Decided to take regular intervals while sitting on my Desktop at home and my workstation in office. I have found this Google Chrome Extension called Break Helper. I am taking five minute breaks after every 25 minutes. During this break I will move around a bit, walk down to cafeteria or to washroom to freshen up, drink water, or may be just stand up for a few minutes. Lets see how this turns out.
I love stories and by stories I mean people recounting events, narrating lives, describing emotions and feelings in context. Whether its fictional or not, I believe that storytelling is powerful, beautiful and fantastic. More than often, I talk about story-telling because I am so fascinated by the craft.
Storytelling is not just limited to writers. Even ordinary people who don’t think of themselves as writers, would carefully pickup words, form sentences, build structure and emotions around their stories. They would try their best, to not only just tell you what happened, but to also convey the feelings and emotions behind the events.
On Quora someone asked, “What does it feel like to have schizophrenia?“. The answers are from real people having this disorder. The answers are simple, no complicated words, no fancy vocabulary, yet they are so emotionally charged and you can almost feel what people are writing. This is a beautiful example of narrating lives. The pain in these answers is so clearly visible, there is the glimpse of the horror these people face when their realities are turned down and the world around them becomes a matrix. There is courage in struggling with paranoia, disorder, chaos, and disbelief. There is hope that things will get better by each day.
What I love about Quora, is that an ordinary person like me, can just walk in and sit among many brilliant people, and just listen. These people talk about everything from science to arts, history and future, crafts and culture. I can ask them questions, and sometimes I can even answer questions. The fascinating part is that the human desire to share knowledge has given us so many tools and technologies. However, narrating human lives by sharing stories is still the most powerful one.
The 1960s was the golden decade in the history of the Indian cinema. During this time film makers experimented with several genres and audiences applauded. It was a brilliant decade with so many talented actors and actresses, directors and musicians, singers and songwriters. The songs, the cinematography, the arrival of color to the movies. It was all just too awesome for the audiences as well as the movie makers.
Two epic movies were the highlight of the decade Mughal-e-Azam and Raj Kapoor's Sangam. Also it was the decade of suspense thrillers with movies like Beed Saal Baad, Gumnaam, and Teesri Manzil. Some of the best Bollywood movies from 1960s are:
Some songs from the decade just to give the readers a taste of the 60s:
Mughal-e-Azam – Jab Pyar Kya tu Darna Kya
Bees Saal Baad – Kaheen Deep Jale Kaheen Dil
Sangam – Ye Mera Prem Pattar Parh Kar
Guide – Aj phir Jenay Ki Tamanna Hai
http://youtu.be/RvXUR4RzRHM
Teesri Manzil – O Haseena Zulfo Wali
Jewel Theif – Honto pe Aisi Baat
Padosan – Meri Pyari Bindu
As a child I wrote notes and kept them hidden. Then I think that probably my mother discovered my notes, she bought me a diary. It was very beautiful, I can even feel the smell of its paper in my mind. It had a nice black leather cover, pages were thick and each page had the date at top. It was a grownup's thing given to a child and I just loved it. As a child when I opened that diary, the date on top and blank page below it made me feel that I should fill that blank page and write about what happened today.
It was not like interesting things happened to me each day. Sometimes I wrote about songs I listened. Sometimes I wrote about my very private feelings. It made me felt great. I felt like I am sharing these things with myself or with a trusted friend who won't judge me.
As I grew, my writings became more frequent and romance, love, loneliness, desires, planning, career, my relationships with other people became the main topics. I also used pages of my journals to draw, to write poetry, short stories and even movie reviews. I remember when I watched "Forest Gump" I wrote a whole page about it, cut a picture from newspaper and pasted it with that review. Then I started pasting pictures in my diary, I colored pages, copied things I read elsewhere and decorated them with colors and drawings.
I still keep a private online journal on blogspot. My writings are usually about my wife, my siblings, career, choices I am making, which are reshaping my life. I have never written about my mother in journal. When I don't write about her, I feel like my journal understands me and is telling me its ok we can talk about her later.
My writings evolved over time, topics changed, style changed, even the format and medium (now internet) changed. Writing diary helped me keep myself focused, understand my strength and weaknesses, it made me happy, provided me luxury of thinking out of the box.
It becomes routine after a while. It is like calling an old friend and talk to them or going through your favorite part of the day.
There are also times when I don't write for days and don't miss it at all. Then something would happen or something would come to my mind and I would want to write it down instantly.
What does it feel like to regularly write in a journal or diary?
Yes I take him seriously. He seems like the kind of person who wants to take advantage of Pakistani Youth's ideological confusion. As Pakistani Youth is still studying the curriculum designed by General Zia's regime. This curriculum attempts to create a layer of Islamic Ideology on the grounds of Pakistani nationalism.
The war on terror and retaliation of fundamentalists has resulted into a conflict that has left no ground for Pakistani Youth to stand upon. They want to find out what they believe in and where they are heading as a nation. They worry about their identity in the global community of the nations and want to do something about it.
