic and can be stretched 30 - 40% before it breaks. Steel can be stretched only 8% and nylon around 20%. It has been suggested that a pencil thick strand of silk could stop a Boeing 747 in flight at full speed. Amazing! According to a study, we are still unable to reproduce such a material with all our technological know-how.

Applications of Spider Silk
The silk is utilized by the spider for a lot of different uses, which include constructing their webs, the production of egg sacs, wrapping in their prey, as a life line when jumping (just like spider-man), or dropping to escape, for transferring semen from the abdomen to the male palp, as a shelter in which it can retreat, etc. This silk has been utilized by humans as well e.g. for producing fishing lines, nets for the transportation of arrow points, tobacco and dried poison for the arrow points, cross hair in instruments, etc.

With this, I would like to add another perspective to all this information, that all this is done by a single spider and even much more. A normal human being with some intelligence can easily comprehend what type of intelligence is needed to come up with a design of such level. It’s even hard for a human being to come up with such a perfect design. Hence obviously a spider hasn’t invented itself or induced these capabilities with evolution. It’s simply the perfection of God; the perfect working system advocates that, an inch here and there in a spider can really mess things up.

The Great Wall of Constraints..

2005-04-03T19:18:00.001+05:00

It's been a pretty busy month, this March, with some good things happening and some really bad days as well. I am finally getting home at workplace and starting to get as productive as I used to be previously.

Apart from work, there had been a lot of other issues which I had been handling all this month which have kept me too busy to write about things I wanted to e.g. Spiders and about some technical upcomings.

I have always found it pretty hard to keep in line with the constraints we are surrounded by, at least the constraints which have been built up by us, the humans. I feel that we should try to minimize the constraints, atleast find out alternatives and do that until and unless we have control on things and then accept the remaining constraints. But, I have not been able to find alternatives about some constraints and that had hurt me pretty badly in the past. And now, it's hurting someone else as well. But, what can I do? What are the possible options? I believe none.

So, I am better off accepting the constraints and not trying to destroy "The Great Wall of Constraints" because I know I don't have the power to do so. Also, I don't want to hurt some of the constructors of this great wall. But, this is not the end, these will remain forever and there will be other constraints in the upcoming years as well. This is one of the sides of life and we are just better off accepting at every point. There's no use crying over things we can't control, instead we should find "Good" in everything. Easier said than Done!

Oh yes, we had a training on IBM Rational Suite yesterday, it's simply amazing! The suite contains products which covers the phases of SDLC and all of the products are very nicely integrated. I'd be writing about this suite as well in the near future.

Phases of Love..

2005-03-12T16:25:00.000+05:00

[The masculine form of person is used to simplify the statements]

It’s interesting to note how love affects the life of an individual forever.

In the beginning, when someone falls in love, it’s noteworthy how one feels about the other person, how anxiety and excitement influences the lover, how everything just becomes colorful.

There generates a meaning for almost everything in life. Every moment spent together feels like a whole world full of joy. The basic necessities of life are forgotten, everything seems to be wonderful, and everything seems to be working. A whole lot of motivation is inducted in the person; it feels like he’s reached on top of the world.

Then an era comes when the lovers start meeting each other, have lot of fun, enjoy the time together, start having expectations from each other. The hidden meetings, hidden from the external world, seem so great. May it be the fear of being caught by someone or may it be the happy moments spent together, everything is enjoyed to the maximum. The nights spent alone become hard enough to pass by. The first thing which comes up in mind after waking up is the other person, which again feels wonderful.

A huge change in one’s life becomes prominent to others. There is a meaning to everything. The lucky ones do get to their destination, the spark of the beginning converts into a huge power house of their lives.

The unlucky ones lose each other because of the conflicts between them, or between their families or the constraints of the culture or for whatever reasons. It’s funny how their lives are affected. The same person, for whom everything was exciting and wonderful, is converted into a careless quite human being. Nothing matters for him now, nothing! The ego is hurt badly, there is no motivation for work, there’s no motivation for anything. He either becomes a violent or a very nice person, depending upon the maturity level.

The person starts relating sad songs to his life and the sincerity to the other person, which used to be his biggest asset, becomes his worst enemy. The interest from life is wiped out on all the levels. He tries for years to forget the other person, but still the memories remain forever. In the beginning the memories hurt the person, but as time passes by, they become wonderful. Whenever he remembers the moments spent together, it brings joy to his life. Once again, life starts meaning something to the person, he develops a reason to live, becomes a kind person who enjoys helping others and a great deal of empathy is developed.

Then he analyzes his past life and feels proud that he had a great deal of love and sincerity for someone else and that same feeling helps him to get motivated for his activities. He feels blessed that this phase occurred to him and changed him forever, positively. He realizes that the failure in love wasn’t really a failure; in fact it was a success in building up his character.

Passive Mode..

2005-02-28T11:09:00.000+05:00

Have been busy at work these days, really busy. At home, I can't setup my mood to write.

My next post will be covering our trip to Peshawar last weekend, will be writing about that soon, don't know exactly when. Then, I am aiming to write something about "Spiders", but need to complete some research about them. I'll soon be creating a technical blog, on which I'll be posting mainly on Java & Flash technologies and will try to cover the best practices learnt from my experiences.

I'm planning to goto Karachi the coming weekend, really missing it.

I am proud of my Parents

2005-02-14T14:18:00.000+05:00

Parents, a blessing from Allah, what would I be if I wouldn't have the parents I have. I didn't realize their vision & approach till I was 16, but since then I have been analyzing all of it, though there had been second thoughts during all of this, but now I am 100% convinced. My love & respect for them is increasing gradually since then. From the very beginning, they have been working hard to bring us up, especially my elder brother and me. They had their own parents as well to take care of.

They had only negligible financial reserves to start with. They had a vision for both of us and they worked really hard to achieve the goals, leaving aside the constraints and personal motivation levels. They had their financial plans, which they have now achieved and all seems smooth, but it isn’t. They got us very good standard schooling and worked everyday consistently to make us better human beings. The amount of sacrifice and the amount of struggle, in terms of time, energy, money & use of intelligence is simply invaluable. One small example of their decision-making ability is that they changed our schools for a better secondary education, keeping in line with their vision. Not only they wanted us to be good at studies, but also in other areas.

