Respect

So there you stand in a line; a mountain, you and an insect. To you the mountain is well, gigantic and you feel so small that you shrivel uo inside and turn towards your Lord and Master saying His praises that indeed He is bigger than all. That is awe!

On the other hand, to an insect, say an ant you are a mountain and well mountain is another mountain but the insect thinks only about that crumb of sugar which it has to carry past you to its mates….and irrespective of the obstacles, irrespective of results and irrespective of what might happen it carries on towards, what it calls, its home. That is self respect!

And there our dear Allah mian says, (…and i am not quoting just giving a gist) that He has created us so we may explore and expand our intellect…….those of us who are ignorant are not momins…

So if you could see life as an observer of a crystal ball then you realize that there is always someone either bigger and better than you or someone smaller and not so good as you…always…..BUT…each of you has its own destiny to search, its own ‘Self respect’ to command. This is how nature helps us to stay sane….by letting us know that we all are important in whatever small way and to whomever who needs us.

Mark(et) my words!

I thought that MBA in marketing would be fun…don’t get me wrong…it is….but then again the engineer/logician in me refuses to die and alas to the utter mortification of my confident claim to be otherwise I rather enjoy the sole finance subject “financial econometrics” that i have selected. Anyways, just in case your thoughts go on ina tangent whether this is about the subject mentioned let me put a noose on your thoughts and lasso you back to my take on the marketing subjects that i am studying.

Consumer behavior is by far the most favorite of mine….probably because like everyone else i take myself to be an expert on human psyche and their habits…(As if!)

I love brand management…it’s fun and full of stories…and who dislikes a story or two…perhaprs with a bit of scandals and intrigue thrown in..the mighty power clashes and publicity wars adding to the action…It’s not entirley without its merits

Industrial marketing is all about the high and the mighty….negotiations and deals…..the nitty gritty of fueling the businesses’ business….i think i have an affinity for that too

Project management is after all ‘project‘ management  and who has a life without projects…be it only be getting my lil daughter’s bag ready for a trip away…so that’s not bad either…

SO WHAT!!! …..is the purpose you may ask, is of writing this collection of marketing courses intro’s ….just that I have realized…a lot of it is actually practical based and should be taught out in the field rahter than within the class rooms…The bug that crawls my skin is that, these great subjects are based on a lot of talks….talks…research….talks….and well yeah….talks……

That gets to me…discussion is one thing but application is entirely another for a degree such as this..marketing..”For the people and by the people” (With all due respect to the American democracy ). I’m not bad in class, not very good either, coz lets face it i have a hard time rattafying theories but yes i like analyses ( UHOH the engineer in me). So though I am learning a lot (and you learn even in the lamest of the situations) I would much rather go heads on in the market and fling the theoris there than  in a rather overtly (though not entirely true) confident manner in the airconditioned comfort of the class room.

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P.S. this doesn’t mean that my prospective employers should take me to be an illeterate windbag…. this is just a prelude to……

P.P.S hehe i love teaser marketing

Brother Dear!

 

Note: This one’s for my brother who went to Australia yesterday for his studie……. Love you Doggy!

 

And so we waved a wistful goodbye

As you hoisted your bags; got ready to fly

And in that instant

That lift of your face; the glint in your eye

And that slight tremble of your wave

Pleaded to call you back

To stop your advent

And though our hands were raised and

Heads were bent,

And clothes still carried your scent,

Though eyes bespoke the floods behind

Heart ached and shattered the mind

Our lips were sealed

Words were locked

To let you soar, set you free

To let you find your destiny

To make you a man you wish to be

 Though your steps faltered

And our insides crashed

We stood tall, carrying a smile

Veiling that salty, painful tear

As you walked away to the new worlds

My brother dear!

 

 

Renaissance

Its funny how a stray mind can draw a specifically vivid conclusion….. This time it was brought on by the ever increasing and deeply disturbing socioeconomic teeter tottering of PakLand. There I was worrying, and without any use of worrying that a strange analogy of post revolution France and present day Pakland hit me…

When France was at its worst and people were dying for a morsel of bread …and when Mary Antoinette suggested eating cakes that there was Renaissance. That was the time, in the dark ages when expressionists and artists came forward and that was the time when people started to come up with having an opinion!

And now when I look around I see more and more of youth going towards alternative careers; arts, drama,  fashion, eventmanagers, bloggers and advertisers and whatnot…..because it  is in these rollercoasters of flying and dipping emotions that people feel a need to express…it is in the fear that we need to vent out what’s pent up and frustrates.