People like Zaid Hamid try to provide that ideological ground. However, since that ground has already been shaken. They give it a strength by using new tactics to assert the usefulness of the same ideology with new conspiracy theories. Since the youth desperately want to believe into something, anything, they are quite vulnerable to this kind of propaganda.
The youth's desire to believe in something can also be seen in the mass following of Imran Khan, and Islami Jamiat Taliba (Islamic organization of Students). The youth want to follow them because they need something to believe in.
Progressive, liberal and secular voices in Pakistan are not encouraged by the establishment and the youth is also not ready to buy liberal secularism because they had been brainwashed as a child in schools and colleges, and then Television and media.
There are many guides on "How to move from blogspot to wordpress", but many of them are missing out important points and the top search results are mostly outdated articles. So you will have to browse through different guides and make sure that you find directions to do the following:
Your goal should be to make it easier for people coming to your blogspot blog to be redirected and land exactly on the same post on your wordpress blog. A good way to do that is to use a combination of javascript and redirect on both sides.
You would also want to use 301 redirects to make sure that your new blog retains the rankings of your old blog posts. Not only it helps you retain your Search rankings but creates a fluid user experience.
During the process, you would want to make sure that your images, rss feed and subscribers are intact too. Some people leave their images on blogger which I don't recommend. I would recommend that you copy those images to your webserver even if you have to do it manually. Google image search could send your visitors to images on blogspot and they won't come to your new moved location.
Once you have moved your images to your own server delete them from your blogger album by visiting picassa web albums and signing in with your blogspot ID.
For feed you can change your feed's URL both in the Feedburner or redirect Feed from blogspot interface to your wordpress blog.
If you have many email subscribers on feedburner or other services you might want to announce the move to these audiences.
This guide might help you:
http://tentblogger.com/mi
Or this one:
http://www.labnol.org/int
What's the easiest way to convert my blogspot site to wordpress?
Last night, Google Adsense disabled hundreds of Adsense accounts. We are seeing more and more Pakistani publishers who got banned from Adsense last night. Apparantely, most if not all of them received the same email message which cites the same reason. The reason is that the sites displaying ads are violating some quality guideline. However, as we are hearing from bloggers many quality blogs got affected as well. Some well known content publishers who are well known among the Pakistani internet community got affected with this massive ban.
We are unsure as to what we can do. Apparantely, disabled adsense accounts have only one chance to appeal and get reviewed by an Adsense specialist. However, the email publishers received is not very specific and publishers are having a hard time figuring out what went wrong. I am among such publishers. I have published content on one of my blogs for 6 years, serving ads while building a steady readership and traffic from search engines. My site offers very unique content with interesting perspective on the topics it discusses. I hope to get reinstated along with many others who believe that they are wrongly banned.
Before submitting our appeals many publishers are looking around for information as to how to prepare for their appeals, what to add in the appeal, how to present a strong case to adsense team for reconsideration, what sites have better chances of getting reinstated, etc.
If you are one such publisher or if you think you can help us please join us on our facebook group, Pakistani Probloggers Or you can help us on Official Adsense Support Forum, one thread is here, Or you can share this message so that it reaches someone who can probably help.
I like Roznama Jawani. Some friends of mine think that they are copying “The Onion”, but I think they are not. They are dirtier and funnier. I really don’t have any issues with dirty jokes, I love smart dirty jokes. Like the one about the “Local Man getting Anal Probe by Aliens”, or “The Arrival of Slut excites local youth”.
We have a beautiful culture in our country, a fantastic blend of influences taken from Western+Arab conservationism, our own heritage and the conflicts we are facing every day, on every corner. The collision of East vs West, Islam vs Rest of the World, Rest of The World vs. Pakistani Terror Imports, Our own Lack of Identity and the crazy-crazy desire to have a nationalist-patriotic ideology to stand upon.
These conflicts are often reflected in our discussions, no Pakistanis can talk without facing conflicts or confusions. For example, two friends might agree upon killing Qadiyanis, but they might disagree whether or not the state should do it, or it is the job of the believers. Two liberals may agree upon dangers of the blasphemy law, but they could have two opposite views on whether it should be “totally removed” or “partially improved”.
The so called Pakistani moderates are the most confused among all people. They have no idea what their own views are. They just want to live peacefully and try their best not to have an opinion. If they are forced to choose one they would choose the one that is the most popular among the crowd they are with.
I feel that Roznama Jawani, “Jays Toons”, “Jaago Pakistan”, “Enemies Of Pakistan”, and others, represent this very conflicted nation. The authors behind these pages have very different views, but surprisingly people who like Roznama Jawani and Jay’s Toons also like Jaago Pakistan and Enemies of Pakistan.
If the nations were described as food, I would say that we are the Special Mix Chaat with countless spices. Some find us sour, some find us sweet. We might look excitingly dangerous to some….and for others we are hot enough to burn their intestines.
There are many great Indian films the answer to this question is very subjective to the interests of the person writing the answer and of course the interests of the person who asked the question in the first place.
I would assume that you are probably a person not very familiar with the Indian Cinema. So I would like to recommend movies that are not only great but also explain a lot about the Indian culture and Indian Cinema aswell.
