successful men are not the most stylish ones

In movies or TV shows they are showing successful people in a way that is very far from the real meaning of success, they will show such people as very handsom and stylish, but thats is not the truth for instance, Stephen Hawking is a very successful man but still he is not handsome at all, Bill Gates is also one of the most influential people in the history and also he doesnt look like Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt.

Success is all about how much you contribute to your or others societies, how much people got influenced positively by you, this is the real judgement of success.

magazines and TV shows nowadays are causing us a headache from these tips and tricks of how to stay in 20s while you are actually in 60s, how to be as slim as Nicole Kidman, how to, how to ....etc.

They are damaging the generations mentality and it is obvious when you have a walk in any mall, you will find copies of football players, singers, actors, and actresses also.

First things first, is it our kids falt or the media falt or whos e falt is it?

When we answer this question things will be more clear and the solution will be closer to find, it is the responsibility of the whole society to let such...

An Analysis of a movie adapted from a book

Not any book fiction or nonfiction can be a movie, because in some cases the book says things which is difficult to be converted to a movie, yes the characters are either inspired by life or they are really existed but a book should have some conditions to be a movie one of these conditions is the dramatic events or also you can say the unusual events which can give the movie a first step towards success, but in the case of "The Kite Runner", the book has all the requirements to be converted to a movie and a successful one.
The book is a really genuine one and has illustrated the Afghani culture form all the aspects possible to be included in an around 200 pages novel, through its narrator the 38 years old novelist Amir who had told us his story in a very exciting sequence of events since he was a child until he had become a half famous novelist in America.
Only the first flashback of Amir in the beginning of the movie was that important to build the while movie on it, other flashbacks where just to illustrate the time factor on the characters, going back to the first flashback when Amir and his wife in their apartment in America received a phone call from Afghanistan, that flashback took us to the whole story behind this famous novelist in America, from where he is, what kind of life he used to live back home, and so on.
I have been always told that" you must read a book, then you watch the movie, and here you will get the maximum pleasure from both", in the case of The Kite Runner I think it's different, because I have watched the movie and immediately after the end of it I walked to the nearest book store and bought the book, the movie is a truly good presentation of the book, when you turn the pages you see each and every scene from the movie exactly like sitting in the cinema and watching it again.
Some books as I mentioned above cannot become a movie like the Davinci Code which according to reviews in the Telegraph and personal blogs of some crtitiques had not add anything to the book but on the contrary many people because of the book and it's huge number of selling went to watch the movie but after that they said that the movie had been advertised in a way which it doesn’t deserve.
Watching a movie is different than reading a book in many ways, when any filmmaker wants to make a movie he/she should be stuck to 1 and a hal or 2 hours and also should grab the audience attention from the first 15 minutes otherwise the movie will fail to cover even its costs.

