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Book Notes: 'The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism' by Deborah Baker

Book Notes: 'The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism' by Deborah Baker

CM+ES Intro

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Access denied, sympathies granted

I always believed that Government sector has a defined quote for disabled people. It proved wrong. I received a CV from a fellow to get a job for a challenged person. When he told me that she has no legs, I felt so down and showered my sympathies towards her. She was CSS qualified but unfortunately the rotten and sick system of Pakistan didn't let her challenge the 'normal'. Since that time I am in a kind of trauma whatever I am doing I just think if she has to do this how difficult it would be for her. (Allah Forbid)
The best statistical analysis about our country lies with our telecom operators who invest in and maintain extensive data on the country’s population for their intrinsic benefit. In a very recent survey Pakistan is a country of 169 million people with 2.49 per cent of its populace falling under the “disabled” category. This includes both visually- and physically – challenged people.
That is quite a large number of the population whose needs are completely ignored.
Harsh words I know, but the life of a person who is challenged in any way is the very epitome of misery in this country. And this begins from the very start: if a child is noted to be a little ‘slow’ or has difficulty in coping with normal activities, he or she is shunned by their family and those around them. Unfortunately, they grow up knowing there is something wrong with them and when they finally reach an age when they should be active, contributing members of society – they find out that there is no space for them, no acceptance here either.
We often point fingers at the system but we do not want to look in the mirror and realise that we are the system. How many private restaurants in the city of Lahore have accessibility options for physically- or visually – challenged individuals? How many of them have menus in Braille? If someone in a wheel chair wants to eat out at a restaurant, people accompanying him/her would have to first literally carry them in – instead of being wheeled in. The person would also be subjected to our ‘scrutiny’ and our innate ability to stare at anything out of the ordinary.
Let’s take a look at another aspect – there exists a quota for physically or visually challenged people in Pakistan, in both corporate and government jobs but it is more or less on paper only. As far as I know, people who do not measure up to our standards of ‘normal’ are usually shunned by most avenues of employment.
So what exactly are they supposed to do? Just because a person is physically challenged, does not mean he or she is less intelligent than any of us or cannot make the next breakthrough or achieve a name for themselves. We, however, think it is alright for such individuals to sit at home and think some more about what they cannot do.
Today, the world is accessible at your fingertips thanks to the internet and social media, bringing an inconceivable input of information to those who can access it. Yet this segment of our society cannot even use the internet because they cannot afford Braille keyboards or special software like Text to Speech or voice recognition.
Surprisingly, our telecom companies also chooses to ignore such individuals even though according to their own data, 80 per cent of “disabled” people in Pakistan can only access the voice call facilities of their cell phones, 10 per cent of the hearing impaired can only use the SMS facilities (there is an absolutely no use of text to speech across the board) while 30 per cent of all physically-challenged people cannot even use a cell phone due to device design.
How is such an individual supposed to even know what kind of services a carrier or DSL service is offering when they cannot visually or audibly access the brochures these companies make? Are any of the advertisement campaigns designed to provide access to those who cannot see or hear? Do any of our carriers offer the physically- or visually-challenged people in Pakistan an alternative other than total dependence on those around them, even when buying a SIM card?
We do give them one thing though – you see, we are a very compassionate nation so we show it by showering pity on these challenged individuals. The problem is they do not need our pity! It is our blatant ignorance that we act like such individuals are lesser mortals than us, hence making them conscious and insecure.
Albert Einstein could not read until he was 8, Thomas Edison until he was 12, John Milton went blind at 43, and Beethoven became deaf at 28. Imagine how many inventors, musicians and poets we may have but will never realise because they live in self-doubt and mental torture? Imagine what we could achieve, as a nation, if we gave them accessibility to the many things we take for granted.

PTCL Call Center - An overview

PTCL Call Center – An overview

PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) a public sector company but administered by Etisalat a dubai based telecom company.

PTCL is Pakistan’s only fixed line network company having customers for fixed line, broadband and other services of more than 1 million. PTCL has huge market share in consumer market of Pakistan among its competitors. Its services are all over Pakistan both in urban and rural areas. It is the only network which dominates in broadband and voice network through its fixed line (PSTN) and wireless products.

Wide range of products and latest technology adoption has brought PTCL in a race with other companies. Few years back PTCL was sinking due to emerging cheap voice solutions by mobile companies. At that time PTCL share were sold to international company with administrative rights. Now PTCL is giving tough time in market to its rivals.

