Shamil, oh Shamil

Shamil, oh Shamil

Alright, Shamil! Here's the debut post. I am sorry that it has taken so long but as they say, better late than never.

How did this come about? Well, you wrote to me expressing how you envy me and my family for our apparent wealth and position in society. I must admit, I do feel blessed in my life and have a lot to be grateful for, such that I feel obliged to give something back in return. Paying zakat or making donations is one thing but I think the best contribution I can make is in terms of my time. Politics is not my cup of tea and I consider NGO activity to be only for politician wannabe's. Besides, I am too lazy to do things like feeding the street dwellers of Chow Kit Road or participate in a gotong-royong to build houses for the poor. In short, this is the best thing I think I can do: Write a blog for you and your friends with the primary objective being to help you improve your English, a general shortcoming among your generation that I think, if addressed, will go a long way towards improving your employability after you graduate and your worth to your employer. In fact, the importance of communication skills in any industry, even if you are self-employed cannot be over-emphasised.

To achieve our objective, you need to write back to me in the best English you can muster. I will correct and comment on what you write and you can all learn from the examples in the exchange. There shall be no shortforms or half sentences and try to insert every appropriate punctuation. Mind you, I have never been formally trained as an English teacher but many people say my English is quite decent. In school, I was every English teacher's favourite.

One inititial advice I have is that you should download a dictionary onto your smartphones or computers and make it a habit to look-up the meaning of any word you come across that you are unfamiliar with. 

What shall I write about? Anything that comes to mind and it would help if you make suggestions. As an indication and by way of introduction, I am a faithful Arsenal supporter, a disease I am inflicted with eversince I saw Charlie George scoring and celebrating the winning goal in an FA Cup final against Liverpool in the sixties. You should look that up on Youtube. I am not looking forward to the coming season because the Arsenal squad seems to be in disarray. But I'll keep the faith nevertheless. Sports is the only thing I watch on TV these days, tennis and golf being the other games I follow. I played tennis upto the national level as a junior. My first trip on a plane was to Australia with the national junior team where among others we played in the Australian Open tournament. Golf is my major pre-occupation these days.

My other hobby these days is reading. It has been a life-long habit for me to read myself to sleep. I used to have a pile of books on my bedside table but these days, I do most of my reading off my IPad. There are thousands of books you can download for free. What do I read about? For the past 15 years, it's largely to do with learning what it means to be a Muslim which seems to be a never-ending quest. I believe that a major problem with the Ummah these days is that we do not think enough about our Muslimness and we mindlessly imitate the west in virtually everything we do, inspite of praying 5 times a day.

Career-wise, I would say I am semi-retired, having interests in businesses that I am not involved in on a day-to-day basis. When I was working, it was largely as an IT professional having obtained my basic degree in Computer Science and Accounting. 

I guess that's enough for this first post. Do encourage your friends to come to this blog and post comments and questions in English. If you want to be good at anything, you need to practice, wouldn't you agree?