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Father’s Day Out By Sumeha Khalid Father’s Day is just around the corner; a number of celebrities and socialites open up to Pakistan Today about their relationship with the first man in their lives – Dad!
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you dad this year? AS: This year I would like to spend the whole day with him, my siblings and my kids and watch him play with them. His world revolves around his grandkids and we have planned a surprise for him! PT: Message for your dad on his special day… AS: You are my true hero and the only man who will always make me feel like a princess.I Love you the most.
Afreen Shiraz – Creative Director/ Consultant Ellemint Pret & Ellemint Salon PT: What do you think are the basic qualities in a good father? AS: Stability, confidence and security in life comes from your father mostly. PT: What sort of a role has your father played in shaping your life? AS: I’ve been blessed to have my father by my side. He has supported all my decisions in life, and helped me become who I am today. PT: How do you spend Father’s day generally? AS: I either spend an evening out with him if he’s in Karachi, as he lives in Lahore, or send him a token of appreciation when he’s not here. PT: What gift would you like to give you dad this year? AS: A holiday in Turkey!
Somaya Adnan – Creative Director at Ayesha-Somaya PT: What do you think are the basic qualities in a good father? AS: A good father is an exemplary role model and the person a child can turn to for anything. A good father makes a child feel secure and I feel the best thing a father can do for his child is to love the mother of his children. PT: What sort of a role has your father played in shaping your life? AS: My dad has been my inspiration. He has always been
the guiding factor in my personal and professional life. He has taught me the priorities in life and that no matter how tough your career gets, at the end of the day it’s just work and family is above and beyond it.
PT: Message for your dad on his special day… AS: Love you always Abu!
PT: How do you spend Father’s day generally? AS: My dad is not very expressive so I like doing little things to make him happy. Maybe send him his favourite food or just visit him and let him spend time with my kids who adore him.
PT: What do you think are the basic qualities in a good father? SM: To be loving, generous and a pillar of strength and support for your children.
PT: What gift would you like to give
Sania Maskatiya
PT: What sort of a role has your father played in shaping your life? SM: He was and still remains an integral part of my life, showering
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me with his love, time, knowledge and support. PT: How do you spend Father’s day generally? SM: I will spend it with my Aba at home. PT: What gift would you like to give you dad this year? SM: Each day I try and emulate the kind of person he is, his generous spirit and his sweet disposition. PT: Message for your dad on his special day… SM: Aba you are my rock, thanks for being the best father in the whole world.
Zara Shahjahan PT: What do you think are the basic qualities in a good father? ZS: A good father must be patient, selfless, caring and strong. PT: What sort of a role has your father played in shaping your life? ZS: My father has provided me valuable emotional support. PT: How do you spend Father’s day generally? ZS: My father stays in the village so I seldom meet him on Father’s Day. I do call him and wish him though. PT: What gift would you like to give your dad this year? ZS: I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it. Maybe a good history book or maybe an iPad mini. PT: Message for your dad on his special day… ZS: Thank you for being there for me Abu.
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Snooze Fest:
How To Improve Your Sleep The average adult is supposed to get seven to eight hours of sleep a night, which is probably about seven to eight hours more than you can spare. But since a well-rested life is a happy and healthy one, we’ve listed some of the the best steps you can take throughout the day and night so you can get the most out of bedtime.
Catch 40 Winks
It prevents you from ingesting caffeine, helps you relax, makes you feel more alert during the day, and, hence, less anxious at night before you go to bed.” But don’t doze off for too long. You have to keep the nap less than 40 minutes so that you don’t fall into slow-wave sleep. If you do, you will experience sleep inertia and this will impact your nightly sleep.
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Cut Down on Caffeine
It is okay to keep your Starbucks Gold card, as long as you put it away after your morning cup of coffee. BluePrint Cleanse nutritionist Julie Ruelle recommended not drinking anything caffeinated past noon (regardless of that post-lunch sleepy feeling). “Even if caffeine keeps you from falling asleep, it can also cause you to have restless sleep or wake you
up in the middle of the night,” she said. “Stick to noncaffeinated beverages like water, seltzer, or fresh-pressed juice.”
