Insights From A Different Corner

Since the start of the Internet boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the so-called exceptional entrepreneurial minds of silicon valley and the rest of the mighty US of A have been trying their darndest to create one sensational story-grabbing business after another. The very first attempt, if I am not mistaken, was to liberalize printing of the information on the Internet. As a result of that half-baked promise, we now have billions of digital pages on the mighty Internet, an absolute majority of which are languishing in obscurity with negligible to almost zero visits per day. The whole of the business of getting a higher ranking on Google and Bing has become so formulaic, commercial, and unremarkable in nature that reading the posts that reach the coveted top spots has become an infuriating affair in itself. Having liberalized the printing world and provided a horrible blueprint to dominate the search engine rankings to the desperate or unscrupulous alike, the entrepr

Popularity Ratings Trump the Interests of Parents and Children Alike Originally Published On: June 2 nd , 2015 In a world where majority of students usually fail to learn the basics well — a sad fact in the case of U.S. educational system, as well — the sitting president of the USA would like to introduce all of the students to an extremely disruptive medium, the Internet. Over the years, Internet has earned a reputation, and not without good reasons (the documents linked to not only furnish but also endorse these reasons), for being a medium whose use without proper care or strict management can result in a loss of focus and hours and deterioration in overall performance. Some studies even suggest that just the presence of hyperlinks can induce carelessness and aimless wandering on the Internet , especially in adolescents. During these formative years when majority of children, even under normal circumstances, find managing tasks a

“The harsh punishment of Ales Bialiatski and three of his colleagues was delivered in response to massive protests over a 2020 election that gave authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko a new term in office.” — BBC International. Link included at the end of the post. The Righteous Western World and their foremost mouthpiece BBC World Service once again regurgitating the sensationalist gibberish that becomes phenomenally untenable considering their own track record of human rights abuses in countries like Pakistan and India. Although I have been living with a raging desire to expose the corruption taking place in Pakistan for over 13 years now, however, the sheer impetus for this post was provided by the use of the word “Authoritarian” President. The mighty and righteous Britain, some major European countries, and America keep calling themselves the champions of human rights and free speech, and they incessantly keep excoriating the regimes in countries like Chin

Some time ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video by an American YouTuber in which he claimed that while in Pakistan, he found it extremely difficult to pay for the stuff that he was buying from the local vendors. Even at the time of watching that video for the first time, I found his claim nigh on impossible to believe. There are at least a couple of reasons for finding his claim unbelievable. During my mid-to-late teens, which would be in the early 90s, we were living in a city called Jhelum, and that’s where I met a few boys whose families had returned from the UK. I stayed in touch with them even after leaving the city for good in 1996, and during one of the exchanges with them after leaving the city, I got to hear from one of them that as soon as Pakistani vendors become aware of the fact that they have a foreign accent and must be from abroad, they raise their prices, and they start charging extra for their services or goods. I didn’t have any reasons not to believe them b

Although I do not have a pronounced interest in human psychology — I am more of a mathematics, computer science, typography, and English language type of a person — nevertheless, as a human existing in this world, I have been studying human behavior for over 20 years now. When it comes to controlling human behavior, the whole of the technique or process can be distilled into two spectacularly potent threats or controlling tactics. When phrased extremely mildly, the advice furnished by the controlling parties manipulating the system and populace at large can be summarized as follows : Always hold your personal interests dear as going against the tide can prove quite costly. System’s spectacularly corrupt elements have such a stranglehold over the affairs that they can ruin a person’s finances and life, hence, we keep hearing that try not to burn your bridges, or maintain the relationships you have as they can at some point prove useful. This is the first outsta

To the dismay of the wider Mughlia clan and some of Anwer Hussain Mirza’s children, the eldest child of Anwer Hussain goes by the name of Abid Mirza. Abid Mirza, amongst a group of very average to below average siblings, proved himself to be a phenomenally unlikeable character. Some of his siblings had profound issues with his existence. After finishing his degree in law with spectacularly poor grades — remarkably poor grades remained his whole life’s story — when he eventually agreed to marry, his parents were only able to find a woman in one of the most notorious villages near Chakwal named Noorwal and a family so horrific that I have never met degree carrying people with such horrendous characters ever. Almost nobody belonging to even a half-decent family from any of the abutting areas near Noorwal is willing to touch these people, yet that is precisely where Abid Mirza eventually found himself. Having gotten married, given birth to four children, and taken on all of th

Within the confines of my room, I have been railing against job title inflation that is taking place in the corporate world, and how ordinary people seem to like the idea that their titles now seem so very appealing. When I was a teenager in mid 1990s, we used to have telephone operators manning the lines at PTCL to help people find the phone numbers of their acquaintances or someone with whom they needed to establish contact. Now people in call centers doing identical jobs — helping people with tasks like finding their lost parcels, lost passwords, reactivating their dormant accounts, helping them reset their WiFi devices, or selling them coverage plans — are called Customer Service Executives. I once watched a skit on this very topic, which I have not been able to locate, where the author, taking into account this diabolical trend of corporate title inflation, predicted that a couple of decades in the future we would not have sweepers and cleaner

Having spent the whole of his life as a cricketer chasing girls and setting the worst example for the young children in his own country, now this guy, Imran Khan, keeps trying to play the religion card to the maximum extent possible to weave his narrative. In a country where an absolute majority declines to challenge speeches involving religious figures, he knows perfectly well that exceedingly few, or almost nobody, would challenge such a narrative that involves the mentioning of prophets and their companions. As people expressing opinions againts Islam or prophet Mohammad face a death penality, hence, these so-called leaders expect perfectly silenced audience and zero statements to challenge their statements regardless of the preposterous nature of those statements. As an avowed agnostic who correctly believes that his rights have been snatched by a terrorist state implementing a spectacularly radical version of Islam , I continue to not only protest against this

The prevalent advice on how to achieve higher ranking on Google’s result pages is to use the keywords as often as you can as the author of the article. However, to create this impression on the readers as well as the algorithm evaluating your text that you have not tried to overwhelm the text with keywords without assigning any importance to the flow of writing, the usual SEO experts also advise the newcomers to lengthen the article and create some flow by introducing multiple paragraphs in your article regardless of their irrelevance to the subject at hand. The most commonly furnished advice is to start by touching upon the basics of the subjects or relying on the historical context to unnecessarily lengthen the article just to use those keywords as often as you can to satisfy the needs of the algorithms currently in use. These wars to rank well using the aforementioned steps have culminated in a situation where the readers of the articles have to deal with 4 to 7 initial p

Radical Islam: Islamization At Gunpoint An acquaintance of mine on Facebook, namely Syed Adnan Hamdani bhai, recently reshared Imran Khan’s much-hyped — according to PTI supporters, a truly spectacular, remarkable — address to all members of the UN assembly. In his speech, he declared that he wanted to talk about four core issues, one of which was Islamophobia. In his speech, the “mighty” Khan proclaimed that the Islamic world as a large group has no radicalization problem in place, and all of the Islamic countries, especially Pakistan, implement a thoroughly moderate version of Islam completely compliant with the holy scripture, Hadith, and Sunnah. Most of these Islamic countries, barring countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria, also claim that their officially implemented version of Islam aligns perfectly with the interpretations presented by all of the former and modern scholars deemed extremely well-read and of moderate disposition. I have long