Maybe just maybe these times of turmoil and agony are a forerunner of another renaissance…a renaissance which will shape the face of arts of expression in this part but one which may be so strong and opinionated in itself that it may entirely snudge the clear lines of culture and values that we  have so long held so dear and beloved.

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err does that make any sense….uh who cares…i was just expressing what i felt

I was here ;-)

Well so getting married can sure put a huge dent in your social and personal life calender …and boy does it make you go about in circles…so anyways here i am with internet access for a limited time so i thought i’d drop a word or two just to let my ardent readers (yeah right )know that i am not dead hehe..just plain busy, putting make-up on my face and attending all those post wedding parties…whew that’s tiring…hope the blogging world’s all good..

Be back with something that makes sense a bit later, till then…pray for the people in Gaza, the sensitive Pak and India border conditions and yeah the intermittent quakes that are cming around the globe :-S Allah mian bless us all, aameen

Think…”Tomorrow”!

I am tuned onto FM91 as i try to finalize this glossary for the manual that I just recently completed. DJ Sophie, who has a very sweet voice btw  is pretty excited and on the roll since she’s celebrating Children’s Day and playing all those jovial nice tunes… Uptown girl, you got the touch, pappu can’t dance heheh…but what suddenly instigated me to open this window and write this quick post is this thought that she quoted and i have made it the ‘Thought of the Day’:

“We don’t inherit the Earth from our acestors….we borrow it from our children”

Call it hitting it home!….If we should start thinking of our endowments as legacies that have to be passed on in all their shimmer and glory then we’ll never plunder them as we do, thinking we are the last & only link in the blessed of beings.

Thinking of those who’ll come after us will teach us to cherish what we have today and nurture it so that those of tomorrow will be able to enjoy it too…being selfish can leave us alone and miserable since all the joys lies in sharing!!

‘Save the world and Go Children!! they make our world so innocent and bright

A byte into “the real World…”

Note: The text ahead may make no sense whatsoever and tht’s pretty ironic since it’s all about logic….so if you’ll read ahead with a mind to understand something then think again

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Was listening to a team mate of mine as he explained how the different musical instruments were mixed after recording using that signal mixing console. I asked him about adjusting the ‘bass’ and ‘treble’ levels and that what in God’s name were those two knobs for.

He launched in on a summarized explanation of how the low, deep notes like that of drums are controlled by playing with the ‘bass’ while high pitched, shrill sounds sometimes like that of guitars are smoothed over by the ‘treble’…As he carried on about how the inputs should just match the range set for any of these or other options…my mind flicked through the graphs and figures in  Digital Signal Processing and the responses of various filters that we studied in them.

I smiled in spite of myself coz i had always loved those subjects that made logical sense   I remember i was in eternal awe of ‘Digital Logic Design’. A friend and I were making ’4-way traffic signal’ for our DLD project and for the life of me i couldn’t understand how to convert the zeroes and ones into blinking , working lights…..until the journey from deciding logical states to truth tables, then equations and k-maps gave us our circuit…amazing!! the natural highs could be so damn exhilerating!.. The world of digital electronics has always mesmerized me because at the base of it lies the simple concept of presence or absence of a signal, very precisely timed. There is that software to hardware interfacing along with the tiny wonder machines called microprocessors and Digital signal processors that could do something as simple from sending a signal to an LED to acting as a complex speech transaltor… but at the base of these all lies the logic which tells when to or when not to send a signal.

In mathematics it’s a zero or one, in Computing a bit and in physical world a mere switch that turns on or off according to the defined patterns and that brings me to the wonder of having just the ‘right’ pattern…the proper sequence can regulate something as ordinary as accounting, tagging and shelfing of books to something as complex as booting of a pc…so at the apex of it or at the root of it all lies the sequence in which one command follows another.

I’m so keyed up now that i can’t even put together a decent and literarily respectable sentence to express my admiration for the magic, the tricks that logic and numbers are capable of…. I dont know if there is even a central idea to this post…it’s just a random set of words to pay my ode to virtual world of bits and frequencies that are making the companies run, control engineering the milk that goes into tetra packs, refreshing your monitor every fraction of a millisecond and ofcourse teaching u to be v careful and sure coz small mistakes in this environment mean big troubles in our world!!

PakHeadlines.com launched!

Note: Here is a cool new venture by a group of young , budding webpreneurs for all you newspaper buffs :-p out there…This is wht they say:……………….

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To work or not to Work…THAT is the question!