From Montessori to Kindergarten (and sometimes during primary & secondary), my mother used to pick my brother and me up from school in a local bus or a rickshaw, depending upon the saving they did in the month. If you add this to the responsibilities of maintaining our home as well as cooking and other daily activities, it's a hell lot of work and pressure. But she made it look all easy.

My father worked harder and harder to make as much money as to raise both of us in the best of his control. He worked hard at his office, as well as at home to teach us, as well as doing work at home, all by himself, yet keeping everything simple.

They got me a new PC (386 dx) when I was in 9th, the price of which was not compatible with our financial position. I had a major accident when I was in 10th, fracturing two of my bones. I had major operations going on, needed a good surgeon. They arranged all of it, again sacrificing their plans financially. I was not a good student at all at that point in time and still they loved me as if I were their best child. They did everything for me during that time, more than what I needed. I still remember the support I had from my father when I was on bed rest for a few months. Add this to raising two other children within financial boundaries, and you'll imagine the pressure, and the energy required.

We also went for annual trips to several countries and I am amazed at how they managed to do that. The education after intermediate was expensive for us, as we were struggling to some extent financially. Yet, they managed it. I saw them shopping, I saw them eating, I saw them saving each & every paisa they can, yet they spent all the money they can on us to make us the best.

And now, I am proud to claim that they have succeeded in all of that, our education, financial stability, home environment, relationship with others & the family reputation, etc. My brother is a Chartered Accountant, working outside the country with one of the world's best companies. I am here in Islamabad, again in one of the better companies in Pakistan, earning a good salary. All the credit goes to our parents and all the sacrifice they had faced for us.

It's human nature that the realization comes with experience and I am sure people have gone through the age where you feel like your parents haven't done anything for you and I am quite sure that, that age is still to come (or may have come already) when one realizes the efforts of one's parents and then an era comes where you are the parent!

The age from 30 to 50 (depending upon the birth of kids) is an age for extreme struggle and careful decision-making and I haven't seen many who have gone through that with success in all areas. There's a lot to do for them, in fact I'll never be able to return fully what they had given me. I must end by saying that praying for them and doing anything they want should be one of our main goals.

Snowy Weekend

2005-02-07T18:58:00.000+05:00

Last thursday, I alongwith two friends decided to have a trip to Murree/Bhurban on Saturday/Sunday. We planned to reach Murree on Saturday, stay overnight and return back the next day after doing lunch at PC Bhurban. Murree is around 60 Kms from Islamabad and it usually takes around 1.5 hours to reach.

We left Islamabad at around 12 noon in Tahir's red Daewoo Racer with original Hankook tyres, and quickly reached the snowy mountains which started around 20 Kms before Murree. As we moved ahead, we encountered a huge traffic jam somewhere around 15 Kms before our destination. Kids & even grown-ups came out of their vehicles and started throwing snowballs on each other as well as the slow moving traffic. We were hit a few times as well. There was snow here and there, everywhere.

Finally, after 3 hours, the slow traffic was converted into low traffic and we reached Murree in no time. Mall road was closed down for all sorts of traffic, so we looked out for the first decent hotel in the way. Hence, we checked-in at Murree Tabaash Hotel and quickly turned the heater on and made ourselves comfortable. At around 6 pm, we got out of the room to check out the atmosphere at Mall road.

We reached Popeye after viewing the public around us and had coffee & soup to warm ourselves. We then decided to visit Kashmir Point and enjoy the view. In the way, we got hold of 3 ice spikes and enjoyed eating 'em. Moving forward, we enjoyed the beautiful, yet creepy pathway with snow crystals glowing in the dim light and light clouds surround. The way got more creepy, as there weren't many people going towards our destination, so we decided to take a 180 degrees turn for the sake of our healths. During our return-back to hotel, we had dinner and again enjoyed the beautiful atmosphere around us. We headed back to our hotel at around 10 pm and enjoyed the services of our temporary heater.

Indus Music was the only visible channel from a list of good channels, so we enjoyed it while playing Black Queen. At around 2 am, we decided to sleep and planned the next day. During the night, Amir realized that he'd caught cold because of which his chest was filled with a lot of pain. He couldn't sleep all night and so at around 7 am we decided to drop the plan for Bhurban and get back. But, it was snowing heavily, infact we soon realized that it had been snowing the whole night and it would be very adventurous to drive in that sort of weather. At around 10 am, it was still snowing, but there was little traffic as well. So, we decided to check-out and head back to Islamabad.

While we were leaving, I realized that the atmosphere created by the falling snow was extremely enjoyable. Wind was blowing as well, making the scene more attractive. But, we had to move, move on and head back, head back to home, home having comfort, comfort which we strive for. We left at 10:15 am!

A few tips for people who go on a snowy trip are:

-Driver & car should be excellent & confident, in order to handle the worst of the situations.
-Keep ultra-warm clothes. An extra set of everything is highly recommended.
-Keep a high buffer of time for extreme conditions.
-All the participants should be strong enough to cope up with you.

A game of perceptions

2005-01-24T11:53:00.000+05:00

After quite some time, I finally spent good amount of time at the hometown. While I was there, the thought of returning back to Islamabad next week, really made me feel bad. Throughout the week, I enjoyed the time spent there, but internally it wasn't amusing. On the last day in Karachi, I met a good friend of mine and we talked about a few things over a cup of tea. He refreshed & defined a few things related to motivation, which I used to practice somewhat, but never thought of them that way. The main idea of this post is based upon the ideas given to me by Ali Nasim, who used to be my Project Manager at connect2web. Though I have written it according to my perception and have also tried to induce some ideas according to my experience. So here goes.

Quite often we tend to dislike our surrounding due to some factors, simply because they are not in line with our expectations or how we want them to be. Surrounding is a general word and specifically speaking it comprises of people, atmosphere, weather, work, etc. The cause of our dislike might be one of these major factors not being in line. Motivation lessens whenever something is not in line with what we desire or need or simply because of the "doesn't matter" attitude. But, there are two things we can always do; either change it or adapt it. Most of the time, we can't change it because it isn't always in our control. So, we have one choice and that is to adapt accordingly. Moving forward we have two choices; either make it exciting or make it boring. Really, this choice is in our hands and we only need to realize it.

