Loud Thinking

Archive for May, 2014

“There is no better test of a man’s integrity than his behavior when he is wrong.”

— Marvin Williams

An urgent proposal to the Prime Minister..!

Dear Mr. Prime Minister,

AoA.

A Watt saved is a Watt produced and the cost of installing 1MW powerhouse is approximately PKR 1 billion. We can save a minimum of 1000 MW per day, if countrywide all markets and offices are very strictly closed at 6 PM, along-with all TV and Cable TV is also shut down at 9 PM.

Extraordinary problems needs extraordinary solutions.

The above proposal will also give peaceful load shedding free nights to the teeming millions during the long hot and humid summer season, who can’t afford UPS, generators or solar power systems.

Hope your government will swiftly act to implement (even if issuance of an ordinance is required) the above proposals in the larger public interest, without fearing any backlash of the vested interests.

With kind regards and best wishes,

Syed Nayyar Uddin Ahmad

Lahore.

Sent from my iPad3 4G LTE

The New York Times deserves a Noble Peace Prize for its great service to the humanity by publishing this heart wrenching article.

And the entire Muslim Country’s governments deserve hall of SHAME for their callousness in looking the other way on the genocide of Muslims in Myanmar.

Myanmar\’s Appalling Apartheid
Posted on 14 hours ago

Nicholas Kristof
Minura Begum has been in labor for almost 24 hours, and the baby is stuck. Worse, it\’s turned around, one tiny foot already emerging into the world in a difficult breech delivery that threatens the lives of mother and child alike.
Twenty-three years old and delivering her first child, Minura desperately needs a doctor. But the Myanmar government has confined her, along with 150,000 others, to a quasi-concentration camp outside town here, and it blocks aid workers from entering to provide medical help. She\’s on her own. Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strategy.
This is my annual \”win-a-trip\” journey, in which I take a university student on a reporting trip to the developing world. I\’m with this year\’s winner, Nicole Sganga of Notre Dame University, spotlighting an injustice that some call a genocide. There are more than one million Rohingya in Rakhine State in the northwest of Myanmar. They are distinct from the local Buddhists both by darker skin and by their Islamic faith. For decades, Myanmar\’s military rulers have tried systematically to erase the Rohingya\’s existence with oppression, periodic mass expulsions and denials of their identity.
\”There are no people called Rohingya in Myanmar,\” U Win Myaing, a spokesman for Rakhine State, told me. He said that most are simply illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. This narrative is absurd, as well as racist. A document as far back as 1799 refers to the Rohingya population here, and an 1826 report estimates that 30 percent of the population of this region was Muslim. Since clashes in 2012 claimed more than 200 lives – including children hacked with machetes – the authorities have confined Rohingya to internment camps or their own villages. They are stripped of citizenship and cannot freely go to the market, to schools, to university, to hospitals.
Tens of thousands have made desperate attempts to flee by boat, with many drowning along the way. This year, the Myanmar authorities have cracked down even harder, making the situation worse. First, the government expelled Doctors Without Borders, which had been providing health care for the Rohingya. Then orchestrated mobs attacked the offices of humanitarian organizations, forcing them out. Some kinds of aid are resuming, but not health care. That\’s a sterile way of putting it. I wish readers could see the terrified eyes of Shamshida Begum, 22, a mom whose 1-year-old daughter, Noor, burned with fever.
Shamshida said that at home the thermometer had registered 107 degrees. Even after damp cloths had been placed on Noor to lower her temperature, the thermometer, when I saw it, still read 105 degrees. What kind of a government denies humanitarians from providing medical care to a toddler? Noor survived, but some don\’t. We visited the grief-stricken family of a 35-year-old man named Ba Sein, who died after his tuberculosis went untreated.
\”He died because he couldn\’t get medicine,\” said his widow, Habiba, as friends made a bamboo coffin outside. Now she worries about her four small children who, like other children in the camp, haven\’t been vaccinated. The camp is an epidemic waiting to happen. Minura, the woman with a breech delivery, survived a 28-hour labor and hemorrhaging, but lost her baby. The infant girl was buried in an unmarked grave – one of a large number of achingly small graves on the outskirts of the camp.
\”Because I am Rohingya, I cannot get health care and I cannot be a father,\” Minura\’s husband, Zakir Ahmed, a mason, said bitterly after the burial. The United States has spoken up, but far too mildly; Europe and Asia have tried to look the other way. We should work in particular with Japan, Britain, Malaysia and the United Nations to pressure Myanmar to restore humanitarian access and medical care. President Obama, who visited Myanmar and is much admired here, should flatly declare that what is happening here is unconscionable. Obama has lately noted that his foreign policy options are limited, and that military interventions often backfire. True enough, but in Myanmar he has political capital that he has not fully used.
As a university student, Obama denounced apartheid in South Africa. As president, he should stand up to an even more appalling apartheid – one in Myanmar that deprives members of one ethnic group even of health care. Myanmar seeks American investment and approval. We must make clear that it will get neither unless it treats Rohingya as human beings.
The New York Times

“Always have a sense of humor about life – you’ll need it – but always be courteous to boot.”

