The Trouble Tree

In one of our English Classes we were motivated to read as many English books as possible. "To improve your writing you need to read as much as possible" said the teacher. For most of the students including me it was very difficult to read thick heavy English books. I think it will take years for me to read such a books, how people do that...strange. So teacher asked to read short storied and gave following sample which I would like to share with you.

The carpenter I hired to help me restore an old farmhouse had just finished a rough first day on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw quit, and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. While I drove him home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his family. As we walked towards the front door, he paused briefly at a small tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands.

When opening the door, he underwent an amazing transformation. his tunned face was wreathed in smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss. Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and curiosity got the better of me. "Oh, that's my trouble tree," he replied. "I know I can't help having troubles on the job, but one thing is for sure, troubles don't belong in the house with my wife and children. So I just hang them up on the tree every night when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again."

"Funny thing is, " he smilled, "when I come out in the morning to pick them up, there are not nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night before."

Love Marriage VS Arranged Marriage

Interesting topic for most of the young people, atleast before marriage :). Actually this was another writing assignment during English Language Course with exact tiltle of "In some countries marriages are arranged while in others people decides their life partners". Following was the my hard work during a weekend for this assignment.

Marriage is a sacred bond between two souls, a relationship in which a male and a female promise to be companions for a life. It is not only a union of two human beings but also of two families. In some countries marriage is arranged by parents or some elder person in the family but in some countries marriage people choose their own marriage partners. Both systems have their own benefits and problems.

In most of the Asian countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran people prefer arrange marriage. It is the decision of the parents who determine when their son/daughter will marry and with whom he/she will marry. Most of the times bride and groom are strangers to each other and they are not given a chance to talk and meet to each other openly before marriage. Different factors like religion, cast, profession, social status and age are considered for marriage instead of will of marring couple.

Since in arrange marriage couple don’t know each other, they don’t have very high expectations from each other which leads to compromising behavior that is one the key factors of marriage life. That’s why divorce rate of arrange marriages is very much less than love marriages. In case of arrange marriages, as it is done with the consent of parents, if couple faces any problems (financial, social or moral) they have different family member to support and resolve issue.

The biggest problem with arrange marriage is that marrying couple don’t know each other and they have to compromise on many things, their likes and dislikes and also sometimes marriage is forced on couple and they have to spend whole their life with a person they don’t love.

Love marriage is preferred in most of the western countries where people chose their own life partners. Selecting a marriage partner is considered to be a very personal decision of individuals. Usually marrying couple spends a lot of time with each other before marriage and they know each other very well.

Love marriage provides more freedom and independence to the individuals. They spend lot of time with each other which enables them to explore each other’s nature and know strengths and weaknesses of each other. This helps to develop a good lever of comfort and understanding after marriage.

Since marrying couple knows each other they have high expectations and less compromise which can result to disaster. That’s why western countries where love marriage is preferred have higher divorce rate.

Whether it is an arranged marriage or a love marriage, both of the partners should realize that their spouse is not always going to be perfect. There is no clear answer about which one is better than the other. It all depends on individual’s personal circumstances and personality. Love, trust, loyalty, patience, respect, understanding, appreciating are some of the keywords of a successful marriage, if all this is their in a marriage irrespective of arranged marriage or a love marriage, it is bound to be a happy and an everlasting one.

Alleviating Poverty in Pakistan

This is the second assignment of second class of English Language Course and i think first time i am writing something out of course and none technical so you can expect its quality. :)

Poverty is one of the major problems of Pakistan. Around 70% of population is earning less then $2 a day. It requires considerable attention by government and private sector to alleviate poverty in Pakistan by improving education, health services and reducing unemployment.

Improving education is one of the major steps that can be taken to reduce poverty. Most of the people in Pakistan are finding it very difficult to fulfill their basic needs of food, cloth, shelter and health. They can’t think of educating their children. They find it a wise decision to send their children to some house or shop for labors work to earn some hundreds of rupees rather than sending to school where they have to spend hundreds of rupees. Government should facilitate people to get quality education easily and cheaply so that people can improve their financial position. There is also need to establish technical institutes where people can develop different skills and earn reasonable money.

Development in industrial sector plays a direct roll in reducing unemployment and hence alleviating poverty. Government should facilitate foreign as well as local investor to invest in different industries in Pakistan. This goal can be achieved by ensuring peaceful and stable environment and availability of sufficient resources like electricity, water and transportation.

Health conditions are very poor in Pakistan especially for poor people in rural areas where people don’t have easy access to hospitals and doctors. There is only one doctor for every 1300 persons and only one bed in hospital for every 1100 persons in Pakistan. There is strong need to pay attention in health services and increase health budget to improve hospitals and availability of medicines. Improvements in health services results improved productivity and economic growth and reduce in poverty.