But, for that we have to set our goals or at least some rules to follow in life. Equally important, we need to think upon where we need to go. After selecting the path to follow, if we consider everything in life as temporary, we can easily comprehend each situation as a stepping-stone. This in turn induces excitement in whatever we do (even if we don't like it) and eventually we enjoy it (as it's temporary) and thus good mood occurs. The motivation comes pretty easily after that.

But, considering current as temporary might lead to lack of motivation to improve the surroundings. What to do now? Here comes another concept and that is called excellence. Again it's a game of choice and what we choose is what we get. Islam also preaches the concept of excellence in whatever we do, may it be performing the role of a husband or a wife, a father or a son or it can be as simple as making a cup of tea and can all the way go to creating a business empire. Or we can simply disqualify this concept and don't try to perform well which only leads to dissatisfaction in the end. The choice is in our hands!

Life is a game of perceptions, only the way we perceive things matters and it sets our motivation level, and I think high motivation can do wonders. One can only realize the real significance of high motivation if he's gone through a phase of negligible motivation. Intelligence, knowledge and hard work are nothing without motivation. One can even get excited in making a cup of tea by setting the right perception. On the other hand, working on some high tech space technology stuff can be boring for someone without the right perception and eventually affects the activity and the satisfaction level of the performer.

Current Telecom affairs in Pakistan..

2005-01-14T11:47:00.000+05:00

Telecard's GO CDMA, a wireless CDMA phone service, launched in Karachi on 12th January.

A friend of mine working at Telecard as GO CDMA's product manager provided me the following information:

CDMA based Wireless phone service. Competition: PTCL.
Its a wireless landline connection, that works on CDMA technology (better than GSM).
PTCL charges Rs. 2.01, they charge Rs. 0.40.
Phone is also internet enabled, meaning wireless internet across Karachi, you can carry the phone around with you.
144 kbps network supported, actual speeds are around 30 - 40k download.
Launch across pakistan within 2 months.
Lowest Internet rate package is Rs. 299 for 25 hours, highest is Unlimited for 1499.
Amazing response, sales outlets are CONSTANTLY full.

Let's see whether this service can compete with PTCL at a decent level or not.

Recently Paktel GSM also lowered its rates to the lowest around, here are the details (as they claim):

Local Call Rate 3.75 / min Airtime (does "Airtime" signify something?).
This applies to calling to any PTCL number (to any city in Pakistan), any other mobile network or from Paktel to Paktel. All calls will be charged the same local rate!

As far as I can recall, Warid Telecom is also planning for a limited launch somewhere around the end of January and a full fledge launch will be done somewhere around the mid of April.

Telenor will also be launching their service pretty soon, as far as I can recall it'll be in mid March.

With Paktel's offer & the current development going on, it's obvious that Mobilink & Ufone will have to improve their service as well as lower their rates in order to retain the market share. At least, we as customers, will most probably get a broadened choice & surely will benefit from the proceedings.

Collaborative Marketing

2005-01-08T18:58:00.000+05:00

Have been thinking about this for quite some time. Just a concept, don't know whether it's practiced or not, nor have searched about this concept. So here goes:

The concept is simple: a group of people somehow related to each other market or forward each other's ideas & works. It can be done professionally or on personal levels, for a work of art to writings to software to an idea of a business or a talent. In other words, Person A either markets for Person B in exchange to Person B's marketing for him, or for any other favor or simply nothing (just plays the role of a friend).

I have already been practicing this with a group of friends, although all of them might not know that they are actually doing this e.g. a friend recommends some other friend to a company for employment, providing a link to other blog on your blog, etc. If you observe it carefully, there is benefit for both of them here, which I think is pretty implicit and I shouldn't be explaining why.

But everyone does what is mentioned the examples; it’s not something new. The point is to extend this practice to the extent that we benefit exponentially and through lesser effort. The power of sharing ideas & concepts is pretty much underestimated by many. Alliance of the good auto-magically broadens your horizon.

A few of the benefits of this are:

No cost! Lesser Effort.
Customized direct marketing i.e. the marketer is directly presenting himself as the advocate for the work being marketed.
Better credibility e.g. the target audience has a relationship with the marketer, and every relationship has credibility on both sides.

Though, a few factors should be taken care of and one should be heedful enough to get the right results e.g. the marketer should have some credibility. Of course, key basic factors of marketing apply here as well e.g. Target audience, building up the mindset of the product, etc.

Just an idea, I shall try to come up with something more specific and a few more examples in the next version, the date of which is unknown. Comments are highly appreciated!

Place, Song, Movies..

2005-01-03T17:13:00.000+05:00

Place
Last week, it rained pretty heavily in Islamabad. On friday, we went to "Pir Sohawa", a spot that comes after Daman-e-Koh and is a must-visit place for anyone coming to Islamabad. It takes around 20-30 minutes from Islamabad, once you are on the road for Daman-e-Koh. A cool and cold place (in winters) and one has to be prepared for bad weather as well.

Song
Recently listened to the song "Haan Yehee Rasta Hai" from the Indian movie Lakshya, here are a few lines from it (Roman Urdu version):

Haan yehee rasta hai tera, tu nay pehchaana hai
Haan yehee rasta hai tera, tu nay ab jaanaa hai

Tujhay ab yeh dikhaana hai...Roke tujhko aandhiyan, yeh zameen aur aasman
Payega jo lakshya hai tera...Lakshya ko har haal mein paana hain

Mushkil koi aajaaye tau, parbat koi takraaye jo
Taaqat koi dikhlaaye tau, toofan koi mandlaaye tau
Mushkil koi aajaaye tau, parbat koi takraaye tau
Barsay chaahay amber say aag, liptay chaahay pairon say naag
Payega jo lakshya hai tera...Lakshya ko har haal mein paana hain

Motivating, yeah? The beauty of these types of songs are that they can be used for motivating anyone for anything e.g. patriotism, career, study, etc. The combination of lyrics & music is excellent.

