INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

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**
[quote]
WORLD's RICHEST WOMEN
[/quote]
**
Sanu ki:D

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Re: INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

QAZI WAJID ka dailogue hai; *"ABBAY HUMEIN KIYA?"*

Precisely the reason why we dont have such enterprising people in our country!

SANU ki tey TUANU ki.....perr aitemad hee lay baitha hai...hamari qoum ko!

Khush Rahein.....aur seekhein dunya se...k kahan ki kahan jaa rahee hai aur hum loge abhi apna JUDGES kay maamlay tey karr rahay hein...
but then again....TUA'ANU KI :)

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*This Day in History, May 3 *

**On May 3rd, 1956, **
**the first judo world championships were held. **

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Re: INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

Bat yeh hy siway Oprah( she belongs to the group of Neeli, Anjuman and Noor Jehan type khwateen. Pakistan or India main bhi yeh group khasa ameer hy) ky sari khwateen ya bap ky ya shohar ky pyson sy ameer hoi hain kissi aik ki misal nahi ky os ny khud sy koshish ki hu, Pakistan main bhi synkron khwateen hain ju bap dada ky zamany sy ameer chali a rahi hain like, Abidda Hussain and Benazeer. Ab abba ji ky janazy per byti or Man ky jnazy per byta leader ban giya tu is main khatoon ka kamal howa na.:wink:
Hamin Aytmad nahi ehsasy kamtari ly doba hy ky her jaga ham ghalat hain.
Americans ko dykhu sab akrin gy magar apni Ghalti ka aytraf kabhi nahi karin gy( I am an American:D) zulm khul ker kerty hain magar “Du Process” ka khiyal rakhty hoy. Fysla woh ho ga ju ham ny ty ker liya hy bandy ko dikhao ham ny moqa diya or tum nykuch sabit na kiya.
Mukhataran Maai case ki misal lijiy yeh Pakistan ky judge ny fysla diya ky khatoon ky biyanat different hain different mwaqy per tu udham mach giya. Same to same situation yahan chal rahi hy magar os ko yeh kehty hain judges ny tamam qanooni taqazy pury liy hain.
Or ap jysy danishwar apnon ko ghalar kehty hain. Kabhi in Ameer logon ko bhi kissi qannaat pasand ki misal dy ker dykhi:aq: yeh sanu ki bhi nahi kehty yeh tu kehty hain bywaqoof hain koshish na ker ky qnnaat ka dhandora peet rahy hain. Well meri nazar main qanaat sy bari koi daulat nahi.Ju milla os per shukar ju nahi mila ya khu giya os ka bar bar KIA zikar:) Reh sakty hain tu khush rahiy:D

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Re: INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

May 4, 2008

Turkish Schools Offer Pakistan a Gentler Islam
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KARACHI, Pakistan — Praying in Pakistan has not been easy for Mesut Kacmaz, a Muslim teacher from Turkey.He tried the mosque near his house, but it had Israeli and Danish flags painted on the floor for people to step on.

The mosque near where he works warned him never to return wearing a tie. Pakistanis everywhere assume he is not Muslim because he has no beard.“Kill, fight, shoot,” Mr. Kacmaz said. “This is a misinterpretation of Islam.”But that view is common in Pakistan, a frontier land for the future of Islam, where schools, nourished by Saudi and American money dating back to the 1980s, have spread Islamic radicalism through the poorest parts of society. With a literacy rate of just 50 percent and a public school system near collapse, the country is particularly vulnerable. Mr. Kacmaz (pronounced KATCH-maz) is part of a group of Turkish educators who have come to this battleground with an entirely different vision of Islam.

Theirs is moderate and flexible, comfortably coexisting with the West while remaining distinct from it. Like Muslim Peace Corps volunteers, they promote this approach in schools, which are now established in more than 80 countries, Muslim and Christian. Their efforts are important in Pakistan, a nuclear power whose stability and whose vulnerability to fundamentalism have become main preoccupations of American foreign policy. Its tribal areas have become a refuge to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and the battle against fundamentalism rests squarely on young people and the education they get.At present, that education is extremely weak. The poorest Pakistanis cannot afford to send their children to public schools, which are free but require fees for books and uniforms. Some choose to send their children to madrasas, or religious schools, which, like aid organizations, offer free food and clothing. Many simply teach, but some have radical agendas. At the same time, a growing middle class is rejecting public schools, which are chaotic and poorly financed, and choosing from a new array of private schools.

The Turkish schools, which have expanded to seven cities in Pakistan since the first one opened a decade ago, cannot transform the country on their own. But they offer an alternative approach that could help reduce the influence of Islamic extremists.They prescribe a strong Western curriculum, with courses, taught in English, from math and science to English literature and Shakespeare. They do not teach religion beyond the one class in Islamic studies that is required by the state. Unlike British-style private schools, however, they encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set examples in lifestyle and prayer. “Whatever the West has of science, let our kids have it,” said Erkam Aytav, a Turk who works in the new schools. “But let our kids have their religion as well.”That approach appeals to parents in
Pakistan, who want their children to be capable of competing with the West without losing their identities to it. Allahdad Niazi, a retired Urdu professor in Quetta, a frontier town near the Afghan border, took his son out of an elite military school, because it was too authoritarian and did not sufficiently encourage Islam, and put him in the Turkish school, called PakTurk.“Private schools can’t make our sons good Muslims,” Mr. Niazi said, sitting on the floor in a Quetta house. “Religious schools can’t give them modern education. PakTurk does both.”

The model is the brainchild of a Turkish Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gulen. A preacher with millions of followers in Turkey, Mr. Gulen, 69, comes from a tradition of Sufism, an introspective, mystical strain of Islam. He has lived in exile in the United States since 2000, after getting in trouble with secular Turkish officials. Mr. Gulen’s idea, Mr. Aytav said, is that “without science, religion turns to radicalism, and without religion, science is blind and brings the world to danger.”The schools are putting into practice a Turkish Sufi philosophy that took its most modern form during the last century, after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turkey’s founder, crushed the Islamic caliphate in the 1920s. Islamic thinkers responded by trying to bring Western science into the faith they were trying to defend. In the 1950s, while Arab Islamic intellectuals like Sayyid Qutub were firmly rejecting the West, Turkish ones like Said Nursi were seeking ways to coexist with it. In Karachi, a sprawling city that has had its own struggles with radicalism — the American reporter Daniel Pearl was killed here, and the famed Binori madrasa here is said to have sheltered Osama bin Laden — the two approaches compete daily. The Turkish school is in a poor neighborhood in the south of the city where residents are mostly Pashtun, a strongly tribal ethnic group whose poorer fringes have been among the most susceptible to radicalism. Mr. Kacmaz, who became principal 10 months ago, ran into trouble almost as soon as he began.

The locals were suspicious of the Turks, who, with their ties and clean-shaven faces, looked like math teachers from Middle America. “They asked me several times, ‘Are they Muslim? Do they pray? Are they drinking at night?’ ” said Ali Showkat, a vice principal of the school, who is Pakistani.Goats nap by piles of rubbish near the school’s entrance, and Mr. Kacmaz asked a local religious leader to help get people to stop throwing their trash near the school, to no avail. Exasperated, he hung an Islamic saying on the outer wall of the school: “Cleanliness is half of faith.” When he prayed at a mosque, two young men followed him out and told him not to return wearing a tie because it was un-Islamic. “I said, ‘Show me a verse in the Koran where it was forbidden,’ ” Mr. Kacmaz said, steering his car through tangled rush-hour traffic. The two men were wearing glasses, and he told them that scripturally, there was no difference between a tie and glasses.“Behind their words there was no Hadith,” he said, referring to a set of Islamic texts, “only misunderstanding.”That misunderstanding, along with the radicalism that follows, stalks the poorest parts of Quetta. Abdul Bari, a 31-year-old teacher of Islam from a religious family, lives in a neighborhood without electricity or running water. Two brothers from his tribe were killed on a suicide mission, leaving their mother a beggar and angering Mr. Bari, who says a Muslim’s first duty is to his mother and his family. “Our nation has no patience,” said Mr. Bari, who raised his seven younger siblings, after his father died suddenly a dozen years ago. He decided that one of his brothers should be educated, and enrolled him in the Turkish school. The Turks put the focus on academics, which pleased Mr. Bari, who said his dream was for Saadudeen, his brother, to lift the family out of poverty and expand its horizons beyond religion. Mr. Bari’s title, hafiz, means he has memorized the entire Koran, though he has no formal education. Two other brothers have earned the same distinction.

Their father was an imam. His is a lonely mission in a neighborhood where nearly all the residents are illiterate and most disapprove of his choices, Mr. Bari said. He is constantly on guard against extremism. He once punished Saadudeen for flying kites with the wrong kind of boys. At the Turkish school, the teenager is supervised around the clock in a dormitory. “They are totally against extremism,” Mr. Bari said of the Turks. “They are true Muslims. They will make my brother into a true Muslim. He’ll deal with people with justice and wisdom. Not with impatience.”Illiteracy is one of the roots of problems dogging the Muslim world, said Matiullah Aail, a religious scholar in Quetta who graduated from Medina University in Saudi Arabia.In Baluchistan, Quetta’s sparsely populated province, the literacy rate is less than 10 percent, said Tariq Baluch, a government official in the Pasheen district. He estimated that about half of the district’s children attended madrasas. Mr. Aail said: “Doctors and lawyers have to show their degrees. But when it comes to mullahs, no one asks them for their qualifications. They don’t have knowledge, but they are influential.”That leads to a skewed interpretation of Islam, even by those schooled in it, according to Mr. Gulen and his followers. “They’ve memorized the entire holy book, but they don’t understand its meaning,” said Kamil Ture, a Turkish administrator.Mr. Kacmaz chimed in: “How we interpret the Koran is totally dependent on our education.”In an interview in 2004, published in a book of his writings, Mr. Gulen put it like this: “In the countries where Muslims live, some religious leaders and immature Muslims have no other weapon in hand than their fundamental interpretation of Islam.

They use this to engage people in struggles that serve their own purposes.”Moderate as that sounds, some Turks say Mr. Gulen uses the schools to advance his own political agenda. Murat Belge, a prominent Turkish intellectual who has experience with the movement, said that Mr. Gulen “sincerely believes that he has been chosen by God,” and described Mr. Gulen’s followers as “Muslim Jesuits” who are preparing elites to run the country.Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish professor at the University of Utah who has had extensive experience with the Gulen movement, offered a darker assessment. “The purpose here is very much power,” Mr. Yavuz said. “The model of power is the Ottoman Empire and the idea that Turks should shape the Muslim world.”But while radical Islamists seek to re-establish a seventh-century Islamic caliphate, without nations or borders, and more moderate Islamists, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, use secular democracy to achieve the goal of an Islamic state, Mr. Gulen is a nationalist who says he wants no more than a secular democracy where citizens are free to worship, a claim secular Turks find highly suspect.Still, his schools are richly supported by Turkish businessmen. M. Ihsan Kalkavan, a shipping magnate who has built hotels in Nigeria, helped finance Gulen schools there, which he said had attracted the children of the Nigerian elite.“When we take our education experiment to other countries, we introduce ourselves. We say, ‘See, we’re not terrorists.’ When people get to know us, things change,” Mr. Kalkavan said in his office in Istanbul.He estimated the number of Mr. Gulen’s followers in Turkey at three million to five million. The network itself does not provide estimates, and Mr. Gulen declined to be interviewed.The schools, which also operate in Christian countries like Russia, are not for Muslims alone, and one of their stated aims is to promote interfaith understanding. Mr. Gulen met the previous pope, as well as Jewish and Orthodox Christian leaders, and teachers in the schools say they stress multiculturalism and universal values.“We are all humans,” said Mr. Kacmaz, the principal. “In Islam, every human being is very important.”Pakistani society is changing fast, and more Pakistanis are realizing the importance of education, in part because they have more to lose, parents said. Abrar Awan, whose son is attending the Turkish school in Quetta, said he had grown tired of the attitude of the Islamic political parties he belonged to as a student. Now a government employee with a steady job, he sees real life as more complicated than black-and-white ideology.“America or the West was always behind every fault, every problem,” he said, at a gathering of fathers in April. “Now, in my practical life, I know the faults are within us.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Karachi and Quetta in Pakistan and from Istanbul.Make Windows Vista more reliable and secure with Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Learn more.

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This Day in History, May 6
***On May 6th, 1889, the Eiffel Tower ***
***was officialy opened to the public.

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Re: INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

(RAJU JAMIL)

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*Man who lost homes in Katrina claims $97M Powerball prize *
**
**By MELINDA DESLATTE, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 54 minutes ago

**BATON ROUGE, La. - A construction company owner who lost two homes in Hurricane Katrina claimed a $97 million Powerball prize, a jackpot won off a ticket he bought at a convenience store where he stopped to buy his wife a gallon of milk. **
When he turned in the winning ticket, Carl Hunter became the largest Powerball winner in Louisiana's history. He won the jackpot in January, but the 73-year-old small businessman waited nearly four months to claim the prize.
An avid lottery player, Hunter said he already had bought a Powerball ticket on Jan. 16 at the gas station less than two blocks from his home in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. But he stopped at the station again that day to buy milk — at the request of his wife, Dianne — and got a second "quick pick" ticket.
"I had some change, and one dollar was used to buy this ticket," Hunter said Thursday at the Louisiana Lottery Corp. headquarters in Baton Rouge, where he claimed his prize.
"It's all about milk," his wife said, smiling.
The couple, surrounded by cameras, was decidedly low-key about the multimillion dollar win, saying they didn't have specific plans for the money — besides retirement and the rebuilding of a camp lost to Katrina.
"I'm retiring, you know, naturally," Carl Hunter said.
Hunter took a lump sum payment that will give him $33.9 million after taxes, according to lottery officials. Asked why he waited so long to turn in the winning ticket, Hunter said he wanted to wrap up some of his construction work and finish his outstanding contracts. In fact, Hunter's wife Dianne said he was still at work this week.
"I don't think about buying elaborate cars or homes," Carl Hunter said.
Hunter said he owned two homes that were destroyed in 2005 by Katrina, and he and his wife moved into a Metairie home she owned after the storm, the home that was near the gas station where he bought his winning ticket.
The multimillion dollar win wasn't Hunter's first winning lottery ticket. He said he won $5,000 off a ticket a few years ago.
West Metairie Shell, the gas station where Hunter bought his ticket, will get $25,000 for selling the winning ticket. The station, tucked among brick ranch homes and raised wooden houses in a middle-class neighborhood, lost its roof during Katrina, and the store was looted.

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Talented?
---------
Do you think you can read? **
**Try this tongue-twister!

Mr. See and Mr. Soar were old friends. See owned a saw and Soar
owned a seesaw. Now See's saw sawed Soar's seesaw before Soar saw
See, which made Soar sore. Had Soar seen See's saw before See saw
Soar's seesaw, then See's saw would not have sawed Soar's seesaw.
But See saw Soar and Soar's seesaw before Soar saw See's saw, so
See's saw sawed Soar's seesaw. It was a shame to let See see Soar so
sore just because See's saw sawed Soar's seesaw.

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what about writers,hmmmmmm????

Your job his job
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WRITERS are the first cousins of JOURNALISTS !

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Interesting Fact

Tiny Girl in India

Adolescent from India, who, with an
increase only in 58 cm, is
the smallest girl in the world.
Jyoti Amge, 14 years, and it shorter
than average two-year-old child
weighs only 5 kg.

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ONLY LACKED POVERTY

A nobleman, who was an enthusiastic amateur painter,
once took a sample of his best work to the great Turner
for his candid opinion of it.
***The artist examined it carefully and, turning to the gentleman
said "My lord, you lack nothing but
poverty to become a very excellent painter"

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hahaha

BUT

i guess WE writers use MORE words than Journalists...

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Re: INTERESTING LIVES and INTERESTING FACTS

DON’T BE CRUEL:
*This Otis Blackwell-penned number too, went to the top of the Billboard pop,
country and black music charts in 1956 and stayed there for weeks–and with
sales estimated anywhere between four and nine million, became Elvis’
biggest selling single to-date. A perfect blend of pop and rockability, Presley
first heard the song at a studio session in July 1956 and immediately agreed to record it.
*Click on;
http://www.youshare.com/view.php?file=Dontbecruel.wav1.mp3

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London Times
Obituary for the late Mr. Common Sense

**Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were **
**long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape. **

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:
Knowing when to come in out of the rain; why the early bird gets the
worm; Life isn't always fair; and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense* lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).*

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but
overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy
charged with harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended
from school for using mouthwash after lunch; and a teacher fired for
reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense* lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly
children.*

**It declined even further when schools were required to get parental
consent to administer sun lotion or an Elastoplast to a student; but
could not inform parents when a student **
became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

*Common Sense lost the will to live as the criminals received better
treatment than their victims, got elected to the parliaments, got their cases dropped. ***

Common Sense* took a beating when you
couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault if you did.*

Common Sense* finally gave up the will to live, after a woman failed to
realise that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in
her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.*

Common Sense* was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust; his wife, Discretion; along with his daughter and son, Responsibility and Reason. He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers; I Know My Rights, I Want It Now, Someone Else Is To Blame, and I'm A Victim.*

**Not many attended his funeral because so few realised he was gone. **

**If you still remember him, pass this on. **

If not, join the majority and do nothing.

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MY ELDEST WRITES TO MY WIFE ON “MOTHER’S DAY”… (Raju)
On Mon, 5/12/08, Sara Jamil wrote:
From: Sara Jamil
Subject: To my mom on my first mother’s day
To: “Mona” , “Raju”
Date: Monday, May 12, 2008, 1:23 PM
Posted on May 12, 2008 by jammie

Even though I have been standing in my mom’s shoes for only a year as yet, I can see it probably started long ago, when simple things like she wanting to hold my hand but me wanting to walk it solo were the very beginnings of the rebellion that was to last us a lifetime.Being the eldest means there’s always a war that you have waged with your parents that the ones after you will benefit from. You are the one who had to fight for the stay-out-late privileges, break in the phonecalls from boys idea, try to explain to them that mehndis start, not end at 11pm, that going out for coffee is not an outing that needs to be asked extensive permission in advance for. You have to fight for the right to a car- even if its your own, you have to assert your independence harder, explain what a college study trip is and eventually figure out how to tell them you have chosen who you want to marry. You are the one who gets blamed the most for setting an example but then also gets trusted the most to set that example.Some days, I want to run to my mom with Nadi in tow because only she can make it all seem easy. And at other times, I want to run away from her, to try and prove to her that yes, I can do it all by myself and I don’t need anyone to hold my hand. Heh, I suppose not much has changed in 31 years except I am beginning to wish on many many levels, that I turn out to be even half as amazing a mom as mine has always been.

Sara
-in search of the marvellous-

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WORLD’s TALLEST STRUCTURES BY COMPARISON

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THE
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***We all complain about Power outages in Karachi . ***
Our small actions can help better the situation.

**Fact: **

If all of us switch off our Television rather than keep it on Stand by mode it will save up to 20 MW power on monthly basis.

Please do search on the Internet and confirm it from this link.
http://www.physorg.com/news8570.html

***In a single year, the electrical equipment in German households and offices consumed an estimated 18 billion kilowatt-hours of power while switched to standby mode. That corresponds to almost the entire output of all the wind turbines producing electricity in Germany . ***
***Many consumer electronics devices take over ***
50 percent of their total power consumption in standby mode.