In the history of Hindi Cinema, 50s was the decade when the rights of women, labor, and issues of social justice and extreme poverty were a major subject in many hit movies. These movies have a huge impact on the Indian society. The storylines often revolved around poor people resisting rich people and fighting for social justice. This main theme continued for a next few decades until the 90s when it started dying slowly.
In 00s and 10s Indian cinema is now much more commercialized and the storyline of poor people struggling against capitalist villains is dead now. The new storylines are showing the struggle of Indians towards richness of the economic boom.
I have tried to make the list of the movies that were significant in shaping the Indian cinema and influencing the Indian culture.
1. Awaara (1951)
2. Devdas (1955), based on Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay's novel of the same name and directed by Bimal Roy, Dilip Kumar played the role of Devdas in the movie. Devdas has been made several times and it is one of the epic love stories of Indian Cinema.
3. Mother India (1957) The epic story of the struggle of an ordinary village woman who lived a difficult life raising her children without her husband while working in their farm land and saving it from Sukhilala, the village moneylender who collects wealth by giving loans to villagers and occupying their properties and jewels if they fail to payback. Mother India has a huge impact on Indian culture and society. It is one of the most popular films in India.
4. Mughal-e-Azam (1960) an epic historical romantic melodrama that immortalized the story of Anarkali and the Prince Saleem. This film is considered one of the greatest Indian movies ever. The songs, costumes, dialogues, lavish production mesmerized Indian audiences. Even today it is one of the most watched Indian movies of all time.
5. Sholay (1975) Read about it on Wikipedia, this movie is considered by many as the greatest Indian film ever made. It was a huge success at the box office and the characters and dialogues from the movie are still part of the Indian popular culture.
6. Deewar (1975)
7. Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) This film is one of the formula films of late seventies. The storyline begins with three brothers getting separated due to terrible circumtances in the childhood and the family gets reunited in the end just before the climax. It had comedy, romance, action, an emotional story line, melodrama, and so much more.
8. Karz (1980) This movie is important because it is the first of the commercially successful movies based on the theme of Reincarnation.
9. Mr. India (1987) an ordinary man who runs an orphan house from his own pocket suddenly finds a gadget that turns him invisible.
10. Maine Pyar Kya (1989) This film is significant as it gave birth to the romantic 90s. The storyline is basically the same old love between a rich guy and a poor girl. But it has beautiful songs and after a whole decade of action movies this film was welcomed by audiences as a breeze of change.
11. Hum Apke Hain Kaun (1994) One of highest grossing Indian movies of all time. This musical romantic comedy is significant as it started a change in the Indian cinema. Until this movie the Indian cinema never paid attention to lavish weddings, orchestrated and choreographed wedding rituals. This movie started many new trends like lavish productions of wedding songs, bridal dresses, jewelry and showing the beauty of Indian culture through weddings and other ceremonial rituals.
12. Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejaynge (1995) This is the highest grossing Indian film ever. It is also the longest running and the most successful Indian movie of all times.
13. Lagaan (2001) historical film that depicts the beginning of India's love with the Cricket and also its discomfort and struggle against the British Raj.
Kashif Aziz asked bloggers on the Pakistani Probloggers Facebook group page:
Pakistani Probloggers: Lets share more about ourselves, specifically:
Replying this post I realized I have never wrote about it on my blog, it is about time I share my blogging story, at least for the record keeping. I can then look back at this page and see how it started.
It was back in late 2004, I was new to internet and there was nothing much for me to do on the internet other than reading. As many of you might know, while reading is fun it is not very interactive. I thought I should do something, one thing led to another and I came to know about blogspot. I thought how awesome it is to publish your thoughts and share them with the entire world. First I started an Urdu blog, just because it was more challenging to do so. The response I got from the small and closely knitted together Urdu Blogsphere was overwhelmingly positive. Which encouraged me to be creative and write on different topics. I was then asked by Spider Magazine‘s Editor to write an article for them. Which gave me the confidence that I can write in English and thats how I started my English blogs.
2. Among bloggers Jason’s kottke.org inspired me a lot. It made a significant impact on not only the way I wrote, but also on how I think and see the web today. Chapati Mystery and Huma Imtiaz‘s personal blog were also good motivations. Later, when I started professional blogging, Darren Rowse’s Problogger helped and inspired me. Apart from bloggers, I started blogging because I had this innate desire to tell stories and ideas and hear other people’s stories and ideas. When I look at blogs, I don’t see articles, I see conversations, storytelling, a party.
3. This is going to be a long list. I read mashable, lifehacker, kottke.org, problogger.net, copyblogger, Slashdot, The onion, Matt Cutts, Design Milk, blogs of people I am following at Google Plus, Urdu blogs, Tribune blogs (because it is difficult not reading them everyone’s sharing them on facebook), etc, etc.
4. I see myself outgrowing blogs. I think I will be able to move on to other fields particularly social web, online marketing, copywriting, advertising or something else too. I will continue to blog professionally but I will be known for other things as well. I am not quite sure what those other things would be, but its going to be an awesome journey.
