Celebration of Eid-ul-Azha

The nation is going to celebrate Eid-ul-Azha tomorrow with the usual religious fervor. While it is one of the two most important festivals of the Muslim world over, the true essence of Eid-ul-Azha demands of us not so much of indulgence and merrymaking but understanding the true spirit of the occasion. There is need to rise beyond the rituals and understanding the inner message of the practice. It is a day to move beyond rituals and symbolism, to expurgate the evils in us and commit to ourselves to austere living and sharing our fortunes with those that are not as fortunate as we are. Let that be our resolve.

The day, as ordained by the Prophet of Islam, perpetuates the act of sacrifice of Prophet Abraham and his son Ismail, both of whom readily submitted to the command of Allah to sacrifice unto Him that which was most precious to Abraham. In it contains the true meaning of faith and submission to the will of the Almighty, as demonstrated by Abraham the Prophet and in equal degree displayed by his son who too was destined to be a prophet of Allah. 

The aim of sacrifice, like all other fundamentals of Islam, is to imbibe piety and self righteousness. It also promotes the spirit of sacrifice for a right cause. To explicate its purpose, Allah says in the Quran, "It is not their meat, nor their blood, that reaches Allah; it is their piety that reaches Him."

Regrettably, we have become oblivious of the significance of the practice that the Prophet of Islam reestablished amongst his followers. We are so much taken up with ostentatious behavior, with display of wealth, with outdoing the other in the size and the amount spent on the sacrificial animal, that we have failed to inculcate in ourselves the spirit of sacrifice for a greater and righteous cause, of patience and forbearance, of subservience to Allah. 

This a time when there is huge movement of people all over the country wishing to join their dear and near ones on this occasion. And we seem to be caught unprepared both at the public and private level to cope with the pressure every time, repeatedly. And we are also unprepared to cope with the law and order particularly in terms of providing public safety. 

While we are celebrating the auspicious day, there is need for all of us to exercise caution, to be extra careful on the roads. And the government must also provide the necessary support in terms of extra transport to meet the heavy rush of travelers. It is also essential that full security, both in the capital and on the highways, is provided during the period before and a few days after the Eid to ensure public safety. 

On the occasion of Eid-ul-Azha I wish all of the well-wishers Eid Mubarak.

Killing of Two Brothers in Sialkot

Two brothers were killed brutally in public in Sialkot, Pakistan. In Sialkot, Pakistan, people tried to take justice in their own hands by teaching a lesson to two brothers, a bit too brutally, for injuring four people at a cricket match.

The incident took place when two brothers ended up in a brawl in a local cricket match and they ended up injuring four people. The charged mob got out-raged and started beating the two brothers. The beating got so brutal that the two brothers lost their lives and all the people of Sialkot considered it a lesson well taught.

There was even a police officer present at the event but he did nothing to stop the beating.
The Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry took sue Mott notice of the Sialkot beating and has slammed the police officer who was present at Sialkot beatings over torture and killings of the brothers and has summoned the Secretary Establishment for action against the police.

The Sialkot beatings and eventual killings have sparked up resentment amongst the people of Pakistan for such lawlessness.

On the 4th day of Holy month of Ramadan a mob in Sialkot has mercilessly beaten to death two young brothers, 15 years old Hafiz Mughees and 19 years old Hafiz Muneeb, who were alleged to be robbers (later on proved that they were not). People beat them barbarically with sticks and metallic rods for hours and let them bleed and die on the road. The dead bodies were dragged and later hanged upside down at the nearby roundabout.

The brutal act had happened in the presence of Sialkot District Police Officer Waqar Chauhan and eight other police officers who watched as silent audience. The gruesome video footage of this horrific incident is aired by private TV channels repeatedly which definitely is too much to bear for the deceased family or even common man that their hearts burst into tears.

Survival of the dead Review

George Romero has totally lost it. In fact, his latest zombie opera, Survival of the Dead, is so bad that I’m beginning to doubt he ever really had it. Romero, like everybody’s other least-favorite George, has been tainted by his early success, and is now every bit the carelessly misguided, ineffectual storyteller Lucas is.

