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What is the value of the truth?

What happens when you use the truth to hurt someone, and they use lies to defend themselves? Who is right and who is wrong?

I was driving to Hurhgada on the new Cairo-Sokhna road which is by the way the best road in Egypt when I saw a big sign with the word Luxor on it. Of coarse I was traveling at 110Km per hour,  since the speed limit on this road is 120Km/h so I could not read the sign. But I felt good that there was an advertisement about a prominent Egyptian city, little did I know at the time that this was the worst thing that could happen to this beautiful city.

As I stopped at the only rest house in that road that has decent and clean bathrooms, I got the shock. I was able to see what the adverisement of Luxor is. Luxor is a brand of beer, not a non alcoholic one but an alcoholic beer. Belaraby Khamra.

I felt a desperation that I had only felt when G. Bush got re-elected. This is a terrible insult.

How a company be allowed to name a beer with the name of one of the most respected cities of Egypt.  This is an insult to every one that was born in Luxor, every one that lived there and every one that loved every part of Egypt.

Have we gone this far, are we as a people so docile that we do not move when we are insulted. Is there no one in all of Luxor and Egypt that feels shame to live in a country that allows a beer to have the name of a city that has many conservative people. Where are the sa3idis. Where are the Egyptians.

And I realized that we as a people have lost the will to stand up for what we believe in and that my dear readers is the end.

The end of us a people that have self respect.

الاقصر

بينما كنت اقود على طريق القاهرة العين السخنة والذي يعتبر بالمناسبة افضل طرق مصر على الاطلاق رأيت اعلان كبير جداً يحمل اسم مدينة الاقصر بالانجليزية ( Luxor ) .

وبالطبع فقد كنت اقود على سرعة 110 كم في الساعة نظراً لان السرعة القانونية كانت 120 كم في الساعة ولذا فلم استطع قراءة الاعلان جيداً. لكنني شعرت بالسرور لوجود مثل هذه الدعاية لمدينة مصرية شهيرة كالأقصر، ويالمدى قصر معرفتي عندئذ لان ذلك كان اسوء ما يمكن ان يحدث لهذه المدينة الجميلة.

وكانت الصدمة اثناء توقفي في الاستراحة الوحيدة على الطريق والتي تحتوي على حمامات نظيفة فقد تمكنت من روئية مضموت الاعلان المخصص للأقصر. Luxor هي اعلان لنوع من البيرة، وليست للنوع الخالي من الكحول بل لبيرة كحولية. يعني بالعربي خمرة.

وكان شعوري عندئذ بيأس لم يراودني منذ اعادة انتخاب الرئيس الامريكي جورج بوش للمرة الثانية. فهذه تعتبر اهانة فظيعة.

فكيف يمكن السماح لشركة بتسمية بيرة باسم واحدة من اكثر المدن تقديراً في مصر. هذه بمثابة اهانة لكل من ولد في الاقصر ولكل من عاش هناك بل ولكل من احب كل جزء من مصر.

هل بلغنا هذا الحد، هل اصبحنا اشخاص خانعين لا نتحرك عندما توجه لنا اهانة. اليس هناك احد في الاقصر او في مصر باكملها يشعر بمهانة العيش في بلد يسمح بتسمية البيرة باسم مدينة تحتوي على العديد من الاشخاص المحافظين. اين الصعايدة. اين المصريون.

وعندها ادركت اننا كأشخاص فقدنا اي ارادة لاخذ وقفة لما نؤمن به، وهذه اعزائي القراء هي النهاية.

نهاية اشخاص لديهم احترام للذات.

Those that control the body, are perfect athletes.

Those that grow the mind, become philosophers and scientists.

But a knower of truth will silence his body and mind. He will sacrifice health and his own logic to reach to his spirit.

We upgraded our mashy.com servers and made many optimizations to cope with the growth in number of visitors. I think that now the speed of mashy.com and its reliability is better.

I hope that all of you enjoy your experience with mashy.com and if you have any problems please use the contact us form in mashy.com to tell us of your problems.

If you loose hope you loose the will to live.

But if you have too much of it you are a fool. 

If you are married and have a loving relation with you computer, does that come under the umbrella of cheating on your wife?

This is the audio of a BBC Arabic Radio interview with me. It is about the Internet as a threat to traditional TV and the new opportunities to normal people opened by the Internet in video broadcasting.

Who I am?

As a manager of a company, I am faced
daily by choices that make me question my self. The hardest of these
choices are those that are between myself as a manager and a human
being.

As a human I believe in compassion and
non-violence. As a manager I believe that a company, family or even
a society is a machine where individuals are gears each working in
perfect unison to create the desired output of the machine.