citizen journalism

Media before the emerge of blogs as the" Citizen journalism " in the era of internet, media giants used to be the only provider of the truth, now Blogs provide us with all the means of democracy which we might have not experienced before the internet and Blogs especially.
Bloggers nowadays became dangerous to some governments for the opinions or news they put into their entries.
The purpose of the media is to be instructive, informative, and for entertainment as well, these are or were the main roles of the media, but through the decades of the media development only few big capitals were dominating the media channels so in this case the credibility decreased to a lower level in spite of the huge image about some media giants like BBC or CNN had been already formed in peoples minds as the shortest way to the truth.
Later, and during the last few years new media emerged as a strong competitor to the ordinary forms of media, and here we find the personal and the participatory touch
Blogs representing one of the most personal and participatory media ever found, because media before the emerge of blogs as the" Citizen journalism " in the era of internet, media giants used to be the only provider of the truth, now Blogs provide us with all the means of democracy which we might have not experienced before the internet and Blogs especially, now we have the video blogging as well as the written ones, all this and more made governments like in Egypt to arrest and stop or try to stop some famous bloggers to go on with uncover the ugly face of the truth or what they think is the truth.
Nobody now is able to tell us which news is worthwhile or not, you can with a click of your mouse to search the blogs in any language and find what is going on and in case you have another view point or opinion about the particular issue, you can leave a comment on the blog entry and other people will or will not share you the opinion but this at the end give Blog another advantage beside participatory and personal, it gives blogging the interactivity which may be lost in other media or at least not found in this way.
Israa Abdul Fattah, a 28 years old human resources manager in a private company in Egypt, an online activist who has been announced as the Facebook Arab President according to an election held by around 100,000 Arab facebook members, they thought it was a joke and even Israa but when she found a group named it "6th of April, protest for all the Egyptians" huge number of people joined this group and they have really done it on the same day at the same time in the same place which made the police to arrest Israa and keep her in the jail for 15 days and then another 15 days for encouraging the public against the government.
Israa is a very important case to be studied by sociologists, and media professionals because it is really different than other cases where secret photos or documents are shown on the net or video showing this celebrity or that politician doing things people didn’t expect them to do, Israa's case showing hidden feeling and passions in the people that they just wanted a small push to start bringing out what exactly they feel about certain issues.
This was number one only, now we start with number two which is more famous than the previous but I like always to save the best for the last.
www.manalaa.net
www.malek-x.net
www.speaksfreely.net
http://misrhura.blogspirit.com
www.anaikhwan.blogspot.com
These are not my internet resources for this article, these are the names of famous and popular blogs in Egypt whom owners and writers have been arrested minimum 1 time.
These bloggers became famous in the Arab world after the stories they have covered outside the jail like the behavior of police men with the protesters and how they have violently hat them by sticks or even shot them, this is outside the jail, but what about inside the jail when they have been arrested???
Alaa, the owner of www.manalaa.net, and while he was in jail, he sent some messages to the bloggers outside to post his writings to keep his blog updated and to tell the people what is really happening in jails.
His blogs became widely spread to the level that the HRW took it seriously and sent a letter to the Egyptian government about these violations to the human rights and if continued the HRW will ask to open an international investigation about this case and others as well.
This is second case, and the third case is about Iraqi bloggers or lets say bloggers from Iraq because sometimes it not the Iraqis who record the resistance operation against the invasion forces in Iraq, but sometimes the US soldiers themselves recording and clicking photos to what is happening to them or even writing their online dairies which are really terrifying to their people and that’s why all the official bodies taking their posts seriously like Al-Jazeera Channel, Al-Arabiya news Channel, CNN, BBC, and others.
Even the US administration sent its orders to the troops in Iraq to ban the process of blogging for the soldiers and officers in the US army there.
All these stories showing us nothing but the important role of the new media which made nothing can be hidden, and this support the people and not governments or political bodies like before, now media is really the citizen media.

Arabic Political Cartoons

Cartoons have a very good impact on people especially when these cartoons are addressing the people about very sensitive issues like the Palestine case for the Arab people.
Cartoons are briefing news or important events in one drawing or sometimes more, cartoonist should have the sense of news as well as the artistic skill to deliver whatever kind of message he/she want to deliver to the people of different classes and educational backgrounds.
It’s a very important means of sending messages to the people because using cartoons to illustrate any single happening will reach more people than any other medium, and this is for the reason that cartoons take fewer time to get the message and it depends on one thing only "the perception and interpretation" abilities of the person no more and no less it doesn’t matter whether you are an literate or illiterate, can understand the cartoonist's language or not (except in some cases when there will be some comments or sentences).
These are old and modern cartoons by Palestinian cartoonists all of them are about the struggling for the Palestinians rights in their land and their freedom of speech right.
These cartoons were the reason behind the arrest of Hajjaj; the cartoonist who did the cartoons from aljazeera.net and the death of Naji Al-Ali the one of the rest of the cartoons.

Mascom Picnic

Sometimes whatever arrangement you make for a family, friends or college picnic but still there will be something which will kill the pleasure of this or that picnic like bad weather, minor or major accident (God forbid), or boring companions who are by the way the worst among all these reasons for spoiling the picnic's spirit.
None of these existed in the MAHE Manipal/ Department of Media & Communications picnic, the picnic was that close to be the perfect picnic ever despite the face that there was nothing so special about the place; LoLo Island / Abu Dhabi, but some magical touch we all felt it was there, only one thing happened we have to mention it here is that one of the senior had injured in the last 1 or 2 hours of the picnic, but even that wasn’t really annoying to the injured person or to the rest as well.
Peaceful, is best to describe the whole environment of the LoLo Island, or the picnic itself, it was a space for all the students and faculties to interact among each other students – students, and students – faculties, Shubha Maam, Mr. Joseph, and Mr. Sabir were the faculty members in this picnic distributed in the 3 buses.
Watching the sunset in Abu Dhabi is really amazing moments you will remember ever, because the sea in Abu Dhabi is different from those of Dubai or Sharjah or Ajman, it has this fine purity and clarity of blue color, it gives you precious moments of thinking and flying without wings inside yourself and dream, nothing but dream.
I know my words seem a little lyrical but this exactly what I and Mascom people felt, as if it was a nice good bye for the 3rd year people.

Photo World & Symbolism

The Photo World/ Dubai 2008 was a good experience for the students of Mascom who are interested in Photography or TV and Video production field, for me had the feeling of : what am I doing here? It was pointless for me to go to such an exhibition, but yes in the last hour when I was really hopeless and disparate to find any good story to cover about this exhibition, suddenly I found something concerns areas of interest of mine.
I realized when looking at the photographs done by professionals and by beginners as well that they all shared something in common; all are showing the huge reform and Renaissances of all the GCC countries especially in Dubai accompanied with showing cultural symbols like the falcon, the classical form of ships, the Masjids, and so on and as shown in the photos.
Such connecting between the developments in different sectors and the inheritance of the Gulf countries lead us to feel that these photographs or the photographers want to show us the insisting of the GCC to relate between the past and the present or to be more accurate between the present and the past; in other words they want to say that yes we are an opened window to the west and to other cultures and to the whole world in it's technical developments, globalization, and modernization but still we hold our inheritance to shape our developments according to it and under the it's influence, and this is what we call the right way of dealing with the globalization and ideas like the world become a small village as McLuhan said.
I don’t want and don’t have enough space to discuss the symbolism academically, but this is only a whisper in intelligent people to notice such form of symbolism in the art movement in the Gulf region to be able to read more efficiently the developments in this particular region.

The Eye...a movie review

Jessica Alba’s new movie The Eye is based on another Chinese or specifically Hong Kong movie carry the same name.
This movie’s poster show you the movie as a horror movie but after half an hour from the beginning of The Eye you will surprised to find that the story and the idea behind the movie are much deeper than what has the poster shown us.
Jessica Alba plays Sydney Wells, a blind violinist who will discover the world after ages of darkness with new eyes which she had got by undergoing an operation to restore the eyesight, when she first starts looking at things around her she found it normal to see abnormal things as well for the reason that she and her doctors thought that she still discovering the world and might see undefined things according to her situation.
Later, she was certain from one thing: that she is seeing frightening creatures leading people around her to their death, normally she had told everybody of the strange things happening with her and more normally nobody had believed her for the first few times until one of these people was willing to sacrifice his life and career for her and not because he believed her but because he fell in love with her!!!
The director of the movie did an ok job but the problem lies on the writer who made a lousy connection among events in the movie, for instance, Sydney Wells was so upset that nobody is believing her disturbing visions so that she decided to leave her job and not even inform any of her colleagues or boss that she want some rest for some time until she feels better then join again, so she let the job go to hell and sat at home with damaging all the light sources in the flat, closing and covering all the windows with blankets, staying in this state for 2-3 days with only phone calls from her sister who was leaving the town, but the strange thing is that nobody had thought of visiting her flat to see what did happened to her, this is no. one.
No. two, her doctor Paul Faulkner was not believing her at the beginning and may be he was more than anyone else refusing the idea that she is seeing abnormal visions but that she was refusing the fact that she has to face the new world and that why she started to see strange things, and suddenly he put everything in risk for her and went with her to Mexico to meet the donor’s family who she suspected that this might be pointing a light on her situation.
The movie is definitely not horror, and definitely not adding to Jessica Alba’s filmography a masterpiece, but let’s says it is a normal movie that you can watch on TV and not in theaters.

Amr Khalid...The New Hope 1

Anthyony Quinn as Omar Al- Mukhtar in "The Lion Of the Desert" movie in 1981 was the real inspiration of Amr Khalid to believe again in Arabs role in the world and to believe in the possibility of renaissance of the Arab Nation again and again, this belief led Amr Khalid an Egyptain accountant to start his making his dream come true by hard work and strong will and belief.

He dedicated his all life to work for this goal the renaissance of the Arab Nation and not under any of the titles were inroduced during the 2nd half of the 20th century like Communism or Socialism of Nathionalism but under the concept of (Faith based Development).

He started with his closest friend and it worked, so he start thinking why im happy with only one person??? I should go for more people introducing my idea and lets see what will happen...

He then began his chitchats with his classmates, then his friends from the most famous social club in Cairo(The Hunting Club) which is only for the high class people and Amr Khalid is one of them, but by this time Amr couldnt stop what he had started, people began to come in huge numbers to listen to him in the club audiotorium which was not enough, then people started to sit in the garden with outdoor amplifires.

Thousands and thousnads of people were coming to listen to him until he got the chance to appear on TV in one of the most famous and popular Arabic TV shows, which made millions of people follow Amr in his idea and beagn to work for for the same goal.