To facilitate customers PTCL opened its call center for customer support in Lahore and Karachi with state of art technology and specialized team. In 2006 PTCL launched its call center operations in Lahore. It was not a traditional call center like 17 helpline. It’s a modern state of the art call center developed by a worldwide famous CMMI level 2 certified chinese telecom vendor named ZTE.

A 138 seat call center was established in a newly purpose built building. Whole infrastructure was deployed by ZTE through its extensive proprietary solution. PTCL started its call center by providing support of vwireless or WLL product to its customers. Later broadband DSL service was launched and sooner voice messaging service was also launched. Then in short span of time Pakistan Package, Billing service, Value added services and evo brands were introduced in market.

All information queries, order placement and after sales support is done by this call center.

This call center is TDM based. It has enormous amount of media extended towards exchanges for connectivity, latest high end servers, cutting edge software and long back up power infrastructure all built in at a single place.

For voice it has E1s and wireless connectivity with exchanges, for data it has E3s those connect this call center with Islamabad and Karachi. This call center is blended call center and provides services for inbound, outbound and robo calls, auto dialing and sms broadcasting services.

Now the call center is expanded from 138 seats to 270 seats by making its both floors operational and divided into different departments with knowledge based CSRs. Plasma screens, training rooms, cafeteria, huge parking area, surveillance cameras, 24x7x365 operations and CSR to EVP presence make it distinguished among all other call centers.

This is the only TDM based call center in Pakistan that provide all modern features of today’s world in fixed line and wireless products. Currently call centers are converting their infrastructure in to IP based call centers for flexible and ready to use features. But this TDM based PSTN call center has its own worth among all. Each and every feature is available in this infrastructure, you name and you can see it. The huge advancement in its existing infrastructure to meet the challenges of emerging new technologies is made possible by ZTE. None of its other competitors could make it possible by simply modifying their software in TDM based call centers, they swiftly jumped towards IP based solutions.

Notable is the fact that if TDM based software is that much flexible to accommodate all new features of today’s world then the IP based solution could bring new horizons towards the business.

Greatest Inventions by Muslims

From coffee to cheques and the three-course meal, the Muslim world has given us many innovations that we take for granted in daily life. As a new exhibition opens, Paul Vallely nominates 20 of the most influential- and identifies the men of genius behind them Published: 11 March 2006

01 Coffee:

The story goes that an Arab named Khalid was tending his goats in the Kaffa region of southern Ethiopia , when he noticed his animals became livelier after eating a certain berry. He boiled the berries to make the first coffee. Certainly the first record of the drink is of beans exported from Ethiopia to Yemen where Sufis drank it to stay awake all night to pray on special occasions. By the late 15th century it had arrived in Mecca and Turkey from where it made its way to Venice in 1645. It was brought to England in 1650 by a Turk named Pasqua Rosee who opened the first coffee house in Lombard Street in the City of London.

The Arabic qahwa became the Turkish kahve then the Italian caffé and then English coffee.

02 Pin-Hole Camera:

The ancient Greeks thought our eyes emitted rays, like a laser, which enabled us to see. The first person to realise that light enters the eye, rather than leaving it, was the 10th-century Muslim mathematician, astronomer and physicist Ibn al-Haitham. He invented the first pin-hole camera after noticing the way light came through a hole in window shutters. The smaller the hole, the better the picture, he worked out, and set up the first Camera Obscura (from the Arab word qamara for a dark or private room). He is also credited with being the first man to shift physics from a philosophical activity to an experimental one.

03 Chess:

A form of chess was played in ancient India but the game was developed into the form we know it today in Persia . From there it spread westward to Europe - where it was introduced by the Moors in Spain in the 10th century - and eastward as far as Japan . The word rook comes from the Persian rukh, which means chariot.

04 Parachute:

A thousand years before the Wright brothers a Muslim poet, astronomer, musician and engineer named Abbas ibn Firnas made several attempts to construct a flying machine. In 852 he jumped from the minaret of the Grand Mosque in Cordoba using a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts. He hoped to glide like a bird. He didn't. But the cloak slowed his fall, creating what is thought to be the first parachute, and leaving him with only minor injuries. In 875, aged 70, having perfected a machine of silk and eagles' feathers he tried again, jumping from a mountain. He flew to a significant height and stayed aloft for ten minutes but crashed on landing - concluding, correctly, that it was because he had not given his device a tail so it would stall on landing.

Baghdad international airport and a crater on the Moon are named after him.

05 Shampoo:

Washing and bathing are religious requirements for Muslims, which is perhaps why they perfected the recipe for soap which we still use today. The ancient Egyptians had soap of a kind, as did the Romans who used it more as a pomade. But it was the Arabs who combined vegetable oils with sodium hydroxide and aromatics such as thyme oil. One of the Crusaders' most striking characteristics, to Arab nostrils, was that they did not
wash. Shampoo was introduced to England by a Muslim who opened Mahomed's Indian Vapour Baths on Brighton seafront in 1759 and was appointed Shampooing Surgeon to Kings George IV and William IV.

