10-minute guide to a successful business

Want to earn quick money? How about investing in a business that’ll break-even within a fortnight? Interested? Read ahead. What I have for you is a panacea for any budding entrepreneur. And be merry, for I ask of no reward! So what is this fantastic idea any way? Well, it’s to set up an IT institute!!! Bemused? Don’t be. In the lines that follow, I’ll show you just how setting up an IT institute will make you rich. I have for you just the perfect business plan. So, without further ado, here it is.
The plan
To launch any business, you have to ask yourself a bunch of trivial questions such as, from where to grab the capital? Where your business would be situated? And the least important, is it worth the effort?
Don’t even bother about the first two - capital and land are as readily available as in accounting text books. Second of all, with this kind of a compelling business plan, any bank will lend you money. And besides, you don’t need to have a hefty pocket for a start. Locality and vicinity of your business is also a non-issue. What may bother you is the third question. That is: is it worth all the effort? To answer the question, take a look around. Come out of your house and count the number of IT institutes within 20 plots on either side of your residence. In some areas, this count gets to no less than 15, with a standard deviation of five. And there are large numbers of students swarming in all of them – three squares a day. This should be enough proof to show that your business shall prove to be a success beyond proportions.
After these three trivial issues, let’s take a look at some non-trivial ones.

Beware of the conscience
During the course of formulation of the business plan, beware of the “guilty conscience” syndrome. “Education is not a business” is the comment that you may get confronted with and it’s utterly important that you suppress it. Try to conjure smart answers like “I am not taking it as a business” or “I am here to make a difference”. More often than not, cheeky answers like these are good enough to make your conscience go back to sleep.
So once you’ve curbed the conscience, it’s time to put the resources into use. You have to arrange for human resource, space and some other things. Let’s check all of them one at a time.
Human resource
You have got to get human resource in terms of both faculty and pupil; don’t even think about hiring servers or attendants, people should learn doing their own work. The issue of hiring the faculty may also prove to be quite uncomplicated. Anyone in your household would be good enough, the more people from within the house, the better, wealth should stay within the dynasty! And after all, how difficult should it be to learn to teach others a few mouse clicks and a bunch of drags-and-drops?
Space
You know it fairly well that space is a non-issue. Your own house would be good enough. No need to spare a lot of room, just a couple of rooms will work. It’s proven practically, people are running institutes in a room. You can rent out another room for a canteen, and another for photocopying. Options are unlimited.
Courses to teach
What you have to do now is to decide on the length of the courses. Some go for the 4 years, some for 3. But I think one year courses are a market niche. Make people believe they can achieve what took others as much as thrice the time. Make your courses a cocktail of all the buzz words. Grab a couple of latest buzz words from the market. Try to make a few of your own; people are allured to acronyms more than simple words. You should come up with quite a few of them. Now catch a few of the ever-green ones, you can have Assembly, C++, Pascal, Java, VR, 3-DM etc. Your course outline is ready.

Conclusion
Well, here you are. This feasibility is good enough for a smart person like you. However, if you think IT is not a niche anymore, you can also offer language courses for English, German and French. Or for that matter you can offer courses stuff like medical transcription or other hot words. What’s important is that you understand the core concept. Education is a business and when every one around you is making a fortune out of it, you shouldn’t lag anymore. People are willing to pay for the dreams you are about to sell. So we shouldn’t wake them up from the dreams they’ve subscribed to. We just have to provide them with enough space whereby they can sleep tight while we get paid to make them think they’re making the best out of their time. The opportunities are legion, trust me.

Roads

Its 6 pm in Karachi, the sun is setting, the sky wears a beautiful shade of orange and red and in the foreground, one can see flocks of birds returning to their homes after a busy day in the skies. Everything seems to be perfectly in order, and it’s on that precise moment that you are pulled back to the ground. “Saddar…saddar, clifton, bunder road, tower aey…” It’s the cacophony of bus conductors who don’t want to waste a single moment to get yet another passenger aboard their already overloaded vehicle. You recall you are stuck in the middle of a traffic jam and you are far away from where you’re supposed to be. You are stranded; helplessly, you look again at the birds floating freely in the sky and think, if only I could fly!!!

There may not be an element of novelty in the lines that follow. I believe you are all aware of most of the facts that are stated in this write up. This is merely an effort to take out my frustration, rather disappointment, that’s a result of incessant traffic jams and rusty roadways. So even if this passage does not attract much of an audience, I’d be happy with a handful of people who read this one out and empathize with me based on their own similar experiences.