Movies
Here are a few movies that I watched recently and would like to share with you:

The Sixth Sense - Genre: Suspense; Pace: Slow; Action: None; Rating: Family movie
A movie about a young boy who can see & communicate with dead people's spirits, but he's not fascinated by this power, rather he fears about it. As the movie progresses, a psychiatrist tries to help him and both of them discover that these dead people are trying to communicate something to the boy for a purpose & he should do something for them in order to overcome this fear.

Hidalgo - Genre: Adventure; Pace: Average; Action: Rare; Rating: Family Movie
A story of a man & a fast horse named Hidalgo who are invited to participate in a multiple day Annual Traditional Arabian race which spans across a few Arabian countries, the race terrain mostly being desert. The movie is about the physical & mental hardships faced by him & his horse as the race progresses.

Euro Trip - Genre: Comedy (American Pie style); Pace: Above Average; Action: None; Rating: Contains a few odd scenes & obscene language.
A young man, from USA, falls in love with a woman, from Germany, as he communicates with her online. He then decides to meet and tell her about it. For that he teams up with his friends to go for a trip to Europe. As they go along, they face a few mishaps but finally reach the destination & meet the girl. The entertainment in the process is too good.

Swades (Indian) - Genre: Thinking over it; Pace: Average; Action: None; Rating: Family Movie
A bright engineer working at NASA, but basically from India, comes for a trip to his village in India on his vacations. Here, on seeing the hardships faced by the locals, he decides to do some good for his home village. In between, he falls in love with a woman as well, his childhood friend. The film depicts his emotional conflict i.e. whether to stay in India or return to the US.

Next
Currently am thinking over the next post, it might most probably be technical, but strongly depends upon the mood and situation.

Triple Minded!

2004-12-29T11:05:00.000+05:00

This is not a specific post, rather a post to keep the blog alive, as I have been pretty busy these days. I am pretty confused about a few important things and it'll require time to straighten things up. The confusion is based upon a triangle: Current Work - Own Business - Game Programming.

The project I am working on in the office has now picked up some more pace and hence I couldn't write from the office much. Moreover, once a day's work at the office finishes, I get involved into game programming. For those who don't know my relationship with gaming, I am an addict when it comes to game playing and am pretty passionate about game programming.

As far as game playing is concerned, I have done much of it, so internal satisfaction is there, whereas in game programming I haven't still done much of considerable or recognitive amount. Thus, I have got hold of a person from our office to develop a game as a part-time activity. I hope the situations ahead don't limit me and the game completes. The aim is to achieve the rookie level in game programming so that opportunities of getting into the gaming industry start to open. Still, there are a lot of considerations e.g. money, opportunities, time, etc. but the motivation is there, which for me is the essence in achieving anything.

I also went on a trip to Karachi this weekend, as I started to miss family and friends, it's really hard to live away from one's family.

Luck vs. Details

2004-12-17T17:33:00.000+05:00

Over a year back, I along with 4 others were travelling in a Suzuki Mehran on Clifton Bridge, Karachi. The road had 2 lanes for each way without any separator for the opposing traffic. It was over midnight, we were driving in the fast (right) lane and all was going well. A Civic coming from the opposing side's fast lane suddenly switched to our lane for a couple of seconds travelling at a speed of over 100 kph. Omar's reflexes were sharp and he turned the car on the left side trying to avoid a collision, but the car went out of control. It went on the left side towards the bridge boundary, then on the right side all the way into the opposing lane and again on the left side back in our lane, finally stopping by in such a manner that we were 180 degrees from the original position, thus facing the traffic behind us.

For a few seconds all of us were shocked watching the traffic behind us stopped 15 yards back amazed at the scene. We got out of the car and made sure that everything was alright. Everything was fine, the car didn't even get a scratch and neither did any of us.

Consider the fact that there was traffic from the other way (without any separator), there was traffic following us, the traffic we were following and there was the left boundary of the bridge (bridge being over 50 ft above the ground beneath), and our car being out of control. How much was the probability of: the car not touching anything, not even getting a small scratch? Was it luck? Generally, everyone would say that it was our good luck that we survived, let aside the fact that there was not a single scratch on the car or on any one of us. Let's examine a few details:

What's the biological reason behind the fact that Omar's reflexes worked perfectly? Maybe he ate something that helped him or maybe he ate nothing. Or maybe he had pretty good sleep, maybe he didn't had a fight with someone, maybe his concentration on the driving was wonderful. Details!
What if the architect of the bridge planned it the way that it had only 1 lane for each side? Details!
The traffic behind us stopped, they looked like pretty educated people. The same people would probably have collided with us from behind if they weren't educated people. They may have gotten education from an institution built years back by some person. That person would probably had worked hard to earn that money. He might have spent that same money on something else. Details!
I am pretty sure something else would have happened if it were raining. Luck! Good luck!

We are a part of the system and the events that occur produce some output and trigger something which might be the input for any other event, and there are thousands of factors involving in the triggering and the execution of an event. We, as humans don't have enough processing power and memory that we can take into account even 5% of the factors and thus ignore the rest. Generally, we term these ignored factors, these details as luck. If the factors sum up to be positive for someone, they term it as good luck and when they turn out to be negative it's called bad luck.

In other words, the more detail we know the less usage of the word luck and the lesser the detail the more the usage of this word.

I don't agree with the general perception or the usage of the word luck, or for that matter the concept taken about it. The point is that luck is there, but not everything unknown is luck to us; only those factors which cannot be controlled by a human being at that point in time, such as the speed of wind, the tide of sea, the clouds, the amount of oil in an oil well, the running of time, etc. can be taken as luck. On the other hand, the amount of pollution, the number of trees, the profit in business (mostly), the questions in exam, prediction of the amount of oil in a well, etc. are all details and can be controlled to some extent by us.

Simultaneously speaking, if one human being can control something doesn't mean that other human being can do it as well e.g. a mechanic cannot control an aeroplane if he doesn't know about flying. Moreover, if he flies one with hundreds of passengers and crashes, it is not bad luck for the hurt. On the other hand, it can happen that the best pilot in the world might crash a plane if the weather becomes unlimitedly harsh. We can term it bad luck.

I had been thinking about this for a long time and there is no input taken from anything else except for a discussion or two with a friend. Hence, one may or may not agree to this perception, any ideas are most welcome.

Weekend in Lahore

2004-12-13T17:01:00.000+05:00

Jal, a Pakistani music band, who has recently released an album "Aadat", is going pretty good. Their music is entertaining and the lyrics are fine as well, but the vocalist(s) need to improve. Take a look at these lyrics (from song Panchi):

Panchi hoon, urnay do, urney do; hawaon se larney do,
Rastay galian, chor aaya mein; Bhoolay waaday tor chala main
Yeh raat abhi, dhal jaye gee; yeh baat abhi, badal jaye gee
Tanha hoon, rehnay do; rehnay do; ansoo hoon behnay do, behnay do

Got back from Lahore this morning at around 4:30 am driving a Suzuki FX through the Lahore-Faisalabad-Islamabad Motorway covering around 360 Kms in 4.5 hours. I had gone through the same journey on Friday night, but in the opposite direction, to meet Ali & Ahsan from Karachi. They reached Lahore on Friday night to work on a project for Warid Telecom who have recently setup their office in EFU House, Jail Road, Lahore. It's a simple office with average ambience and spacious desktops.

A city well known for its unique traditions and environment, Lahore is a must see for a Pakistani. A few of the areas to visit are Liberty & Fortress markets & Race course garden, not to forget Minar-e-Pakistan & gardens such as Shalimar Bagh & Bagh-e-Jinnah. Then there is M M Alam road where there are a few good restaurants such as Village, Cafe Zouk, etc. Other dining out areas are the main Food Street and Lakshmi Chowk (famous for Karahi). There is a famous pan shop called "Barray".
Lahore has a few good universities like UET, University of the Punjab, LUMS & FAST-NU, with good spacious campuses. The major roads are Mall Road, Jail Road, Abbott Road and the road beside the famous canal (don't know its name).

Though, I have heard a lot from the people living there and have read a few things about Lahore as well, but my experience so far is not that good. For one, taxis are hard to find as opposed to the superabundance of congested rickshaws (which are sometimes a headache). The city is not that well structured as compared to Islamabad, but again same is the case with other cities in Pakistan, such as Karachi.

Summary: If you are new to Lahore, you have to have a friend and a car in order to enjoy Lahore's atmosphere.

About my trip, we didn't do much besides staying in the hotel room, watching tv, talking and travelling in rickshaws! I hope to see Lahore's positives on the next visit.

Syed Humair Mudasser Qadri (Kadri with a Q :-p) and Danish Moid have started blogging as well, though they haven't written much, but I am sure we'll get some unique writings pretty soon. You can check out their blogs here:
Syed Humair's Blog
Danish Moid's Blog

inshaAllah, the true meaning?

2004-12-07T10:12:00.000+05:00

Around 8 months back, I along with a few other people took a Time Management Workshop organized by TimeLenders. It was lectured by Suleman Ahmer and was a very informative week. He is an impressive personality with his concepts and communication skills outstanding many others I have experienced. The selection of his words and the relation with Islam & the happenings is awesome. He is an NED graduate and a Masters from US, at that time working in the HR department at a multinational in Karachi. He is also the writer of book "The Embattled Innocence: Recollections of a Muslim Relief Worker". Suleman has also conducted Time Management Workshops in USA and currently in Pakistan and has also written a book on Time Management which I guess would be in the market now.

During one of his lectures, he told us about the happenings in Chechnya a few years back and his involvement as a relief worker there followed by a short story (please spare me as I don't remember the exact wordings, just grasped the concept):

"During this period, the Chechnyans were to build an hospital in such a vicinity which wasn't pretty far away from the place where the Russian army was at that moment. The Russian army was pretty large in number and thus the hospital and the locality had very little chance to survive. All the plan was made to build the hospital and to start the construction, when I approached an engineer and a few other concerned people and raised my concerns. To my surprise it didn't matter for them and one of them said "inshaAllah, the hospital will be built and will remain". I pondered on their attitude and at the end after concentrating on their response it just struck me through the mind. The true meaning of inshaAllah!"

Then, he explained to us what came to his mind and he told us the definition that the Chechnyans used, which is close to "If God doesn't stop me/us" as compared to the definition which is pretty common "If God allows me/us" or atleast is taken this way. Both the definitions mean the same, as far as my knowledge is, but the new definition shows much stronger commitment and healthier will than the old one. I hope I am not inducting any confusion in one's mind, but if you think closely and deeply it is what a Muslim's character should be, commitment & will being considered as one of the most important thing in his/her life. Summary: You should only use inshaAllah when you know you will do it and nothing can stop you except for Allah.

Let's take a few examples:

You have lent some money from a business relative and you have to give it back in a month. At that point in time you either know that you can't return on time or you don't. If you know then there must be something wrong, right? Will you use the word InshaAllah? I wouldn't have!
On a busily scheduled day, you are to meet your close friend for something he needs and you have to squeeze some of your activities in order to meet him. He asks for your commitment one day before and at that point in time you know that (because of your priorities) you have little chance of getting out some time. Will you use the word? I wouldn't have! Why? Out of your control! Priorities!
A new software project comes up and you have to work on such technologies on which you haven't worked upon, but trend says that you are pretty adaptive. You are being asked whether you take the challenge or not. You know that if you work a few extra hours weekly, you can do it! Will you use the word InshaAllah? I would have! Why? Simply because given the scenario, I know I can learn quickly and my dedication would outstand the challenge! In control!

To everyone's surprise, the Russian army backtracked and the hospital was built and is operational since then. The result of the commitment and will is there, no matter how severe the conditions would've been and no matter whether there was hope or not, the planning was done, effort was made & it was finally built! What an awesome exhibition of faith, will & dedication and leaving the rest on God! God didn't stop them, so how can the Russians?!

Since then, one question has been disturbing me, "Do I have the same spark?". Do you?

Here are a few links of writings by Suleman Ahmer:
http://www.geocities.com/mutmainaa/story/city_girl_doll.html
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0795/9507012.htm
http://islamicbookstore.com/a4237.html
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0111/S00023.htm

Body Builder Redivivus

2004-12-06T11:25:00.000+05:00

red·i·vi·vus (adj.): Come back to life; revived: “defenders of the Imperial Presidency redivivus” (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.).

