LAHORE: Pakistan beat South Korea 5-1 in the last match of Super Eight round of Junior Men’s Hockey World Cup at Johor Bahru, Malaysia, on Wednesday.
Love, compassion, service to humanity, devotion, sincerity, humbleness, inspiration & devotion are all different names for on man on earth, we proudly present to the world as a gift, known as Abdul Sattar Edhi.Edhi is a well known name to the world of service and humanity. Edhi is for Karachi what Mother Teresa is to Calcutta. But more than that Edhi is an angel on earth not only for Karachi & Pakistan but to the whole world. From Karachi to all over Pakistan. From Azad Kashmir to Tsunami & from Lebanon to Katrina this one man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, as of 1997, Edhi Foundation operates the world’s largest volunteer ambulance service.
Edhi is our No.1 & the best gift to the world. He has done more then a Nobel Prize would mean. For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. He is truly a role model to follow and a great hero of our time. Our curriculum books definitely need a chapter on him at least. He is the best thing probably that happened to Pakistan in last 59 years of our history.
Born in 1928 in Bantwa, Gujarat, India, Edhi’s family belonged to the industrious Memon community. From a young age his mother taught Edhi to be kind towards others and to help the poor. In 1947 the family migrated to Pakistan and settled in Karachi. That was a time of great emotional trauma and social and political upheaval. Edhi became involved in social work and began working with welfare organizations and soon started his own dispensary, providing medical aid to the poor. He bought his first ambulance, an old van which he called the “poor man’s van” and went around the city providing medical help and burying unclaimed bodies. His van became his advertisement and soon he came to be known for his work with the poor. As a consequence, donations started pouring in and his operations expanded, employing additional nurses and staff.
The lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. Some donors have been very generous. One family donated two villas in the wealthy Karachi suburb of Clifton for use as a residence and school for around 250 girls. A Pakistani expatriate in the UK donated office buildings worth ¬£1.4 million ($2.5 million) that became the British headquarters of the foundation, which organizes local charity services both for expatriates and in support of the foundation’s work in Pakistan. In addition to money and property, contributors donate clothes, appliances, furniture-even goat and chicken meat, sometimes by the ton. The organization uses a portion of these gifts to feed and clothe residents of the homes; the rest is given away to other hospitals, prisons and disaster victims.
( Image credit : EF )
Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day. Contactpakistan summarizes Edhi well: “Edhi is a mobile institution ready to respond … anxious to comfort and console the anguished souls. Endurance, perseverance, patience, struggle, sympathy and compassion along with sacrifice of his personal comforts, are the important elements on which rests the philosophy of Abdul Sattar Edhi.“
President Asif Ali Zardari has assured Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that Pakistani soil will not be allowed to be used for terrorist activities and all measures would be taken to bring the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks to justice.
Zardari urged the Indian prime minister at a meeting here for resumption of the composite dialogue between the two countries, an online news agency said.
He said Pakistani soil was not being used for terrorism against any other country and emphasised that "we are fighting a war against terrorism and the world must wake up and take notice of the enormous sacrifices we have made".
Zardari, according to Online, said: "We are the worst victims of terrorism and our armed forces are continuously engaged in combat operation to fight militancy."
While the two leaders held one-on-one discussions, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi told reporters: "Both countries stand to gain by resuming dialogue. It will be a sensible thing to resume dialogue as soon as possible. It will be in mutual interest to do so." (IANS)
ISLAMABAD - Pakistani Army chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani Monday flew a combat mission against the Taliban, riding as the co-pilot in an F-16 jet for an aerial overview of the offensive against the militants in the country’s restive northwest.
In doing so, he became the first army chief to fly in an F-16 jet. The aircraft was flown by a wing commander of the Pakistani Air Force.
Earlier, while addressing soldiers and airmen at a forward air base, Kayani said Pakistan did not need any foreign help in the war on terror and that the armed forces were “fully equipped to root out the extremists”.