Exercise
Exercise can improve every aspect of your life, including how you sleep. Celebrity trainer, Josh Holland gave the skinny on working out and our sleep. “High-intensity training and
exercise can help the body’s need to recover,” he said. “Sleep and recovery go together hand in hand. The harder you train, the more recovery and sleep your body requires, so it’s important to first create a baseline as to how well you sleep. This means doing something like working out in the morning to relieve stress and improve your mood, resulting in longer and more sound sleep later at night.
Consume Melatonin
Melatonin is a hormone produced by your brain that helps control your sleep and wake cycles. It can be found in any number of foods, such as fish, fruit, grains, meat, and vegetables. Try fish for dinner, especially salmon and tuna. “These are rich in B6, which is vital to make the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin,” she said. Chickpeas are also a good source of melatonin. If you’re on the go, you can buy it as a supplement at your local pharmacy.
Watch Your Diet
What you eat and how you digest it can affect how you sleep. Try eating an ounce of almonds or a tablespoon of almond butter about two hours before bed. The protein in almonds will help keep blood sugar levels steady while you sleep. And it’s believed that the magnesium in almonds may help you sleep soundly. Weak digestion can make falling asleep difficult so avoid eating large, heavy meals late in the evening. You should also stay away from foods that are difficult to digest, such as spicy chili, hot peppers, and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts. You can prevent indigestion, however, by snacking on a rice cake or yogurt.
Take a Bedtime Bath
You can soak away the stress of the day and prepare yourself for a restful sleep with a nice, calm, relaxing bath. Add lavender essential oils, which can enhance
the already calming properties of a bath. Herbal bath blends help you sleep and moisturize your skin.
Unplug Bright light, even in small quantities such as from your computer or smartphone screen, can be a sleep stealer as it prevents the body’s production of melatonin. Turn off all screens and unplug yourself at least one hour before bed so that you have some peaceful downtime in a dimly lit room before hitting the hay, she said. This encourages sleep in many ways, including helping your neurotransmitters switch from wake to sleep. Light is the most powerful signal to the brain that it is time to get up and feed the chickens, and the light from your computer/smartphone is enough to trigger your brain to stay awake.
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Films
It is Ranbir Kapoor that will stay with you
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Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a bright, breezy and brassy film designed for easy consumption. What it certainly is not is ballsy. For all the big ideas about life and the dilemmas of youth that it tosses up in the air over a runtime that’s 20 minutes shy of three hours, it always opts to play safe, vacillating between thoughts of rebellion and acts of conformity. The characters spout familiar platitudes to each other: live your dream, get a life and move on, stop pitying yourself and learn to love thyself…We have seen and heard it all before. In the first half of the film, four happy-go-lucky school buddies with superficially defined traits reunite to go on a trekking trip to Manali and beyond. Bunny (Ranbir Kapoor) is footloose and dreams of exploring the world. Aditi (Kalki Koechlin) is wild and fancy-free. Avi (Aditya Roy Kapur) is a drifter happy to blow up his cash on cricket bets. Naina (Deepika Padukone) is the odd one out. She is a bespectacled and sedate medical student. She joins the gang in an act of impulsive defiance but cannot break away from her neuroimmunology textbook even as the rest of the traveling party live it up on the road. By the end of the adventure-filled sojourn through the ups and downs of the undulating landscape, each of the four is transformed a little, but only to go his/her way. Eight years later, one of the two girls in the group, Aditi, decides to marry a straight-laced engineer (Kunaal Roy Kapur) and her old friends descend on a resort in Udaipur for the grand betrothal. And like they did the first time around, they come and go talking about love, friendship and the need to grow up even as they consume a whole lot of liquor. Between the swigs, love and