Till around 12 years back, I used to play cricket pretty regularly. We used to play near our home; I was the captain of our team and the key player may it be batting, bowling or fielding. During that period, we had a match with a team of some older guys. I still remember when I was batting and the opponent wicket-keeper wasn't really happy with my batting, he passed a comment on me to other person "Look at how skinny he is". I looked at him for a moment, looked down and my concentration returned back to the game.

But that was not it! From that day onwards realizing that it's true, my nature disturbed me not to give a chance to anyone else. I increased my diet and after some time started a few pushups daily, not proper exercise just a bit here and there.

After around 6 years, it was time for me to carry out a full work-out plan. I joined a gym and since then, I have been in & out of it. As far as my fitness and shape is concerned I have came a long way through. The people who are with me from that time back say that there has been a major change.

During this period of around 6 years, there had been many gaps with a couple of gaps even going upto 10 months, hence effectively it has been a 2 and a half years exercise. The last good work-out period I had was a year back, with Humair & Shahg, lasting around 6 months effectively in a span of around a year. It was a pretty consistent era, both technically and weight respective, at least relatively. But after that, I have not been able to settle in with some good consistent exercise.

Recently, after thinking about it too much and examining my daily activities, I decided to join Bodyonics Gym, F-10 Markaz. The registration fee is Rs. 1000/- (negotiable) followed by a monthly fee of Rs. 1000/-. It's pretty expensive as compared to Karachi, but it's very good & nicely maintained, though there's nothing else apart from the exercise apparatus.

As I write, I have already skipped 4 days exercise, but I am confident and hopeful that I'll carry it out for some time and break the barriers in inducting some consistency. The force inside me will revive and I shall become the Body Builder Redivivus!

Mountainous Weekend

2004-11-29T13:33:00.000+05:00

Back in August we had a trip to Kaghan Valley, plan of which also included a trip to Nathiagali. But due to lack of time, we had to drop it. Consider it luck or consider it a result of sequence of events that I got an opportunity to be there this weekend.

In the previous week, Ahsan Ashja (currently at connect2web), Haroon Atiq & Danish Anjum (fastians batch of 1998) came to Islamabad from Karachi to attend Zulfiqar Naqvi's (fastian batch of 1998) Wedding ceremony. The plan was already made that a tour would follow the events and that they'll leave Islamabad on Thursday and I had to join them in Murree on Friday night.

I booked a seat in a 14-seater Daewoo van which costs Rs. 80/- from Rawalpindi to Murree. It's a nice van providing a comfortable journey. We reached Murree in around one and a half hour and as soon as I got out of the van, a taxi driver approached me to get me to the hotel. After a few words he recognized me as the one who'll be joining the rest of the crew from Karachi, interesting yeah?

It was very cold there that if it had been raining it wouldn't be water coming down. I reached Faran Hotel at which the rest of the three people were already staying and waiting for me. Then I came to find out that there was another friend of theirs with his wife staying in a different hotel and they'll be with us for the whole tour. A thought came to my mind that the tour would be ruined, but it proved wrong in a few hours.

After a couple of hours, we got out for a cup of coffee at Popeye, followed by a dinner and yet another coffee. At around 12, we were back in the hotel room and started playing cards (game being Court piece, also known as Double Siri). Haroon had to goto a school for a speech at 8 in the morning, so we decided to limit our games, but due to our fun-loving and adventurous nature we didn't sleep at all!

The next day, after having some sleep in the morning, we booked a land cruiser for Rs. 2800/- for a whole day at Nathiagali. In our way, we visited Ayubia where we also had a cable car ride. An airgun/balloon game was also played by me, though not knowing the rules, I was off for emptying the whole board, though I requested him to discontinue in the middle, but he resisted. In the end just 3 out of around 40 balloons were left which I couldn't finish (somehow!), thus I had to pay Rs. 100/- to him.

At around 4 pm we reached Nathiagali and started finding a nice hotel. This time of the year you won't find many people staying there, hence hotel rates aren't high as well. This is because of the v. cold weather and no snowfall (hence not a win-win situation). We got hold of an average hotel (Afaq Hotel in the main market) for a reasonable rate and had lunch cum dinner in an open restaurant at around 5. The scenery was great!

At night, when an era of boredom started, a request was made by Zaid's wife to have a small trip to Donga Gali, but to our surprise it was closed down and there wasn't anyone there. We returned back to the hotel, played cards till 12 and slept. At around 6:30 sunday morning, we returned back to Islamabad in our land cruiser.

All in all, it was a very good, though short, trip and everyone enjoyed everything about it, may it be cold weather, the comments passing, the journey, the sight seeing or friendship building.

Work when people are watching!

2004-11-19T07:10:00.000+05:00

I met one of our batchmates living in Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Tahir Masood, a few days ago. We have been to a few places since we met. A few days ago, we (plus Zahin & Khurram) went to Hot Spot, an ice cream parlour which is at a place mostly covered with trees, resembling a hide-out style. It's a pretty good place to visit after dinner, especially for couples, located in the area opposite to Jinnah Super. There is also a Hot Spot in Karachi near Evolution.

Getting back to the topic (genre being humour with some message), I shall start by mentioning that there are four types of people usually found at work:

One who work when there is work and chill out otherwise
One who don't work much even when there is work and it shows
One who don't work much even when there is work and they pretend being busy (at times extremely busy)
One who work when there is work and even otherwise

I belong to the 1st category and a very few times to the 2nd & 4th one . The main focus of this post will be the 3rd category and I am using this as a chance to embarrass them!

I have seen many people who belong to this category and I assume you have also experienced such observations. There are a few characteristics of these people, some of which I have noted are:

They usually come pretty formally dressed and are showy (I guess 50% of their salaries go in presentation).
They don't get out of their seats much.
Whenever you approach them, they open up something of which they don't have any idea about but, they assume it would create an impression.
At lunch or tea or any other casual meeting, when asked about work, they try to impress everyone around by using diplomatic words about their work and they'll only be specific on things which everyone else doesn't know about (and they thought we won't realize this?).
At times they'll murmur or position their hands in such a way that the person watching them gets an impression that some rocket science is going on (I laugh at most of them).
They'll try to talk in English many a times not realizing the talent they possess in talking rubbish (talking in English -> in Pakistan)
They'll try to impress the higher management and they'll do anything for it. Then they'll impress their peers exaggerating about their relationship with the management (They don't know that the management discusses about them with other people).