Pakistan has a lot of resources and only there is need to utilize them in right direction with proper planning to alleviate poverty.

Second Class

After a lot of motivation and excitement form the first class to learn English, I went for the second class vary happily. I had also completed the assignment of writing 150 words report on any topic. My second class was on 16-June and that was second birthday of my professional life so without thinking much about topic I decided to write 150 words on my professional experience. You can see separate blog post on this topic.

This time teacher come up in the class with a documentary and the subject was “War by Other Means” more specifically “Financial War”. Even in this war peoples are killed but without bullet and specially women and children became target of it. just to summarize the documentary in my words, it was a war by developed nations against developing nations by giving them loans through World Bank and IMF and then getting lot of debt on loan. It was a case study of Philippine which was facing energy crises similar to Pakistan. World Bank proposed a solution to built atomic energy plant with the help of load from World Bank and a US company “General Electric” was selected to build the plant. Money came from US and went back to US and Philippine became victim of loan. The plant was built at a place highly vulnerable to earthquakes and was not able to generate even 1KW of electricity. At the end result was that Philippine was spending around 50% of its budget for the debt of its loan and poverty increased up to 70% of its population. Most of the people were living on pieces of paper and plastic from garbage which was the only source of their income. Health conditions were so bad that after every hour a new born child was died as a direct consequence of debt.

I went happily in the class but when I left the class I lost my happiness and come out with upset mood after two hours of discussion about poverty and other similar unpleasant things.

At the end of the class we were given another assignment to write a 150 words report on “Alleviating poverty in Pakistan”.

My 2nd Professional Birthday

My professional life started on 16-June-2008 when i joined Techlogix pvt ltd as a software engineer. During these two years i worked on a varity of different technologies that improved my technical skill a lot.

I started my career in the Motorola Team by wokring on a Business Process Management(BPM) project(PSD). PSD was my first and the most horrible experience of my professional life. I forget the difference between day and night in those days but in the meanwhile experience learnt from that project helped me throughout my career.

My second project was completely different from the first one. This time i was exploring the domain of Business Activity Monitoring(BAM) and Business Intelligence(BI). Unlike PSD this was one of the most successful project of my career.

My third assignment was on level3 support of some of the BAM projects. Like most developers i was initially not happy about this assignment of support activity where we have to wait for issues in the production to work on. But as time passed I enjoyed of being team lead for the first time although there was only one other member in the team. Also i experienced a sense of responsibility and direct communication with client.

During these two years at techlogix, I worked only in one team(Team Motorola) but i learnt a lot of different technologies which is the rare case with others as normally people working in one team keep on working in same tool and technologies for a long time. So I think I am fortunate in this regard.

English Language Course

I was feeling very strong desire to learn English these days and fortunately I received an email from Techlogix training department that they are going to offer English language training course to some selected employees and by chance I was also selected to take that course.

My First Class

I was very excited about my first class with a lot of questions in my mind about my first class like who will be the instructor? How he will be teaching us to improve our English speaking and writing skills? At the end of class will we be able to speak English fluently and write it in an effective way to communicate it? and many other similar questions.

Fortunately we found a very good instructor Mr. Shahid J. Ismail with the experience of about 20 years in various countries like UK, Scotland, Iran and Turkey etc. He taught us that to learn English or any other language whether Urdu or Punjabi we need to follow same procedure which a baby follows to learn it. Baby listens to his parent then start from very simple words like “mummy” or “papa” and then move to bit difficult words like “food” or “milk” and then to sentences like “I am hungry” and “I need milk” etc. similarly to learn any language we need to start from very simple words and then move to complex sentences. It is a gradual process and takes more time rather than effort. I order to improve our speaking skill we need to have a good amount of listening as an input to our brain and in order to have good writing ability we need to read as much as possible. He suggested us to listen English either in the form of TV channels or English movies for at least two hour a day and read some story books or novels as well.

After about 30 to 40 min lecture instructor asked us to come on stage one by one and introduce yourself and then pick up a card randomly from a set of cards and speak on the topic mentioned on the card. This was very interesting session and we enjoyed it a lot by hearing a wide variety of introductions. The most interesting part of this session was related to the way people were responding to the topic which their fate brought to them. Surly no one was prepared about the topic and it was very difficult to speak even a couple of sentences. This was also the case with me. My topic was “Favorite Season” and my response was “I like rainy season. Usually in month of July. A hot day….rain comes…..we move out……take bath in rain…..and that’s it. ”. I realized that I was not able to find words and make sentences to explain the topic. That was also the case with most of the students and that was what needs to be improved. At the end of the class we were given an assignment to write a report of at least 150 words by the next class. I hope to see some strange and also interesting reports in the next class.

At the end I would like to thank one of my very good friends who inspired me and motivated me to write my first blog post, otherwise I wouldn’t have done such an effort.