friendship do happen, but the quartet does not quite grow up. The high-flying Bunny, after several years of globe-trotting as a television cameraman, talks of the pleasure of watching Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. In response, the more rooted Naina extols the joy of seeing Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jaayenge with a tub of popcorn at Maratha Mandir. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is clearly more of the latter than the former although it does occasionally betray the ambition to be larger in scope than what it is capable of. It is a mildly diverting film at best. Its musical set pieces are robustly staged and with Ranbir Kapoor at the centre of them all, they are fun while they last. The characters are rather sketchily etched and the psychological bends that they encounter on the way to self-realization are far too simplistic to catch the audience by surprise. Neither the romance nor the drama that the film seeks to whip up can salvage it from being just another harmless romp aimed at an undemanding audience that is comfortable with swimming at the shallow end of life. There is no denying, however, that Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is gorgeously filmed, the locations are eye-popping, and the guys and dolls that people the tale are a bunch of attractive people. The two lead actors, Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone, do make a fetching onscreen pair. And they are well complemented by Aditya Roy Kapur and Kalki Koechlin. It is the erratic narrative arc that is a letdown. Overlong, sluggish and fluffy, it meanders through varied locations as the young lovers/ friends seek to reconnect with each other after a few years of being apart. The song and dance routines, no
matter how foot-tapping they are, do not quite possess the kind of infectious energy that can offset the clichés around which they are wrapped and turn the film into something more than just superficially enjoyable. Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a mix of Dil Chahta Hai and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, with dollops of 3 Idiots thrown in for good measure. It is all served up in a Karan Johar-style concoction where the backdrops – both indoors and the locations – are infinitely more expressive than the inner worlds of the young characters. The impulses of the quartet of friends, who predictably include one couple that is on the verge of a lifelong relationship but are either unable or not keen enough to express their love for each other, are hardly explained in logical and convincing terms. As a result, the fragmented storyline hurtles forward only in fits and starts. The heroine is head over heels in love. The boy she is smitten with is averse to making a commitment. The girl is unable to communicate her true feelings. So you know exactly what the outcome is going to be. They will keep crossing each other’s path until true love is found. Director Ayan Mukherji, who gave an impressive account of himself in his debut film, Wake Up Sid, appears to have allowed the skills that he displayed the first time around to go into deep slumber. Not that Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani is a sleeping pill. It is not. But it could certainly have done with a little more narrative verve. Do make it a point to get into your seat before the show begins. Madhuri Dixit’s item song plays out ten minutes into the film. Watch Ranbir Kapoor match steps with the still-lustrous diva and you know why this guy is special. Watch Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani for him.
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Books & Authors
Of two academic journals By Syed Afsar Sajid GC University, Lahore and Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad are two meritorious seats of learning in the country with an illustrious academic and professional background. The two journals being reviewed here belong to these institutions.
The Ravi - 2012
The Ravi boasts of an agelong tradition of academic excellence nurtured by intellectual inquisitiveness, learning, and creative felicity. It has enjoyed the distinction of being edited by eminent men of letters at different points of time, like Siraj-ud-Din, Pitras Bokhari, Taj Muhammad Khayal, M. Masood, Sh. Muhammad Akram, Noon Meem Raashed, Syed Muhamma Jafri, Zia Jalandhari, Abdus Salam, Muzaffar Ali Syed, Muhammad Idrees, Moeen A. Qureshi, Hanif Ramay, Kamal Azfar, Anis Nagi, Anwar Adeeb, Irshadullah Khan, Agha Ghazanfar, Sarmad Sehbai, M. Athar Tahir, and Basir Sultan Kazmi. What distinguishes the journal from its peers or contemporaries is the standard and quality of its trisectional contents (English, Urdu, Punjabi) contributed by an enviable