In 2007, Amr came in the Time Magazine's 100 people who shaped our world under the category of Heros & Pioneers.

Finally, Amr began a campaign which has not ended yet, a 5 weeks campaign in cooperation with Dubai Police & The UN to make 5000 addicted person to ask for help and they prepared eveything from the phisical treatement till the after treatement period.

Finally, Now we are in the 4th week with unexpected results, more than 4500 people asked for help and have taken directly to the specialized centers, unlimited number of volunteers for helping in this campaign, the Egyptain PM announced last week his Government support to the campaign.

This is Amr Khalid, one person made a little difference in our life, what about the others? The world needs more of this kind of people, not only talking but DOING.

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/time100/article/0,28804,1595326_1615754_1616173,00.html

to be continued..

Russia Between the Economic Growth and Lack of Democracy

Russia needs a long time to reach the level of accepting democracy and applying it successfully, it is not the matter of preparing the russian people for it, because the russians are not any people they have a long and important history of cultural and technological participations to the world, so now we cannot say that the russian are not ready for the democracy but on the contrary the Kremlin is not ready, and the new Tsar Vlademir Putin wants to restore the national pride and the importance of Russian in the world.

"He (President Vladimir Putin) has more power today than the Pharaoh of Egypt, the Tsar, and the Soviet Union's General Secretary combined," veteran Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov told a party congress on the outskirts of Moscow.

this powerful man is trying to save as much time as possible to return Russia to the view, "he thinks he is a reformer" Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

After Russia will come back then that time the international community will not accept Russia without democarcy and Putin and his fellows in the Kremlin and the parliament are more clever than stick to the same pattern of foreign diplomacy, they can change in no time to save whatever they saved and developed since the Fall of the Soviet Union.

and YES, a big one Putin is a new version of Stalin or we can say he is the modern Stalin who sometimes avoid showing muscles publicly, but sometimes he shows them just to remind everyone of who is Russia under Putin in case anyone will think of doing or even saying anything against it.

Iraqis in the United Arab Emirates

After the Anglo-American invasion to Iraq, Iraqis began to move to other countries like Jordan, Syria, Qatar, Sweden, Denmark, and of course United Arab Emirates which gave and still gives many facilities to the Iraqis than other countries in the region.
Because of that number of Iraqis is increasing day after day in the U.A.E., and of course they have now Iraqi restaurants, cafes, companies, etc.
Mohammed Irfan, a student of bachelor degree in business administration Al- Ghurair University says that: U.A.E. people are good and still have the Arabic and Islamic morals and traditions; they are good welcoming people, but the problems is that the number of Iraqis leaving Iraq is huge and one of the few countries offer visas to us is the UAE, so sometimes our people find it difficult to get a visit visa to UAE"
This is one of the problems most of the Iraqis talks are all about, but this problem is the major one, we still have other problems as we will see now:
Ahmed Khalid, a high school graduate came to UAE to find a job, he said:" I already got the job but still you will find things that is really irritating for instance I'm Iraqi and working as a salesman and my salary is 2,500 while at the same time another Iraqi working in the same position but the only thing is that he has a passport of a western country and his salary because of this reason is double that of mine, you just feel injustice no more no less".
People are different in their cultural values and traditions so that they tend to form their own communities inside multicultural society as that of the U.A.E., Iraqis in the U.A.E. as other nationalities found Iraqi restaurants and cafés in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and in other emirates as well, they spend the evenings in the cafés playing Dominos and Backgammon listening to Iraqi music sometimes watching the news in case there was something new or extraordinary.
Ali Hussein, a business man came from Iraq in 2004 has a contracting company said:" these cafés came to life after 2004 because number of Iraqis is growing bigger and bigger, we spend the evenings here in the café to meet with Iraqis and chit chat with them knowing each other and to reduce the feeling of home sickness which is killing us, you should tell people how big is our love to our country, no body will know that".
There are Iraqi students in U.A.E. also, they are in different levels of education lets see what they feel towards study in U.A.E.:
Mohammed Farook, a ninth grade student in Al-Doha Highschool in Sharjah said: "its ok here but I think in Iraq it was more serious than here, and the exmas were more difficult"
At the end of my trip to different Iraqi places I've got the feeling that the most serious and the biggest problems Iraqis are suffering form is that the are not like any other nationalities, they know that this is the place they should settle in for a long time because they know they have no country to go back to, and everytime they find a hope, next day the situation got worse and worse.

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