Note: This piece of article is basically intended for young women and ladies of my age group but well no harm if guys read and drop their valuable comments too

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It’s my last month here at TPS and I have been working forever more diligently than this past year…guess the feeling of no strings attached sort of gives you the boost and liberty to work at ease. Deciding to quit my job wasn’t an easy decision and I am sure most of us ladies out there face this confusion when they are getting married and are unsure of almost everything …But to me this is the right decision!….and this does not mean that I advocate ladies sitting at home and doing nothing besides cooking and putting goop on their faces ….

No my point of view is merely that when u are starting into a life, u ought to give it ur full, undivided attention so that u can understand the novelty of it all and mould yourself accordingly. Many of my friends and colleagues suggested I should have taken an extended leave…but I thought that knowing that I had this thing at my back I would be more prone to cling to it and if I ended up resigning anyway at the end of leave that would be like breaching a commitment I had made with my firm of returning back while they held my position and hire no new resources…. It’s like maybe these two to three months while you enjoy the roasts and drinks at wedded blitz parties thrown for you, someone out there might just be looking desperately for a means to earn his or her bread.

Office life is like a full time thing, it requires you give it it’s due attention unaware of the sliding hands of the clock or wondering if you ironed your husband’s evening clothes or not:-P Well no I am not sure if that always happens because I have seen many a smart ladies, married, who work at office and at home….but I have seen myself…I work at office and yeah man enjoy the luxuries at home….Akhir piari Amma hain na  

Argh this article seems to be only opening up more arguments than I am bracketing close…and I only just wanted to say that if you have confidence in your abilities and potential and are lucky enough to develop an understanding with your partner later on and decide that you can juggle two or more responsibilities then you should not be very much afraid of leaving your job initially…..because you can always get another one …..or your current employers can always hire you back when u are ready. Also in the meanwhile there are always those great freelance opportunities that you can work for right from home….Oh there are a dozen things that you can do, provided you have that… umm… ‘gumption’ (hehe thnx Saqib for the addition to my vocab) to not let your brilliant brain go to waste….. It’s just that in the beginning I think the new people with whom u are getting associated should be given that prime importance and respect because they are making you their prime object of attention….and as things go by….as time flies you can always get what you want provided you always have the purity of intention, thoughts and will

Costs and Values!

 

The reason I gave up on Accounting and Economics was that I just could not stand the thought of measuring the worth of everything for its monetary value. Calcualting the goodwill and efficiency of an employee and adding it to the company’s gross income filled me with disgust for all the subjects of finance…..but lets not be too hasty to judge my point of view….for, a thought process a few days back had somewaht smudged my sharp opinions.

Money has never been a thing of prime importance to me and wanting to be in possession of new toys, gadgets or accessories never been my habit…yet this can easily be owed to the fact that I always get the things of basic necessity and continual luxury unasked for. My Baba and Amma have made sure that there is nothng left in life that their children could say “Ah i Wish…” for and to that end sooner or later all sorts of things have been provided to us. It is said that you can seldom know the importance of anything unless you have experienced the absence or loss of it…so Alhamdulillah not having experienced those deep pangs of craving for the material things, i have always thoughts the people who are running after cellphones, old, cars, ipods or what nots as….well silly. I thought they did not know that to be happy you just need to have around you the right people at the right time and a lot of creativity.

But few days ago, with this crash in the value of Rupee i had a revelation on me…what if the dollars account really did freeze and people who have their paychecks coming in the foreign currency could not get their month’s worth of dough to buy their bread and butter?? ….. A person who earns and i mean earns faithfully…collects each penny almost literally at the expense of a drop of perspiration of his/her brow. So what if a month’s salary should be held back?…

What if a fan bought by a peddlar’s collected tens and fivers suddenly breaks down?

What if an old, old beggar finds enough strength to buy himself a rs 25 bun kebab and he falls somewhere and loses his sole source of sustenance down a drain??

What if? and these what ifs can ruin the peace of your mind but alas they keep you conscience and common sense alive. It is this thought of losing the things that are vital in life to be able to live respectably or simply…just live that makes ‘money’ such a holy obsession…because it’s money that buys…and though it can not buy happiness it can atleast buy us the articles that may induce that feeling.

I still don’t find it in me to give money that apex for being the propeller behind a smooth life but i do respect it’s stature and am scared of it’s power….It’s is no man’s friend.

So whenever i am allowed to exercise my right to choose the little comforts of life i ponder, assess and analyze the resources and then apply it to the fullest …because today i can tomorrow i may not….Yet i try never to make them my means to survive….they are because of me, i am not because of them!!

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Thought of the Day by Me

Things of temporary and fluctuating values can never be held on to…and i believe human can always adapt so let’s hold on to something timeless and eternal….like faith and love!!