06 Refinement:

Distillation, the means of separating liquids through differences in their boiling points, was invented around the year 800 by Islam's foremost scientist, Jabir ibn Hayyan, who transformed alchemy into chemistry, inventing many of the basic processes and apparatus still in use today - liquefaction, crystallisation, distillation, purification, oxidisation, evaporation and filtration. As well as discovering sulphuric and nitric acid, he invented the alembic still, giving the world intense rosewater and other perfumes and alcoholic spirits (although drinking them is haram, or forbidden, in Islam). Ibn Hayyan emphasised systematic experimentation and was the founder of modern chemistry.

07 Shaft:

The crank-shaft is a device which translates rotary into linear motion and is central to much of the machinery in the modern world, not least the internal combustion engine. One of the most important mechanical inventions in the history of humankind, it was created by an ingenious Muslim engineer called al-Jazari to raise water for irrigation. His 1206 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices shows he also invented or refined the use of valves and pistons, devised some of the first mechanical clocks driven by water and weights, and was the father of robotics. Among his 50 other inventions was the combination lock.

08 Metal Armor:

Quilting is a method of sewing or tying two layers of cloth with a layer of insulating material in between. It is not clear whether it was invented in the Muslim world or whether it was imported there from India or China . But it certainly came to the West via the Crusaders. They saw it used by Saracen warriors, who wore straw-filled quilted canvas shirts instead of armour. As well as a form of protection, it proved an effective guard against the chafing of the Crusaders' metal armour and was an effective form of insulation - so much so that it became a cottage industry back home in colder climates such as Britain and Holland.

09 Pointed Arch:

The pointed arch so characteristic of Europe's Gothic cathedrals was an invention borrowed from Islamic architecture. It was much stronger than the rounded arch used by the Romans and Normans, thus allowing the building of bigger, higher, more complex and grander buildings. Other borrowings from Muslim genius included ribbed vaulting, rose windows and dome-building techniques. Europe's castles were also adapted to copy the Islamic world's - with arrow slits, battlements, a barbican and parapets. Square towers and keeps gave way to more easily defended round ones. Henry V's castle architect was a Muslim.

10 Surgery:

Many modern surgical instruments are of exactly the same design as those devised in the 10th century by a Muslim surgeon called al-Zahrawi. His scalpels, bone saws, forceps, fine scissors for eye surgery and many of the 200 instruments he devised are recognisable to a modern surgeon.
It was he who discovered that catgut used for internal stitches dissolves away naturally (a discovery he made when his monkey ate his lute strings) and that it can be also used to make medicine capsules. In the 13th century, another Muslim medic named Ibn Nafis described the circulation of the blood, 300 years before William Harvey discovered it.
Muslims doctors also invented anaesthetics of opium and alcohol mixes and developed hollow needles to suck cataracts from eyes in a technique still used today.

11 Windmill:

The windmill was invented in 634 for a Persian caliph and was used to grind corn and draw up water for irrigation. In the vast deserts of Arabia, when the seasonal streams ran dry, the only source of power was the wind which blew steadily from one direction for months. Mills had six or 12 sails covered in fabric or palm leaves. It was 500 years before the first windmill was seen in Europe.

12 Vaccination:

The technique of inoculation was not invented by Jenner and Pasteur but was devised in the Muslim world and brought to Europe from Turkey by the wife of the English ambassador to Istanbul in 1724. Children in Turkey were vaccinated with cowpox to fight the deadly smallpox at least 50 years before the West discovered it.

13 Fountain Pen:

The fountain pen was invented for the Sultan of Egypt in 953 after he demanded a pen which would not stain his hands or clothes. It held ink in a reservoir and, as with modern pens, fed ink to the nib by a combination of gravity and capillary action.


14 Numerical Numbering:

The system of numbering in use all round the world is probably Indian in origin but the style of the numerals is Arabic and first appears in print in the work of the Muslim mathematicians al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi around 825. Algebra was named after al-Khwarizmi' s book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, much of whose contents are still in use. The work of Muslim maths scholars was imported into Europe 300 years later by the Italian mathematician Fibonacci. Algorithms and much of the theory of trigonometry came from the Muslim world. And Al-Kindi's discovery of frequency analysis rendered all the codes of the ancient world soluble and created the basis of modern cryptology.

