Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Jinnah's Take on Potential Problems to be faced by Pakistan

Today, I revisited Jinnah's historic speech on 11th August 1947 to the first constituent assembly of Pakistan. 

Here I list the things, in Jinnah's own words,  that held top priority in Jinnah's vision of Pakistan and the challenges he thought Pakistan would have to cope with . 


The original text of speech can be accessed from a host of sources like, Pak Tea House or Left Side of the Right Brain, where it was posted today. 



1. First Duty of a Government 

"You will no doubt agree with me that the first duty of a government is to maintain law and order, so that the life, property and religious beliefs of its subjects are fully protected by the State."



2. Bribery and Corruption
"That really is a poison. We must put that down with an iron hand and I hope that you will take adequate measures as soon as it is possible for this Assembly to do so"



3. Black-Marketing
"A citizen who does black-marketing commits, I think, a greater crime than the biggest and most grievous of crimesThese black-marketeers are really knowing, intelligent and ordinarily responsible people, and when they indulge in black-marketing, I think they ought to be very severely punished, because the entire system of control and regulation of foodstuffs and essential commodities, and cause wholesale starvation and want and even death."


4. Nepotism and Jobbery
"I want to make it quite clear that I shall never tolerate any kind of jobbery, nepotism or any any influence directly of indirectly brought to bear upon me. Whenever I will find that such a practice is in vogue or is continuing anywhere, low or high, I shall certainly not countenance it."


5. Religious Freedom
"You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State."



If we compare Jinnah's vision of a state as guardian of its subjects and free from the vices mentioned above with the current state of affairs, we are, no doubt, still at ground-zero. We have to re-visit our own mistakes, re-think our strategies and boot up again. 



Monday, August 6, 2012

PMLN Fake Twitter Accounts - Part II

VentureBeat posted an article with some stats on fake followers on twitter, few hours back. 
The article mentions about growing trend in such paid services and how it goes against the  terms of service of twitter. 

After reading the article, I had another look at the PMLN fake twitter accounts, I mentioned in the last blog. 

It was fun to figure out the survival strategy of the paid services. Maintain a certain amount of unique content with  each profile to save it from the rash of twitter against spammers. 

Identical tweets continue

If one takes a cursory look at the following twitter accounts: 

  1. MudassarSultan1
  2. IffatRehanKazmi
  3. MadihaAliChohan
It is clearly visible that the first four identical tweets are the about PMLN, IK, CJ and PPP. Fifth tweet, at the time, I am looking the accounts, is a quototation. The quotation is different across different accounts. A nice way to keep the overall profile content unique. 
Just as sometimes, as students,  we would copy the whole assignment but modify / delete / add few sentences to try to establish that somehow our work is different from the rest of class/group. 

The quotation is second last tweet in the picture below. 




One of the quotes from an accounts reads, "Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none.
Indeed we don't trust a few. However, dear paid services, you seem to do with 'do wrong to none' part what non-practicing followers of a religion do.  

Source accounts for tweets and pictures

The first profile in the eariler list, MudassarSultan1, describes himself/herself/itself as "a creative designer, intellectual, social worker who loves to read , write, paint... and gets high on music :) or love whatever comes first :))"

Well, to acknowledge the creativity of this account, it's enough to state that this account is the first source of this tweet and the picture which was re-sent, I dare not say re-tweet here, by all other accounts which seem to be part of the fake PMLN twitter 'gang'.

Another account, which is evidently, part of this gang,  synchronously re-tweeting quotes, is  RidaShahJafferyHowever, we find some sanity here and little engagement in twitter conversations hints at the profile to be real. The accounts's total tweets, 120+,  are on higher end of the account average of the 'gang'. The comic by Tamoor about SKMH funds r'e-tweeted' PMLN 'gang' originated from this account. 

--------------------------------------------------------
All in all, the respected Khadim e Ala who matched Lahore to Paris continues to be  promoted through use of paid software services that regularly generate fake accounts and data. 

Is this the way PMLN is committed to it's 3 E's: Energy, Education and Economy ?? 

P.S: Moeez Pirzada had a good discussion in his program Sochta Paksitan on National Health Policy in Pakistan and why all political parties are silent about this issue of real importance.  The sane reader might wanna have a look at it. 



Thursday, August 2, 2012

Is PMLN attempting too hard to make into Social Media??


Probably we all happen to find, at times,  strange patterns on twitter, the simplest being "This is trending in Paksitan or this is trending worldwide." Some patterns are annoying, like when your timeline is filled with Faisal Qureshi's replies to teens and trolls. You find journalists literally screaming about trolls At times there's a group of ordinary tweeps or even journalists like Dr. Shaid Masood, Ahmed Noorani and Razarumi engaged in conversations.  In one of my earlier I mentioned about MQM kinda exploiting the the #socmm12 social media mela to flood tweets about what MQM does and what it does not.

 But today, as I was following  comments and responses about the Shaukat Khanum, I noticed a sudden barrage of re-tweets rather same message tweeted from a dozen or more accounts. Re-tweets, continuous, within a blink of an eye and with no mention whatsoever of the original source. No sings of a re-tweet. And surprisingly no other tweet from ordinary tweeps in between. I was totally baffled what is going on. You better look the snapshot below.  For sake of space I have presented the tweets in two columns.

Wao, a great number of people talking in favor of PMLN. I had believed eiter MQM or PTI dominated the presence on twitter. But what's going on here. PMLN. I have much more interests than mere politics but this was quite  intriguing.

At the outset, there is something wrong with the profile picutes. Ok,. why not look at few of the profiles in the list. There are some similarities: 

  1. A good number of accounts have no description at all.  For others, its so obscure and non-consistent  with the general appeal and types of tweets from the profile. 
  2.  All of them have on average 80-100 tweets and 90% of the tweets are the same... and somehow synchronized precisely to a second... not Minutes... if you happen to notice!!!
  3. All the accounts unfortunately are combined to re-tweet tweets by PMLN against other parties and tweets about Let's Join PMLN and let's meet PMLN leaders and respected CM Shehbaz.

In the picture below, three accounts are show with same set of tweets at the same time... what an amazing synchronization. 





Here's more, certain accounts go shopping together and tweet same tweets about Ramadan, like reading Quran and welcoming Ramazan. What a spirit of unity. 



 I won't rush make any claims and assumptions about whose running all these accounts.  But apparently there's a strong connection to PMLN and its attempts to gain some hold in social media sector. May be someone is testing a Beta version of software on PMLN tweets to malign them. 


P.S.:  Before delcaring me a PTIAN, PPPIAN, or JI-AN, have the courage to pass by one of my blog about Khadim e Ala at least. Though his highness' silence on recent blames by N-league is intriguing.



Subscribe to Posts: