An Eternal Memory- I loved this one so much specially the last line

How far are you in your life?

Did someone say it right that women are at their best when they approach 40's? On this birthday, I realized that I am approaching my best age. Time is slipping away from my hands like sand. When I look back at my life, it looks like a second ago, I was a little girl held by my father in his hands taking rounds of the house in an attempt to stop me from crying, and a mother always ready to welcome me whenever I would wake up from my sleep. Then I approached the golden age, when you are not scared of any obvious thing. You do what you want, and you know how to become stubborn in order to get what you want. Then the teenage starts, the stupidest life time. You have really big dreams becoming a famous actor, singer, or a stylish politician. You don't care what the society says about you. You want to do the craziest fashion, wanna be clad in such outfits which people may stop for a second to look at you. Then the twenties when you start to think about your career, marriage, kids. This is also age of dreaming but mature dreaming, or rather dreams that "can" come true. And then you begin with early thirties, the time span where you really think to settle down somewhere, take a break, think what you have achieved so far and what you further want to achieve but not for yourself but for those who are later going replace you - ! You cannot afford gambling at this age. People usually avoid making any bigger/ riskier decisions of their life at this stage of life. 

This is the short story of my life! I guess that is the life of most people. Most but not for all. Everybody is born in a different situation. Being sheltered by loving parents is yet another comfort. When you lose them, that is the time you have to stand up for yourself and think mature. Some people never get mature because they know that they have a roof on their head and it will protect them in danger. The important thing is that people don't wait for you to get mature, neither does time. You have to meet their demands and you can no longer live in your isolated barbie world. 

You have to stand up, take responsibilities and finish your journey of life with lesser regrets!! 

سب ٹھاٹھ پڑا رہ جاویگا جب لاد چلے گا بنجارہ

Over these months, I have realized (to some extent) how this life is. It is just a small journey, we come and we go. It is just like the scene at any airport, arrivals and departures...... nobody come to the airport bringing all his wealth. In these times, I just hear the following words in my ears all the time: گر تو ہے لکھی بنجارہ اور کھیپ بھی تیری بھاری ہے اے غافل تجھ سے بھی چڑهتا اک اور بڑا بیوپاری ہے کیا شکر مصری قند گری کیا سانبھر میٹھا کھاری ہے کیا داکھ منقا سونٹھ مرچ کیا کیسر لونگ سپاری ہے سب ٹھاٹھ پڑا رہ جاویگا جب لاد چلے گا بنجارہ

English Translation:

If you are a millionaire, and your stores are brimming,
Know, O ignorant! There is always another merchant who is even greater than you.
What of your sugar, candy, jaggery and nuts? What of your doughs, sweet and salty?
What of your grapes, raisins, ginger and pepper? What of your saffron, cloves and betel?
All your splendor will lie useless, when the nomad packs-up and leaves

Naat from somebody

Disclaimer: This naat portrays love of someone for our prophet. She asked me to write this naat in Urdu script and publish it somewhere on internet, this naat was written by her so I don't want to post it in my name, but as per her wish I am publishing this:

ہمارے نبی کی شان ہے سبحان الله 
سادگی انکی بیمثال ہے سبحان الله 
سب سے اعلی حسن اخلاق ہے انکا 
فدا ساری  خلقت،  درجہ آفاق ہے انکا 
انکی تشریف  آوری رب کی ہے رحمت 
نماز  روزہ  زکات سب  انکی  ہے برکت 
جنکو دشمن  نے بھی امین ہے پکارا 
جن پر رب نے  اپنا قرآن  ہے اتارا
خوش  قسمت  مدینے  کی ہر  ہے گلی 
انکے  تبسّم سے کھلی  ہے کلی کلی

Social Exchange through Social Media

In today’s business world, the companies ought to harness competencies from the customers. In this respect, the markets are viewed as forums for firms and active users to share and combine resources and capabilities of each other in the process of product/ service development. Co-creation and Co-production are used to describe the relationship between firms and consumers. Co-creation is based on the idea that value is solely determined by the consumers and firms serve as either to facilitate value or to co-create by becoming involved in the customer’s value creation process. The Co-production on the other hand refers to the mere involvement of consumers in product and service development. According to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), the morphing of customers’ role in the dynamic business environment from passive to active players demands companies to involve customers around four axes: 1) Engage in dialogue with the customers, 2) mobilize communities, 3) Manage customer diversity and 4) Co-create personalize experience. Today Social Media comes at the heart of mobilizing Social Exchange mechanisms in various forms.

Today, the purview of social media has swept away all the firm boundaries and customer premises. Online forums and tweeter feeds used for marketers and product developers towards discernment of customers desires is now an old story. The world is now at the verge of technological change and there is yet much more to be delivered by social media that will come at the later part of the talk. Looking at social media from Prahalad and Ramaswamy’s pivot points to exploit customer’s knowledge and ideas, we can think of social media providing the following:

•  Engage in Dialogues with Customers: Social media has long been thought to providing a new channel for companies to communicate with their customers but now it has fundamentally challenged to other forms of communication. Today companies are moving towards using social platform and social design mechanics to manage interactions across all communication channels to customers (Social-driven IT, Accenture Technology Vision 2012). This will also add value by insuring value adding communication among customers, employees and enterprises.
• Mobilize Communities: Matt Shaw (2011) reported that 84% of the adult customers feel that they feel more loyal to the brands because of social media and on the other hand, only 9% reported that social media are best to obtaining clear comprehensions about their favorite brands and 85% believe that a brand could not reach out to them over past 3 months. This indicates a clear gap between the potential of social media and the under-utilization of it. Hence social media needs to capitalize on mobilizing the communities in view of potential of social media to do that.
• Customer Diversity: Can be achieved effectively by social media. Social media provides the opportunity to manage various groups and networks and therefore an effective social exchange mechanism can take place by exploiting each fragment managed via independent network.
• Co-create personalize experience: It is very important to understand that Social media is just not about marketing. Social media is among the technologies, that Bingham and Conner in their book “” write as innovations that enable a new kind of knowledge-building ecosystem with people at its core. With examples from Best Buy to Intel and from Deloitte to U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, social media improves the way you recruit talent, engage employees, and build work-force capacities. Social media creates useful learning assets from customer’s experience with respect to your product and customer’s feedback. Hence, interaction between users and developers can establish valuable ties that can result into more customer loyalty and business value. Facebook recently launched the new version of Open Graph. It’s a framework that enables content developers to build applications that allow users to share whatever they are doing without overwhelming their friends.

Opportunities provided by Social Media:

Social media provides new opportunities to capture, measure, analyze and exploit social interactions in new ways.

·      

S   Social Polling which is an effective marketing tool to determine what works and what doesn’t. In this way, firms produce directly usable information which serves as the key to making business decision (Johnny S. John, 2009). 

     F8 event (Facebook event to bring together the developers, entrepreneurs and innovators who are building a more social web), facebook is now involved in exploiting the users activity by adding more verbs in addition to “Like”, such as “Read”, “Watch”, “Listen”, or “Travel”. In this way, if a travel agency learns that a user is planning for travel, they can render lucrative offers and cheap tickets to his desired place to travel. This is an insight that would not have triggered the travel agency had the user clicked “Like” for Madagascar.

    

    The traditional customer-firm relation is blurring away because users are now more actively involved in sharingexperience with each other. Toyota Private Social Network provides an opportunity for Toyota owners, dealers and cars. You can be alerted when your car needs battery recharging and also provides you with tips on maintenance from the dealers.

P    Provision of a social commerce platform like “The Gifts Projects” of eBay.

     Provision of commerce services like Geico’s service to pay bill online on Facebook without even clicking Geico’s own website.

    Better handling of customer’s problems, for example telco’s implementation of lodging complaints over twitter and that result into increasing the customer satisfaction level from 70% to 85%. 

Challenges - What firms need to capitalize on?

·         Companies need to revisit the whole business process and systems that implement them. All the firm boundaries where firm interact with customers need to be integrated with each other and “socially enabled”. This would mean at the very least that customers get the same answer to question whether asked over email, website, call center or face-to-face interaction.

·         Companies need to capitalize on new forms of data generated by those social feeds.

·         Establish an IT team to design and pilot cross-functional social media platforms.

·         Move beyond merely “Social listening” to managing social interactions. This can be done by helping individual business units to position their social strategies on top of enterprise wide strategy of social.

·         Monetize on social interactions.

·         Firms need to identify an effective social medium to interact with the customers so that optimal value could be achieved.

Social media is an effective mechanism for co-creation where various business units will interact with the customer to generate value by getting valuable knowledge from the customer. Companies today must adopt social media otherwise a Social Media legacy will culminate businesses in future as these companies will be lacking the useful insights from the customers that they know about them and their businesses will be lured away by the customers. 

Oct 14, 1990 & 2012

Life is a puzzle and sometimes, it shows its weirdest face. History repeats itself and we humans are perplexed. Today is October 14, 2013 and one year ago, I didn't this day would change my life like that. October 14, 1990, the day when my father had to leave for his trip to his hometown around 1000 KM from where we live. I remember the last time I ever shook hands with him. We bid him goodbye and I kept looking at him while he was leaving until he was out of my sight. We didn't know he was on way to his eternal place and this journey was just start of it. 

December 22, 1990, a day before he had to come back, he had a sudden heart attack which was quite severe and he died within few minutes even before the medical help could reach him. 

Last year until October 14, 2012, my life was so perfect and nice when my mother had a brain stroke that day. Initially it was not diagnosed, in fact I only came to know about the severity of her strokes few weeks after her death by getting access to her reports. Earlier I had "personally diagnosed" her disease through internet search. I thought that she had "Transient Ischemic Attack" meaning only little part of brain damage while it was "Tonic Clonic" means the whole brain was damaged. After her brain strokes, she did survive for 10 months but she was only physically present but not "really" with us. She passed away on August 22, 2013. Both on 22nd! (My mother born on Thursday, died on Thursday). Life is a mystery sometimes......

I actually lost both my parents on October 14, (father in 1990 and mother in 2012, my father physically and my mother mentally). I never saw either of my parent dead. My father passed away in his hometown and they buried him there. I came to know about his death on the third day because I was too little. For my mother, I opt not to go to Pakistan for her funeral. For me they are still alive. May Allah SWT forgive him.

I would relate it to another date, December 14, (1994 and 2012). On December 14, 1994, my mother had a worst heart attack. She was admitted in the hospital on that day for 1 month and 1 day (until January 15, 1995). And December 14, 2012 was the last day she was ever in the hospital. She was released from the hospital on that date. Every year, I would tease her and remind her of her heart attack and say, "mom today is your heart attack anniversary and she would get mad at me". From October 14, 2012 to December 14, 2012, she was admitted in the hospital for 5 times. From December 14 until the day she left us, we were on a roller coaster avoiding the fear of when she needs to be admitted in the hospital again. Her Tonic Clonic seizures could come anytime. But that day never came. She passed away peacefully in her home, in her room on her bed without any obvious sign of a stroke or attack. I saw her one day before her death, me, my friend who was visiting me and Ebrahiem. She was looking like an angel, so much carefree, like a small baby. That is why, when i heard this news from Aurin (same friend), i just could not believe it.

Parents are a shelter. When they are with us, we take them for granted and when they leave, we realize we have lost the biggest worldly support -  no THE ONLY worldly support. I have realized this but its too late. I hope those who have parents realize it before its too late. 

I love you ammi

Today, one week has passed since you are not (physically) around me anymore. Never really thought I will be writing something like that. But if I had to bid you goodbye forever, it would have been the most difficult task of my life. I know I have handed you over to someone Who loves you more than I do, who is "Rahman" and "Raheem". I know that this is only a temporary separation and I will meet you soon inshaAllah. I know whatever I could have done for you would not even tantamount to  one night that you spent taking care of me. I know I had not been the way I should have been. I know how I wasted my time in other stuff rather than valuing those moments by spending them with you, I know I have disobeyed you so many times. But I know you still love me a lot. You love and care is still surrounding me. 

The dilemma is, I lost you just after becoming a mother myself. Motherhood makes you realize so many things that you have been taking for granted throughout your life. I am not an ideal mother like you, that's why I really wished you could take care of my baby. The day when you had to leave this world, I was making this prayer in the morning: "May you get health and may you get all my life and energies and you be taking care of my child because you are much better than me". Then in few hours, I came to know that you met your ultimate destination and you left this world even without kissing my child. 

I know how you had to kill yourself after our father and absorbed all the tears inside your heart and never really showed us your sad face. Did I ever see you crying? No! You dedicated your life for your kids and your plants. And that makes me remind something funny about you. When you had to explain our house address to somebody, you used to refer to your plants; "the place where you see so many plants" :) You learnt me to be strong and look forward to mercy of Allah SWT because in the end, He remains and everything else perishes. 

Mom, do you know Allah SWT had talked to me at the time you were going through the most severe brain stroke in all the strokes that you suffered and when I was reciting Surah Rehman on you, and then I reached this ayah:

"Everyone upon the earth will perish, And there will remain the Face of your Lord, Owner of Majesty and Honor." (Quran 55: 26-27)

I got the message from Allah SWT that your days in this (fake) world are numbered. Yet, I kept praying for you, kept hoping for you because we all needed energies. We all needed strength to make your remaining days as much comfortable for you as possible. Yet, the mercy of Allah SWT is so much that you lived with us for 294 more days, got rid of the most life threatening thing that you had- 'your bedsore' of 4th degree, kept praying for us, getting to see my baby, striving your best to survive. There was even a time when your paralysis was partially gone and I saw you eating with your own hands. You were taken care by your daughters who were breathing with every breath you were taking and so much emotionally motivated by your beloved son. 

Ammi, I didn't really lose you, I lost the praying hands of yours. How can one imagine a person having so many brain strokes would be perfectly reciting the prayers from Quran  (word-by-word from heart) for her daughter who is miles away. That is why you have such an important status in front of Allah: 

"Your Lord has decreed that you worship none but Him, and that you be kind to parents. Whether one or more attain old age in thy life, say not to them a word of contempt, nor repel them, but address them in terms of honor. And out of kindness, lower to them the wing of humility, and say, "my Lord! bestow on them Thy Mercy, even as they cherished me in childhood." (Quran: 17:23-24)

Who can imagine a person who, according to the doctor, had all the diseases except cancer would see my sad face on Skype and ask me about it, "Why is Sadaf having a sad face". This reminded me of: 

"We have enjoined on man kindness to his parents; in pain did his mother bear him, and in pain did she give him birth." (Quran 46:15)

You know what was the most demotivating thing for me when you were in serious condition in the Special Care Unit, this narration:

After the death of his mother, Prophet Musa A.S. went again to Koh-e-Toor where he finds Koh-e-toor and its surrounding much more forbidding than they had even been. He arrived at the designated place in a state of fright. Musa A.S. entreated Allah to enlighten him why he was haunted by such nameless fears. He heard this reply: 'In the past whenever you visited Koh-e-toor, your mother started praying for you. She begged that I show My Mercy to you and she invoked My Grace upon you, and she implored that I overlook your oversights and forgive your errors. I do listen to the prayers of a mother for her child. But now she is dead, and her prayers have gone with her. You are therefore no longer being shielded by the prayers of your mother. Therefore take heed and warning lest your err. And this is the reason for your terror'. 

I cried a lot there but later in another difficult moment facing my personal troubles, I prayed to Almighty that I have almost lost the praying hands of my mother. You be my parent and You be by my side. For a parent can die but You never die. That is how I got back my strength and I got back my motivation. 

I know now when I say you "I love you mama", I won't hear this back "I love you too (with a big cute smile)". You even used to reply this when you were really very sick. This all would have killed me if I did not have faith in Almighty that you are in His merciful arms. I know I have to do sabr to get Hasanaat and become your Sadqa Jaria. 

"And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a loss of wealth and lives and fruits, but give good tidings to the patient, 

Who, when disaster strikes them, say, "Indeed we belong to Allah , and indeed to Him we will return.

Those are the ones upon whom are blessings from their Lord and mercy. And it is those who are the [rightly] guided." (Quran 2: 155-157)

I am grateful to Almighty for blessing me with such a great mom for so many years of my life. I am proud of you my ammi. 

"Verily, in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest." (Qur'an 13:28) 

And seek help through patience and prayer, and indeed, it is difficult except for the humbly submissive [to Allah ] (Quran 2:45)

That is why I am not at unrest like I used to be when I lost my father and uncle. And when I smile around, its not that I have forgotten you. I know how hard it was for you to see me crying and since now you cannot stop me crying anymore, my tears would be a big burden on you. I want to seek patience from Allah SWT and make as much prayers for you as possible and fulfill all the dreams you wished for me. Bringing up my child according to Quran and Sunnah and instill upon him your love so that even after I am dead, the prayers for you may not discontinue. And my little one will keep calling you "Bari Mama" the word that always brought smile on your face. 

Mama, I need to tell you that I am carrying forward all the good messages I have received from you so that your soul may benefit from it. I will try to continue the good deeds which you were routinely doing. People think that my mother has passed away, but I believe that mothers never die- good mothers never die and no mother is a bad mother. 

I love you mama and I would keep saying it despite the fact that I will never get "I love you too" reply from you :) May Allah SWT keep you in His mercy..... Amen. May you together be with your parents, husband, kids, sibglings, friends and all who you loved in Jannah. Amen

Your youngest child,

Sadaf