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mix of young and old Ravians including some noted nonRavian figures also. The phenomenon re-affirms itself in the instant issue too for which the Patron and Editors of the journal deserve kudos. In the English section, Khaled Ahmad’s article titled ‘On Ghairat and intolerance’, Prof. Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy’s essay on ‘How Pakistan can develop a culture of science’, Prof. Dr. Saadat Saeed’s ‘Manto: A realist with an existentialist approach’, Prof. Dr. Tariq Rahman’s ‘The story
The Ravi – 2012 Patron: Prof. Dr. M. Khaleeq-ur-Rehman, VC Manager: Prof. Dr. Saadat Saeed Editors: Ali Zafar (English) – Ali Akhtar Saleem (Urdu & Punjabi) Publisher: GC University, Lahore
journal’s contents. The inclusion of some really good English poems by Maham Awan, Ahmed Chaudhry, Ushna Butt, Saud Bin Ahsen, Shoaib Ahmed, Nabiha Chaudhry, Zohrain Bhaur, and Farwa Shafqat adds lustre to this part of the magazine. The Urdu section of the magazine comprises verse and prose writings of Allama Dr. Muhammad Iqbal, Zafar Iqbal, Saadat Hassan Manto, Intizar Hussain, Masood Ash’ar, Dr. Abdul Karim Khalid, Aisha Azim, Dr. Khalid Mahmood Sanjrani, Basir Sultan Kazmi, Dr. Qur’atul Ain Tahira, Dr. Nasir Baloch, Anis Ikram Fitrat, Shabana Riaz, Mo’aaz Anis, Sadaf Aslam, Dr. Shaista Hameed Khan, Khurshid Rizvi, Dr. Tehsin Firaqi, Atiq-urRahman, Syed Mashkoor Hussain Yad, Sarmad Sehbai, Saood Usmani, Prof. Sharif Ashraf, Syed Hasnain Mohsin, Anjum Salimi, Baqi Ahmadpuri, Amjad Islam Amjad, Dr. Saadat Saeed, Qaim Naqvi, Yasmin Hameed, Seema Ghazal, Ambreen Salahuddin, Muhammad Anwar Jamal, and others. The Punjabi section has an exclusive niche for the popular Punjabi poet, writer and educationist (late) Abbas Najmi. The text in this Section owes its authorship to writers like Prof. Dr. Khawaja Muhammad Zakariya, Prof. Asmatullah Zahid, Dr. Syed Tariq Zaidi, Prof. Annals of Punjab Medical College (APMC) Asim Nadeem, Chief Editor: Dr. Zahid Yasin Hashmi Zahid Masood, Editor: Dr. Safdar Hassan Javed A b b a s Publisher: Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad Najmi, Dr. Muhammad
of Pakistani English’, Najam Sethi’s ‘The good ol’bad days’, Dr. Moeed Pirzada’s ‘Pakistan media: Achievements, failures and way forward’, Maheen Syed’s ‘Lawn-ing with the most favoured neighbour’, Lal Khan’s ‘Friends or foes’, Mushahid Hussain’s ‘Parliament and civil-military relations’, Adiah Afraz’s ‘Who is afraid of PIC?’, Syed Hanif Rasool’s ‘Delhi in eclipse’, Dr. Tahir Kamran’s ‘Loss of a voice’, S. M. Zafar’s ‘Those forty-five minutes’, Irfan Hussain’s ‘Secularism in Muslim societies’, Dan Qayyum’s ‘Two nation theory: Past and present’, Ali Moeen Nawazish’s ‘Youth in Pakistan’, Shoaib Ahmad’s ‘The “minor” matter’, Zohrain Bhaur’s ‘Love struck!’, Daniyal Ahmad’s ‘The purpose of education’, Hazrat Wali Kakar’s ‘Talibanisation in the light of Pashtoonwali’, and Shahnaz Khan’s ‘True legacy of the Prophet (PBUH)’ reflect the remarkable expanse and diversity of the
Yunus Ahqar, Shakil Ahmad Tahiri, Saif-ul-Mulook Saifi, Muhammad Usman Salim, Aisha Aslam, and Pervez Para.
Annals of Punjab Medical College (APMC)
It is a research medical journal of high academic-cum-professional value. All of the articles included in this issue are purported to be original, multi-authorial, and fully annotated. Their themes originate from a variety of medical subjects like urticaria, Caesarian section, pollen allergy, pelvi-ureteric junction obstruction, forced expiratory volume in smokers versus non-smoker doctors, progesterone receptors in the rat uterus, post-operative nausea and vomiting in laparoscopic gynaecological procedures, vesicovaginal fistula, frequency of coronary heart disease risk factors among doctors of a specific medical institution, hypocalcemia after total thyroidectomy, costal cartilage graft in augmentation rhinoplasty, problems of child circumcision, duodenal perforation, maternal mortality, morbidity with placenta previa, comparison of outcomes of membranous with endochondral bone graft in orbital floor reconstruction, necessity of drains in thyroid surgery, differences in fibrocartilage at the epiphyseal attachment of quadriceps tendon and semimembranosus tendon of man, and case reports on the Poland syndrome, bilateral developmental dysplasia of hip joints, unruptured term pregnancy with an alive fetus in a non-communicating rudimentary horn with placenta percreta and monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS) – solitary plasmacytoma of sternum besides subject index, author index and instructions to authors. The journal speaks eloquently for the application and fecundity of its illustrious editorial team as well as the researchers who seem to have undertaken a painstaking exercise in composing their papers and reports. Thus its curricular, as also professional, value can hardly be gainsaid.
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