During the last three years, the interest rates from consumer banks have exponentially dropped from an agonizing 19% to a tempting 7-8%, and by the time this article gets published, that is if it ever does, we may witness further drop in the interest rates, thanks to the state bank for its policies which eventually are a result of consistent growth in the economy. These lower interest rates have enabled banks to repackage there loan plans. Easy loans with minimum fuss, that’s what the consumers are getting these days. Consumer banks claim that it’s possible for everyone to own a car or a house. We must admit that this is a niche’ that has paid them off big time. The initial cost of ownership of a brand new car has reached a record minimum and what’s left for one to decide is the brand of the car. Banks, under tremendous pressure from their competitors, will make sure they get your car driven at your doorstep, with minimum effort from you. The willingness of people to spend money and the willingness of banks to lend people money to spend has resulted in a positive flow of money; it all seems to have galvanized the overall economic situation. And our economy is now seemingly becoming a productive self perpetual unit.

However, since there’s no perfection to human invention, these policies too have their cons. What seems to be the success of our economic institutions has become a nightmare for the traffic authorities. Traffic in Karachi has never been exemplary, but in the recent years, it’s gone from not too bad to worse. Roads in Pakistan in general and Karachi in particular are not the best in the world, worse still after occasional monsoon. Karachi doesn’t get much of a rain anyway, but it seems like our local authorities want to make sure that whatever water comes down, stays there. One of Karachi’s busiest roads, shahra e Faisal, has the worst drainage systems for a world class road. Last year’s traffic jam on a rainy day where people actually spent the night in their cars on main roads is probably a good example.

If we include drigh road to shahra-e-faisal, we’ll probably have the longest piece of charcoal in Karachi. Then there are a couple of lengthy routes that are parallel to it, the university road and the sharah e Pakistan. If you happen to be traveling on any three of them from 5:30 to 6:30, you’ll agree with what I had written in the first paragraph. And for shahrah e faisal, this timeframe expands from 4:30 to 8:30. During that time, these roads witness the usual misbehaviors of our civilized society. Signals are violated; motorcyclists try to paddle their way through the narrow gap between two cars; people try to change lanes too quickly and in the process, a speeding car from behind would crash into them, which results in a fight between the drivers of both the vehicles, both blaming the other, and while doing so, they have a huge pile up of vehicles waiting behind them; there are heavy duty vehicles, sometimes a 12-16 wheeler which shouldn’t be allowed there in the first place, trying to take a U turn on main road. A fairly recent addition to the traffic problems is the increasing number of intra-city bus routes, of which some are so-called environment friendly and some are not so environment friendly; you must have seen the environment friendly buses emitting mass amount of black smoke, which certainly doesn’t seem to contain a lot of oxygen. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that these new routes and greener vehicles were brought in as an effort to improve the public transport facilities in Karachi. But this project, like many other ad hoc projects initiated by the planners, seems to have backfired on them. Instead of setting an example for the Mini buses and the Buses, the new buses have set their predecessors as examples. You can see them boarding and lodging passengers in the middle of busy streets, they don’t bother overloading passengers like any other. Their so-called air conditioning system gives in to the overload of passengers and makes the environment similar to that of a truck full of cattle. We have a mass transit program which is waiting for some miracle to get itself initialized. We’re still not sure whether we need a light train that travels above the ground or a subway that travels within the earth or whether it’s better for us to rejuvenate our ailing local railways. The common man doesn’t care whether he’s traveling in a bullet train or a local normal train. What he needs is a respectable way to travel from home to workplace and be back in time for dinner, and in one piece.

And then there’s the VIP movement, the latest buzz word in the traffic jargon. I understand that our leaders have a very busy schedule and they need to be present at many places in one time, and of course there’s the security threat that makes their protocol even more sensitive and important. I respect the concern of the security officers and I sincerely believe that they’re just doing their duty. At this point I must specify that I am not referring to the VVIP movement, which pertains to the protocol of people of the highest echelon in our country. I am referring to the not-so-important, ego-centric bunch of few, who exploit this protocol for a display of their importance. And it is due to this handful of people that the phrase VIP seems to have changed its meaning to “Very Intimidating People”. What I can’t understand is that why is it always necessary to move these VIP’s during the rush hour. Because by piling up the traffic on the other side of the road, you’re only increasing the threat level instead of decreasing it. And some people have a terrible price to pay for these VIP movements. You must have read in papers the many cases in which patients or a severely injured person were not allowed to be taken to the hospital because there was VIP movement on the other side of the road and the patient succumbed to the pain.