Describing the Pakistani armed forces as the “finest in the world”, he said they were capable of “thwarting any external or internal challenge”.
“A handful of extremists want to destabilise the country with their nefarious tactics. This is not a war of Islam but some anti-state elements who have pushed us to the wall and we had to start a military action against them,” Online news agency quoted Kayani as saying of the military’s anti-Taliban operations in Swat and two other districts of the North West Frontier Province that entered their 50th day Monday.
“We will not end military operations in the Swat Valley till all the militants are defeated,” he mantained.
Kayani said 126 soldiers have been killed in the operations.
He also announced that the soldiers involved in the operations would get double salaries from July 1.
The military began its operations April 26 after the Taliban reneged on a controversial peace deal with the NWFP government and instead moved south from their Swat headquarters and occupied Buner, which is just 100 km from Islamabad.
The operations had begun in Lower Dir, the home district of Taliban-backed radical cleric Sufi Mohammad, who had brokered the peace deal and who is the father-in-law of Swat Taliban commander Maulana Fazlullah. They later spread to Buner and Lower Dir.
The military says it has largely secured Buner and Lower Dir districts and is now engaged in mopping up operations in Swat.
To go by military figures, over 1,400 Taliban have been killed in the fighting. There is, however, no independent confirmation of this as the media has been barred from the battle zone.
Some three million civilians have been displaced from the three districts by the military operations.
Buoyed by their successes in the NWFP, the military has also moved against the militants in the Buner district to the south and is planning a full-scale offensive against Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, whose writ runs in much of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghanistan border.
Tanveer Sharif, a Danish based Pakistani Citizen and owner of a leading Mobile VoIP service named Vopium. As Founder of Vopium, Tanveer Sharif has been involved in building up the company from scratch. In April 2008, he negotiated an investment deal of USD 6.8M dollars in the company.In an answer to a question at TattleTech, that how he see the future of conventional landline usage and how much of that market share can VoIP absorb? He says "First of all Vopium offers a solution provides the cheapest call option to user may it be via VOIP, GSM or Wifi, or even landline. For landlines we have a service we call just dial, thus we are aiming for a bigger piece of the pie. The future will still see a decrease in landline usage, in most developing countries it is already no longer main stream. Globally alternate services like Vopium will see real growth as the trends shift to mobile only, low cost calling services. "
In the 60s the building that we all know as Habib Bank Plaza in Karachi was the tallest building all the way from the Middle East down to Singapore.In the 1960s almost every army, navy and air force in the Middle East was manned by Pakistani officers and men. We literally raised those armed forces.
Many airlines that operate from the Gulf have actually been trained, organized and manned by PIA. Sure, Pakistan has fallen on tough times. But let all Pakistanis take strength from the fact that this great country needs to be put back on the track from which it got derailed in the 1960s. We Pakistanis have to once again regain our lost glory.
Way back in the 1960s Pakistan was truly on the move.
The early Ayub years gave us the “Green Revolution” because of the construction and commissioning of dams such as Mangla and Tarbela. Barrages were erected all the way down to the Guddu near Hyderabad.
These dams and barrages gave birth to an efficient network of canals and small distributaries which in the sixties not only made Pakistan self-sufficient but surplus in agricultural products.
In the 60s the building that we all know as Habib Bank Plaza in Karachi was the tallest building all the way from the Middle East down to Singapore. In the 1960s almost every army, navy and air force in the Middle East was manned by Pakistani officers and men. We literally raised those armed forces.
Many airlines that operate from the Gulf have actually been trained, organized and manned by PIA staff when they initially started operations. Today they are amongst the best in the world while PIA is in a total mess.
In 1972 it was Pakistan that created history and paved the way for the world to move in the direction that it actually has moved by being instrumental in bringing about President Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing (then Peking). That visit helped both China and USA equally and opened the world to be shaped as it is today. Not long after that, in 1979, if Pakistan had not taken on the USSR on its own initially, along with the Afghan Mujahideen, the world today would have been very different.