15 Soup:

Ali ibn Nafi, known by his nickname of Ziryab (Blackbird) came from Iraq to Cordoba in the 9th century and brought with him the concept of the three-course meal - soup, followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts. He also introduced crystal glasses (which had been invented after experiments with rock crystal by Abbas ibn Firnas - see No 4).

16 Carpets:

Carpets were regarded as part of Paradise by medieval Muslims, thanks to their advanced weaving techniques, new tinctures from Islamic chemistry and highly developed sense of pattern and arabesque which were the basis of Islam's non-representationa l art. In contrast, Europe's floors were distinctly earthly, not to say earthy, until Arabian and Persian carpets were introduced. In England, as Erasmus recorded, floors were "covered in rushes, occasionally renewed, but so imperfectly that the bottom layer is left undisturbed, sometimes for 20 years, harbouring expectoration, vomiting, the leakage of dogs and men, ale droppings, scraps of fish, and other abominations not fit to be mentioned".
Carpets, unsurprisingly, caught on quickly.

17 Pay Cheques:

The modern cheque comes from the Arabic saqq, a written vow to pay for goods when they were delivered, to avoid money having to be transported across dangerous terrain. In the 9th century, a Muslim businessman could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.

18 Earch is in sphere shape?

By the 9th century, many Muslim scholars took it for granted that the Earth was a sphere. The proof, said astronomer Ibn Hazm, "is that the
Sun is always vertical to a particular spot on Earth". It was 500 years before that realisation dawned on Galileo. The calculations of Muslim astronomers were so accurate that in the 9th century they reckoned the Earth's circumference to be 40, 253.4km - less than 200km out. The scholar al-Idrisi took a globe depicting the world to the court of King Roger of Sicily in 1139.

19 Rocket and Torpedo:

Though the Chinese invented saltpetre gunpowder, and used it in their fireworks, it was the Arabs who worked out that it could be purified using potassium nitrate for military use. Muslim incendiary devices terrified the Crusaders. By the 15th century they had invented both a rocket, which they called a "self-moving and combusting egg", and a torpedo - a self-propelled pear-shaped bomb with a spear at the front which impaled itself in enemy ships and then blew up.

20 Gardens:

Medieval Europe had kitchen and herb gardens, but it was the Arabs who developed the idea of the garden as a place of beauty and meditation. The first royal pleasure gardens in Europe were opened in 11th-century Muslim Spain. Flowers which originated in Muslim gardens include the carnation and the tulip.

Tips to Improve Self Confidence

Here are some quick tips to improve your Self Confidence. If we are committed to have a healthy self confidence there are many things you can do every day to boost your self confidence, each small steps that will help you to reach your goal. The good news is that self-esteem is not fixed and can be improved, try some of the steps below to boost your confidence and self-esteem.

1) Identify your successes. Everyone is good at something, so discover the things at which you excel, then focus on your talents. Give yourself permission to take pride in them. Give yourself credit for your successes. Inferiority is a state of mind in which you've declared yourself a victim. Do not allow yourself to be victimized.



2) Look in the mirror and smile. Studies surrounding what's called the "facial feedback theory" suggest that the expressions on your face can actually encourage your brain to register certain emotions. So by looking in the mirror and smiling every day, you might feel happier with yourself and more confident in the long run.



3) Exercise and eat healthy. Exercise raises adrenaline and makes one feel happier and healthier. It is certainly an easy and effective way to boost your self-confidence.


4) Turn feelings of envy or jealousy into a desire to achieve. Stop wanting what others have just because they have it; seek things simply because you want them, whether anybody else has them or not.


5) When you're feeling superbly insecure, write down a list of things that are good about you. Then read the list back. You'd be surprised at what you can come up with.

6) Don't be afraid to push yourself a bit - a little bit of pressure can actually show just how good you are!

7) You can try taking a martial arts or fitness class/course (or both). This will help build confidence and strength.

 Invest in some new clothing and donate some of your old clothing to send a message to yourself that you both look sharp and feel sharp.

9) Try to make yourself talk positively at all times. When you hear yourself saying you can't do something, stop and say you can. Unless you try, you will never know whether you are able to or not.

10) Don't get wrapped up in your mistakes and dwell on bad points; they can contrast your good points or even give you something to improve. There's no feeling like being good at something you were really bad at.

11) Don't confuse what you have with who you are. People degrade their self worth when comparing possessions.

12) Surround yourself with nurturing friends, not overly critical individuals who make you feel inadequate or insecure. This could do great harm and damage to your self confidence.

Always remember "There is hair line crack between success and failure" Be sure to push your self a bit, who knows that bit may lead you to success