Increasing traffic is not the only problem we’re facing driving here, we have to deal with wrecked roads at the same time. You’ll see miniature versions of craters been built by various local government agencies. These guys just seem to wait for the completion of a road, which normally takes a year to be built in the first place, and when the drivers think it’s safe to drive through, they’ll send in their digging squad to drill through a piece of the road. Once they’re finished, it’s a cue for the other agencies to take their turn and start their own “mini-crater” project. Obviously, since these guys don’t belong to the roads department it’s not their problem to mend the damage they’ve done to it. So the road once again becomes all torn and tattered. And as in a series of unfortunate events, rain arrives, and those craters are filled with water and mud. Last year, in gulistan e jauhar, the road under the bridge literally became a mini river. Flocks of boys rested on the pavement anticipating a car would get stuck in the water and when it would, they charged Rs. 5-10 per person to get the car out of trouble. But that kind of thing is likely to happen in our city when people have to help themselves.

Right now there’re various huge development works being carried out in Karachi for the last eight to ten months, which is also a reason for increasing traffic jams. I understand the necessity of flyovers, underpasses and overhead bridges but I also feel the pace of work is not up to the mark. A year for a road is just too much time. With the local government elections just round the corner, the pace of work is likely to go up, but I think if people take the feeling of unrest with them to the pooling booth, they’ll certainly choose the people who’ll do their job, and quickly.
When these lines are being written, it’s the start of muharram. There’ve already been two huge traffic jams in F.B. area since traffic was diverted from various other routes to two points creating a bottle neck. Traffic authorities have blocked one lane for securing the mosques and that has aggravated the problem. In such a case, people refuse to listen to the traffic constables and one can only empathize with them seeing their helplessness. It’s hard to tell whether it’s us in the wrong lane or the car facing us. We’re stuck in the bottle neck and once again I couldn’t help but think – If only I could fly!!!

Boss stricken

This is an article I had written some 3 years ago for a friend's web portal... obviously an immature effort from an amateur writer.... but i haven't changed it...
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Boss-stricken
You would be among the chosen few if you don’t have a person, usually called your “boss”, supervising you. He is supposed to be someone who, more often than not, will make you feel miserable in your shoes; his presence will be enough for your perfectly running program to let the air out of it; he’ll blame you for not working as he expects, (not to mention he’ll never tell you what he expects); and last but not the least, he’ll take credit for all the good work that you have done. I, having worked under at least five different bosses within a span of only one and a half years (it’s not that I was changing jobs that rapidly), thought it my responsibility to lend a helping hand to my younger readers in preparing for the inevitable; The Boss.
In the lines that follow, I’ll share with you what my experience with bosses has been. I’ll tell what happens when bosses go livid on their subjects, and vice versa. Given below are some points that are the essence of my experience, and I am thankful to the editors to have given me the opportunity to convey that to you. So without further ado, here we go!

1. Follow the golden rules: If you don’t, know it now, the boss is always right. Sooner or later you’ll have to acquiesce no matter how. And pretty ironically, you’ll be sure that the person standing in front of you is a gem of an idiot, yet you’ll have to do the work his way.

2. Think like your boss: Stupid as it may sound, this might just do the trick for you to be able to foresee your boss’s mood. However, as a precaution, better not think of yourself while you think “Bossily”, since doing so may lead you to some extremely provocative inferences about yourself.

3. Never tell him you have an appointment: For 3 out of my 5 bosses, whenever I have told them I have an appointment, out of nowhere, assignments popped up half an hour before my departure. These would the issues any Tom or Harry may resolve, but they would be miraculously busy at that time. And all I could do was helplessly staring at the clock ticking.

4. If you are late, avoid seeing him: Believe me, if he is the first person you meet when you are late, you’ll be lucky to get to your seat before lunch, since you’ll be standing in front of him listening to all the crap he thinks you are proving for the company. And obviously, once the lunch is over, bury the idea of it. I recommend meeting when nicely fed, both you and your boss.

5. Never tell him the true reason for your absence: Or for that matter, never say you had a fever or flu, since
you’ll be presented with some undeniable proof that he was suffering from the same ailment, yet he worked till late night. Followed by a lecture on what he thinks the problem with the new generation of employees is. The climax will most probably be the story of his life. In doing so, he’ll have wasted an hour and obviously blame you for not having value for time. So, to avoid all this, I suggest, as you would expect, burying a non-existent and already-deceased distant relative.

6. Watch out for unusually friendly attitude: If your rude boss starts talking politely, apply somewhere else for job; after all, you’ll have to do it the day after.

7. Never say No: Because doing that might just be your last act in the company.

One thing that you may have noticed is that I have used a masculine gender for bosses throughout this write-up. The reason is obvious; I have never come across a female boss. And predicting feminine behavior, and that too in a predominantly masculine clad, is beyond my talent.