It’s actually astounding that Survival of the Dead comes from someone who’s been in the business for forty years, because it positively reeks. The writing is dense and talky, with stilted, masturbatory dialogue, and some of the laziest attempts at horror I’ve ever seen. Not only is Survival not scary, it’s not entertaining, and for all its attempts at social commentary, it’s not even insightful.

It’s like Romero spent the last few decades reading essays on Night and Dawn of the Dead endlessly stroking his own ego as both a Master of Horror and a respected sociological voice. But where his early Dead films were dedicated zombie pieces with a muted social backdrop, Diary and Survival of the Dead are full-blown, pretentious soapbox films that just so happen to start the walking deceased. In fact, the big zombie sequences this time around are used more too artificially herd our protagonists than they are to exhilarate audiences. 

But even the most over the top kill is rendered meaningless when it’s executed at the hands of such uninspired characters. Romero’s cast is comprised of uniformly cartoons, stereotypical surrogates for human beings that prove not only that Romero doesn’t know his craft, but also that he doesn’t particularly understand people. It might not be so embarrassing if he wasn’t desperate to stay relevant, but he jams in a superfluous teenager who says things like.


Romero’s rotting carcass of a career. The man simply cannot write and relate a coherent story anymore. It’s tough to even summarize Survival of the Dead. I mean cell phone kid and a ragtag team of ex-military something-or-others clash with two feuding Irish families on an island off the coast of Delaware… a place apparently so far removed from modern society that they settle their disputes with 19th century rifles. It’s all just tacky garnishment around Romero’s big question, which is whether or not euthanize the living dead is a humane practice. It’s an intriguing premise, but one that doesn’t have any real world application. Plus, he posits that a zombie can learn, but also that it’s no less hungry for flesh. Hypothetically, if they’re real, they’re dead, and they want to eat us, I’m not sure it really matters that they have some minuscule capacity for intelligence.

Survival of the Dead goes beyond a forgivable exercise in over-thinking, it’s so sloppily conceived and ineptly executed that it casts doubt on any talent I once thought Romero had. Like with Lucas and his later Star Wars films, the director has, at best, faded into a distant echo of the artist he once was. At worst, his audience is forced to consider that maybe he was never the genius we hailed him as. Now there’s a scary thought.

Story of a Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities (1859) is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. With well over 200 million copies sold, it is among the most famous works of fiction.

The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, the corresponding brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries toward the former aristocrats in the early years of the revolution, and many unflattering social parallels with life in London during the same time period. It follows the lives of several protagonists through these events. The most notable are Charles Danny and Sydney Carton. Danny  is a French once-aristocrat who falls victim to the indiscriminate wrath of the revolution despite his virtuous nature, and Carton is a dissipated British barrister who endeavors to redeem his ill-spent life out of his unrequited love for Danny wife, Lucie Manatee.

The novel was published in weekly installments instead of monthly, as with most of his other novels. The first ran in the first issue of Dickens' literary periodical All the Year Round on 30 April 1859. The last ran thirty-one weeks later, on 25 November.

Crisis Communication

Businesses, individuals, and organizations will, from time to time, make honest mistakes or in some unfortunate cases, intentionally support unethical decisions to dissuade or conceal something significant from its public.

Whether it’s an oversight or a matter of deception, savvy companies usually employ and deploy a crises response team to prepare for, manage and attempt to positively spin the potential backlash from customers, partners, and employees related to almost anything.
Crisis communications is a branch of PR that is designed to protect and defend an individual, company, or organization, usually from a reactive response, facing a swelling public challenge to its reputation, brand, and community.

More often than not, we miss the very things that provide insight into a future response simply because we’re not conditioned or trained to proactively discover and diffuse threats or negative experiences.

Our weakness, however, is also our opportunity to manage and also respond to any potentially damaging or menacing public groundswell.
Conversations related to the brand, company, executives, products, and competitors take place each and every day, without our knowledge and perhaps worse, without our participation.
In the era of the Social Web, a story, and the ensuing public recruitment, rallying, and support, can rapidly spread unlike any crisis wildfire witnessed or experienced in previous generations.

To date, crisis communications and reputation management were relegated as a reactive response, while the groundwork for a potential predicament and the development of strategic communique is among the best practices for proactive crisis planning.