It is at those times that an individual
not realizing that his or her true utility in an organization is to
be a gear at that point this individual feels that their unique
identity as a human is being hammered, these moments are the hardest
for a manager. At one extreme, a manager can open the doors of human
compassion and give more freedom to the gears and at the other the
manager can be a ruthless and soulless slave driver that uses the
whip as the main instrument of management.

These are the tough choices.

Let me talk about gears and humans to
explore this tough choice.

A country like Japan, historically has
been a country where individuals are nearly 100% gears. Japanese
companies encourage blind faith in your superiors, and discourage
individuality in the work place. Japan has since been known to be a
perfect country for manufacturing, Japanese cars, are perfect, they
are soulless but perfect. To balance this, the youth of the Japanese
society today is one of the most liberal and permissive of all
societies on earth. They are marionettes by day and pure unrefined
human desire by night. The youth enjoy the most advanced electronic
toys and devices on earth, devices that even the American youth can
not afford to buy. Let me just say what one Japanese woman said, I am
Christian by day, a Shinto in the afternoon and a Buddhist by night.
The Japanese have in becoming perfect gears compensated in freedom to
a degree where that freedom has made them loose their identity.

On the other hand the United States
have a somewhat middle culture, most people are gears. In the USA the
cycle of hire and fire is a fact of life. If you do not conform and
operate as a good gear, you will be fired faster than Bill Clinton
can reach for a cigar. But at the same time individuals that show
creativity and extreme intelligence are quickly promoted. No they are
not even promoted, they are hunted down and tracked from school and
university, the large companies are always looking for geniuses and
these geniuses are the true backbone of the American economy. An
economy that since the 60s of last century was not able to
economically produce a TV set, but was able to explore space and
produce the most advanced electronics and weapons of mass destruction
that the world has known.

In Switzerland every body is a gear,
every body takes pride in the beautiful clockwork that is their
society. But unlike Japan, the swiss are determined not to be good
gears they are determined to be the best gears. Swiss industry is
thus reserved for only the best and most expensive items money can
buy.

All these countries give various
degrees of freedom to the individual in an organization but in the
end, every body is a gear. I nations that are backwards like Egypt,
everybody is an individual, nobody wants to be a gear. And it is this
lack of dedication to the big picture that weakens our companies,
families and country as a whole and thus in a strange twist of the
inevitable fate, we end up with less freedom. Yes those cultures
where people refuse to be gears, end up with failing economies that
give people less financial and political freedom.

Our Egyptian products are junk, well
not all, but if you take a sample of Egyptian products you will be
able to look at the heart of a nation that does not have pride in
anything it does.

So back to my choices. As a manager I
know that if each individual in this organization becomes a gear then
the organization as a whole will run smoother, it will produce more
and become a Japanese factory.

But the problem is that individuals in
Egypt have not been accustomed to being gears in a machine. So each
individual adds a little bit of their own input into not their work
but their appointed tasks. To make things clearer, a good gear will
do the appointed task and use their intelligence or personality to
give the output a special flavor. The bad gear will say, well I do
not like this task, let me change the task itself so that it is more
to my liking and in doing that, they disrupt the working of the
entire machine.

The difference between a good gear and
a bad one is that the individual knows that the task they do, is
sacred, and that any freedom is withing the appointed task. Thus if
an individual can not accept taking commands from their manager,
without changing the command itself the individual becomes a block to
the machine rather than a gear in it.

So my choice is be easy with people,
make them happy on the short term, or be hard, and make the
organization run smoother which will in the end help ensure that the
organization can survive and can achieve a better financial
situation, thus giving the gears more financial freedom to be able to
use in becoming more free as individuals in their private life.

So here I am, knowing what the choice
should always be. Sometimes I have to be hard, sometimes I have to
stop being a nice guy and take up a stick. I have to make people
realize that if they truly believe that their manager know what he is
doing most of the time and if they believe that this manager is in
essence a good person, that cares for them then they should accept
being gears in the machine.

Lets realize as Egyptians and Arabs
that just because you are told to do a task in a specific way does
not mean that the task giver is degrading you or limiting your
freedom. The task giver is just a gear in himself. A manager is not
really as free as most would thing, a manager is a gear that is moved
by the customers and market in which the company lives in. Each of us
is a gear, each has a part. If the parts do what is required of them,
then the machine works well, if the manager is taking the machine in
the right direction then all will reap the benefits.

It is the ability of a person to become
a gear, to do as one is told, to work with other gears without
creating problems with them, this ability is called professionalism.
When two gears do not like one another, they create stress in the
machine. When you hear the engine of your car doing the kind of noise
that you usually associate with pieces of metal breaking, you know
that you will have to pay a lot to fix this broken car, you will also
know that somewhere there was a gear that did not do its job or two
gears that did not work well together.

Now can someone tell me which service
station can I take this country to?