— Peter Jennings

The Happiness Habit

The Power of Positive Doing
by BJ Gallagher

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” Abraham Lincoln once wrote. I’ve long thought so, too.

Happiness seems to be a habit as much as anything—a habit of attitude, a habit of responding to life, a habit of action.

I recall seeing a sign in a manager’s office a number of years ago. It read:

“Happiness is available. Help yourself.”

I loved the double meaning—“help yourself” as if a big bowl of happiness was sitting on his desk, like a bowl of jelly beans, and all you had to do was dip your hand in and help yourself—and “help yourself” as in “take action on your own behalf.” It reminded me of one of my all-time favorite books, Happiness is a Choice, by Barry Neil Kaufman. Barry and his wife had a baby boy, their third child, who was diagnosed as autistic. At first, the couple was devastated—they thought their lives were ruined and their child doomed to a hopeless future. But once they worked through their initial reaction to the diagnosis, they made a huge choice: They decided to be happy. They said, “We can let this situation drag us into depression and self-pity, OR we can decide to love our child, make a nurturing family for him, and have a good life together. They chose the latter.

They rejected the advice of doctors who told them to put the child in an institution and move on with their lives. Instead, they completely redesigned their home and their lives to meet the needs of their autistic toddler. He couldn’t meet them in their world, so they met him in his. They sat on the floor and played with him, mimicking his shrieks, whoops and wild gestures. Bit by bit, they were able to build rapport with their son, teach him new behaviors, and coax him further and further into normalcy.

The boy grew and thrived under his parents’ unconditional love, patience, and teaching—it was a long, challenging process, but he graduated from high school, then college, with honors. And throughout those challenging years, Barry Neil Kaufman and his wife chose to be happy. They made it a habit.

How do you make happiness a habit? Simply choose it. Again and again. Habits are formed by repeating the same thing over and over again until it becomes the normal way you behave. Scientists tell us that if you repeat something consistently for 21 days, it will become a habit.

So if you want to really feel the Power of Positive Doing, start by making happiness your new habit.

5 Twitter messages of public interest..!

@nayyarahmad: @CMShehbaz @MaryamNSharif @umarsaif

1. r v so backward in IT that Pres, PM offices & ministries & departments can’t maintain a Twitter account?

@nayyarahmad: @ArifAlvi @sherryrehman

2. Sir, the officially recorded figure for the last year was 869 which means on an average over two ladies killed/day.

@nayyarahmad: @KhawajaMAsif @imf_pakistan @WorldBank

3. A Watt saved is a Watt produced then why can’t we close our offices and markets at 6PM in Pakistan?

@nayyarahmad: @CMShehbaz @MaryamNSharif @betterpakistan

4. Extraordinary challenges demands extraordinary measures.

@nayyarahmad: @CMShehbaz @MaryamNSharif @betterpakistan @imf_pakistan

5. 1 Mega Watt production cost is about Rs.1billion imagine the savings/day of just 1000MW from 6PM onwards if offices and markets r strictly closed?

Then our rulers say no one in the world respects us..!

US Secretary of State John Kerry today called over telephone the Indian External Affairs minister and ……… The Prime Minister of Pakistan..!

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor souls who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

— Theodore Roosevelt

Time Is a Midsize Company’s Most Valuable Resource

While poor time management hurts any firm, it’s especially pernicious at midsize companies. These companies must move quickly to make up for smaller competitors’ agility, but they also need to tackle big projects to compete with larger firms. Time, not money, is the most important resource for midsized firms.
Honor deadlines from the top down. Project management is worthless if the CEO disrespects deadlines. Make missing deadlines unacceptable at every level. Promote your best time-managers, and make the consequences of missing deadlines clear.
Ruthlessly cut projects until only critical ones remain. When a company tries to do too much with too few resources, projects inevitably end up late, mediocre, or unfinished.
Be transparent about a project’s status. In midsize companies, core projects affect every department since the business isn’t big. Leaders must keep team members informed about advances and setbacks, including missed deadlines, to assess the project’s overall progress.

Adapted by HBR from “ Midsize Companies Must Prioritize Ruthlessly” by Robert Sher.

My Twitter message to Ms MN Sharif

@nayyarahmad: @MaryamNSharif like India there should be statutory National Commission for Women in Pakistan, which is doing a yeoman’s job there.