Enuph! Let's move ahead with the reasons as to why they do this? I think it's due to their lack of vision & sincerity, purely materialistic approach and the misalignment of their focal point, and they think they are too smart! They don't seem to understand that sooner or later everyone (or at least a person) will find out what they are made of.

Due to human nature, which is very complex to me, people tend to attract towards a high profile job not realizing the pre-requisite capabilities. But no! They think they are some sort of a Superman and take up the job even when they not know an atom about it. Hence, when it comes to fulfilling the tasks, most of the time they use their nominal creativity and skills to transfer the ball to other's court (in Urdu we say "topi transfer").

It might take a day or a decade to realize the incapabilities of the person and it depends upon the talent of the subject, but as far as I have seen, the curtain is raised sooner or later and everything becomes clear to the concerned. This leads to the discontinuation of responsibilities at the current location. But the story never seem to end, there comes an era of job hunt, during which they are successful in impressing some other employer through the usage of their Mastery in Bullshit Arts.

And the same story goes on and on, everywhere (a theory). It's a strange world full of strange people finding strange ways to produce strange results (this is not related to everything else...or is it?).

I would appreciate comments on this post, so that we all have a clear understanding of such people, who knows I might end up writing a research paper :P

Vacation in a Flash

2004-11-18T08:32:00.000+05:00

"Ahhh!" was the feeling when I reached the Karachi airport. Finally, the long awaited, though for a short period, vacation was about to start. The weather was hot, the sky clear and the friends & relatives near. As soon as I reached home, I started communicating with all the friends and made plans for the whole stay. My agenda also included shopping for the cold weather.

From friday till Wednesday, it was a total of 5 and a half seconds in a true sense. The attraction of parties with friends and relatives didn't allow me to think twice before attending them. It's really weird how such lively & joyous moments pass by this fast. All of this left a rule for me to follow for the moments to come, Enjoy every bit of the happy moments because they may not be available for the majority of time and you might regret even a lost second. And once you get to avail these spans, pay thanks to the Almighty for them.

On the last day, I went out for shopping, with a very limited time. I got hold of a woollen sweater from Bonanza, they have a pretty decent variety with an affordable price.

Then came the time to say goodbye, which was the only thing I hated during this tour, for I had its fear from the very beginning.

"Ahhh!" was the feeling when I reached the Islamabad airport. I sighed and moved forward establishing yet another concept about life.

Vacation to the hometown, finally!

2004-11-12T11:32:00.000+05:00

"Seat belts, please!", the van driver said when we, the participants of the orientation at our office were seated, to be taken to the company's warehouse. Shahg was right in his views about Islamabad's people, I must say that this guy has killer analytical skills.

I have tasted the nature of people here at Islamabad and I can easily say that they are friendlier and more helpful, relaxed & satisfied as compared to the people living in Karachi. Of course there are exceptions everywhere. Though, Karachi has its own advantages which I'll formulate soon.

As I write with only 6 hours to depart for Karachi, my hometown, to spend Eid Holidays, I am filled with anxiety and the excitement to meet the people whom I have been with a long time. It's only 15 days since I am here and it already seems a long time. Now I can imagine the mental strength of the people living far away from their countries.

I am planning to be back here in a week and would try to post something in the meantime, if the time & situation allow me. Eid Mubarak!

Nothing but Creations!

2004-11-09T10:24:00.000+05:00

This would be a very strange post to most people and I guess would be pretty relevant to the rest.

In our daily life we observe many creations of God e.g. the sun, moon, stars, trees, animals, mountains, clouds, sea,....the list never seem to end. But because of the everyday norm, we don't think over it much and are careless, except for a few people. A few questions might elaborate the point:

-While going to work would you stop by and think over the energy of the greenery around you?
-Would it sound sane to you if someone stops in the middle of the road pondering over the sky?

Have you ever thought what lies underneath the earth's surface? What lies under the sea, above the clouds or inside an atom? On the highest level we might easily derive that it's a whole world with a system of its own and with smaller components who work together in the system. Think over it for a couple of minutes, imagine the world inside, imagine its hugeness!

Being human beings, the best of all creations, we have the brains to understand almost everything. What really is our end? What can we do? What is our worth? Can we overcome our basic constraints e.g. eating, drinking, sleep, etc. and let's not talk about controlling our minds. We basically mould ourselves according to the constraints we are living in and that's all we can do. In other words, we can't get out of our constraints.

Some of you might oppose by saying that humans have even gone into space, oil exploration under the sea is in progress, etc. My question would then be, what is the limit? Have you still reached the limit? What then, when the limits will be reached?

This all arrives to the realization that we might be the best creation, better than any other creature, we can invent rockets and control animals, but we can't overcome our own limitations and constraints and that we are nothing but just creations.

Though, the conclusion isn't really what it looks like and I hope you are not demoralized by these words. The ideal conclusion would be the realization that a) we are just creations and b) hence should imply more closeness to the Creator.

1st Day @ LMKR, Impressed, but..

2004-11-01T12:17:00.000+05:00

Islamabad reminds me of the memorable tour we had in which we covered Kaghan Valley, NWFP (areas like Naran, Shogran, Thandiani, etc.) as well. This we included four males:

Syed Humair Mudasser Qadri- FASTian, Batch of 1999 (Working at EzValidation (formerly Dreamznet), Karachi)
Sarfaraz Ahmed - FASTian, Batch 0f 2000 (Working at ITIM, Karachi)
Muhammad Ali Shah - FASTian, Batch of 2000 (Studying at Chalmers, Sweden)
& Myself

Memories!

I had already skipped the bus which comes to pick up at around 6:45 am. It was around 7:15 am while I was waiting for Khurram Majeed (batchmate from FAST and a very old friend) to pick me up from the hostel for office, when I thought about my recent past life and compared it with the present. Man changes a lot with the environment! A few of the people reading this will understand my exact point.