One can go on recounting many more aspects of Pakistan to show what a potently viable country it should have been today with an economy strong enough to stand it in good stead for exercising an independent foreign policy as well as in bringing about an environment in which the country would have had a content population which would, in turn, have excluded space to all sorts of disruptions.
What, then, went wrong and why do people now talk in terms of whether Pakistan will be able to outlast its present crisis?
Pakistan indeed lost its way in the years that followed the incidents I have quoted; military coups, the judicial murder of an elected prime minister, frequent derailing of the political process, an erratic foreign policy pursued by a bunch of minds that were driven by reasons other than prudent statecraft, importing of self-seeking bankers and making them prime ministers, denying of provincial autonomy to the federating units, allowing ethnic and other kinds of militancy to grow, letting fiefdoms be created right under the nose of the state, making talent become subservient to cronyism, treating education as if it was insignificant and so much more is all responsible for the dire straits we find ourselves in after having made a great start in the early years of our freedom.
It is said that South Korea laid its foundations for progress and prosperity on Pakistan’s First Five Year Plan. Pakistan never made a second five-year plan and in fact the First Five Year Plan was followed by unplanned improvisation. Who knows, had Pakistan followed its own First Five Year Plan like South Korea did, in the subsequent years Pakistan too may well have been one of the biggest economies of the world today. (South Korea is now the fourth-biggest of Asia and the world’s 15th.)
Most Pakistanis are known to have a strong faith in the country’s ability to bounce back from the wilderness. Pakistan is not a country that can be written off because a handful of insurgents have taken the state on frontally and because the state has not responded as responsibly as it ought to have ever since the crisis was evolving. Reacting to situations when crises explode in the face cannot be the best of situations for any state.
Where have all the leaders gone?
The present crisis should never have gotten to where it now stands. Now that it has and now that it has to be handled, let all Pakistanis take strength from the fact that this great country needs to be put back on the track from which it got derailed in the 1960s.
We Pakistanis have to once again regain our lost glory and win back our rightful, respectable and dignified place in the comity of nations. We can and must do it.
Text taken from CurrentAffais.com.
Allama Iqbal, great poet-philosopher and active political leader, was born at Sialkot, Punjab, in 1877. He descended from a family of Kashmiri Brahmins, who had embraced Islam about 300 years earlier.
Iqbal received his early education in the traditional maktab. Later he joined the Sialkot Mission School, from where he passed his matriculation examination. In 1897, he obtained his Bachelor of Arts Degree from Government College, Lahore. Two years later, he secured his Masters Degree and was appointed in the Oriental College, Lahore, as a lecturer of history, philosophy and English. He later proceeded to Europe for higher studies. Having obtained a degree at Cambridge, he secured his doctorate at Munich and finally qualified as a barrister.
He returned to India in 1908. Besides teaching and practicing law, Iqbal continued to write poetry. He resigned from government service in 1911 and took up the task of propagating individual thinking among the Muslims through his poetry.
By 1928, his reputation as a great Muslim philosopher was solidly established and he was invited to deliver lectures at Hyderabad, Aligarh and Madras. These series of lectures were later published as a book "The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam". In 1930, Iqbal was invited to preside over the open session of the Muslim League at Allahabad. In his historic Allahabad Address, Iqbal visualized an independent and sovereign state for the Muslims of North-Western India. In 1932, Iqbal came to England as a Muslim delegate to the Third Round Table Conference.
In later years, when the Quaid had left India and was residing in England, Allama Iqbal wrote to him conveying to him his personal views on political problems and state of affairs of the Indian Muslims, and also persuading him to come back. These letters are dated from June 1936 to November 1937. This series of correspondence is now a part of important historic documents concerning Pakistan's struggle for freedom.
On April 21, 1938, the great Muslim poet-philosopher and champion of the Muslim cause, passed away. He lies buried next to the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore.