The office is located in F-5 sector, just beside Marriot Islamabad, 3rd floor of Software Technology Park I, and is around 15 minutes drive from the hostel. We reached the office at around 7:45 am, my first day at LMKR. After spending sometime at the reception, which is pretty spacious and quite nicely decorated (especially the wall clocks showing different country times) I was taken in the interview room to sign on the employment contract. After that I was taken to the cafe on seeing which, I was impressed. It contains a seating area like every cafe has, a kitchen, a smoking area, a pool table area, an internet access area and a TV lounge area (having approx 60" TV), all covering somewhere around 175 sq. yards area. Not kidding, but this much space can contain around 2-3 normal software houses of Karachi.

The office is structured in a way that different departments are partitioned accordingly. The decoration & ambience (love this word) is good, music played adding value as well, in the work areas as well as the washrooms. The dress code is formal & most of the people wear a tie and a few of them wear suits. Almost everyone has a flat screen thin LCD monitor, a good seat to sit on and a spacious desk. The scenery from the office windows is a good one with Margalla Hills view.
Etc.
Too much for a software organization in Pakistan, yeah?

As far as culture is concerned, the management is pretty strict about employees following the right timings in everything, dress code, body odour, office looks, employee behaviour, etc.
The operations management, also I guess in the board of directors, as far as I have perceived, think differently. They don't start thinking from the finance perspective. Take e.g. LCD monitors, I heard from some guy that when asked a board of director the reason for replacing normal ones, he was told in order to improve the looks of the office. Of course they aren't placed there for that only, but it gives the idea of the management's style, believe me I have seen the other extreme. There are many other examples of stylish stuff without which work can be done by the employees, but with which things beyond can be achieved, things which most of the software organizations in Pakistan fail to achieve, things which tend to motivate average people to reach the levels of excellence.

Just finished with our orientation sessions. Everything seems structured in one day's experience here, hope it stays the same but common sense should previal sometimes. When is the key!

F-10 Markaz (Center), Islamabad

2004-10-30T22:26:00.000+05:00

The place I am writing from right now is an internet cafe located in the vicinity of F-10 Markaz, Islamabad. The place I am living in currently is LMKR's hostel, a large house, with shared rooms and what else, it's very near to the market here.

About the hostel, there are some facilities/services provided such as cook, TV, table tennis, badminton, ACs & heaters, etc. There is a cemetry just beside the hostel, in an approx. 1500 sq. yards area, I wonder what's a cemetry doing in a residential area and that too in F-10. Strange!

The F-10 markaz is a good place to shop for daily consumed items, there is almost every bank's branch in it, but there seems to be a lacking of good restaurants, cloth shops, gaming arenas, etc. My favorite outlets here are Best Day Super Store & Bodyonics (gym) plus I am trying Paradise Tailor here, if he's good he'll also add in my favorites. I have heard some good things about a couple of bakeries as well, one's Bakewell, though haven't been there yet.

Tuesday:
I found a gaming arena (finally!), it's called Striker Xes Gamer. There is a kid and his father who are running the shop and they can't speak Urdu much, the decoration is not that good, but the PCs are good enough. Whatever! It's a gaming arena after all.

Packing up the stuff!

2004-10-29T02:40:00.000+05:00

With a day remaining in the departure to Islamabad, to join the new company, I am already feeling the loneliness which is waiting to haunt me for a few initial days. Nah, it's not that bad! Maybe it is. Exactly, this is the confused state of my mind currently so I am better off being somewhat careless on these thoughts.

Karachi is one of those places which have people who make maximum use of what is available, depending upon the constraints. The same applies to the social life and the people conducting the socials. Hence, I will surely miss this social life there in Islamabad, at least for a few months. Though it's pretty obvious that other aspects of life are better in Islamabad than the hometown. E.g. the corporate culture as far as software industry is concerned, the standard of life, city structure, atmosphere, weather, profile of the dwellers, etc. and what else, it's the capital!

Having said that, there are a few things which can be counted as cons for a person like me. Firstly, the social life, then we have the lack of outing places, the standard & profile of people living there (it seems hard to get good company), the distance from family and most of the time being lonely. I hope there are good gamers out there in Isloo.

Packing the stuff these days physically and mentally, yet to give final touches to my baggage.

**Next: Will be writing the things learnt in the new city, from one of its internet cafes.

Myself

2004-10-22T01:16:00.000+05:00

Family name being Kasbati which means "Hardworker" my full name is, as you might have noticed, Muhammad Salman Kasbati. My hometown is Karachi, Pakistan. I am a computer science graduate, degree being BCS (Dec 2000), from one of the better institutes in Pakistan, FAST.

After graduation, I joined CresSoft Karachi, one of the leading software houses of Pakistan, as a Software Engineer and during that completed my MCS degree. In late 2002 I joined another company named connect2web, Karachi. Have been working there till the mid of October 2004. Recently accepted an offer from a company in Islamabad by the name of Landmark Resources, I'll be working as a Senior Software Engineer there from November 2004.

My activities include solving problems, computer gaming (Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, strategy games), sports (football, table tennis, weight training, etc.) and providing help to all sorts of people in sorting out their problems :), depending upon the time left from work & sleep.

States of Mind

2004-10-21T02:52:00.000+05:00

It's funny how a person performs same action differently at different times depending upon the state of his/her mind. This happens with me all the time and I am at this point in time assuming that others experience this as well.

The things which get affected may include the confidence level, sharpness, reactions, communication, etc. Like e.g. my verbal english fluctuates from really-bad to above average in almost every english conversation I have, may it be an interview, a meeting with directors of our company or just a chat with a friend. In this particular case, I have noted that the confidence level fluctuates which creates a confusion in expressing words in addition to the confusion in selecting them.

Having said that, there's this other concept "Practice makes perfect" and which at some extent is true for many situations, but really the baseline in my opinion is the state of mind. This arrives us to the questions such as what makes up this "state of mind"? What effects it? Can we control it or get a grip on it?

***Let me think over it..I'll be back in a few days on that.