Today in Rawalpindi

Munaza Kazmi

Dining is part and parcel of the travel experience, with many people now drawn towards destinations based on their food culture and cuisine. 

Pakistan, where food is the culture. Pakistanis are passionate about their cuisine, which is full of flavor and bursting with color. And they love to eat and love to discover. So today I set up to have another experience; to discover something new to my eyes also tasty to eat.

The sun was blazing when I was travelling on the road of Rawalpindi, with horns of rikshaws, and motorcycles in the background.

Rawalpindi, the 4^th largest city of Pakistan, was the capital of Pakistan from 1959 to 1969. The city lies on the Potwar Plateau 9 miles southwest of Islamabad, the national capital.

The city enjoys a rich history and culture. Rawalpindi meaning “Village of Rawals” occupies the site of an old village inhabited by the Rawals, a group of yogis. 

While moving you can find several heritage ruins, that I wonder why not given consideration for the preservation. The city is moving fast while ignoring some of the incomparable architectural ruin. 

Certain ruins are identified with the ancient city Gajipur, or Gajnipur, the capital of the Bhatti tribe before the Common Era. 

Destroyed during the Mongol invasion dating back to 14th century CE, the town was restored by the Gakhar chief Jhanda Khan, who gave it its present name. However, it grew rapidly in importance when Milka Singh, a Sikh adventurer, occupied it in 1765 and invited settlers from the Jehlum and Shahpur areas to settle there. It was annexed by the British in 1849.

In ancient times the locality formed part of Ghandhara and was included in the Achaemenid Persian empire. However, if you are feeling a little more excited about I would suggest you gear up a little more and visit the marvelous ruins located near Shahderi, northwest of Rawalpindi and Ankiel, south of Rawalpindi, where a Buddhist stupa site dating back to 3rd century BCE would end up a memory for life.

Beside the history and architect Rawalpindi is an important administrative, commercial, and industrial center. 

Its industries include locomotive works, gasworks, an oil refinery, sawmills, an iron foundry, a brewery, and cotton, hosiery, and textile mills; it also produces shoes, leather goods, pottery, newsprint, and tents.

Also, there comes a big, really big bazar which sells from a toffy to maybe a Mercedes…The market is famous for handicraft, traditional clothing, beautiful and colorful jewelry designs sand yes, the food.

After a tiring journey I arrived at Pearl-Continental hotel. A huge white building, where you can have all the modern-day luxuries with taste and smell of good food. 

The reason of being ravenous, I headed straight to Marco Polo Restaurant which offers exciting food all day, a spacious beautiful setting with the view of deep blue swing pool, that’s what you would really love to.

Well after satisfying the hunger, a brief tour into the hotel is worthy indeed, a green lawn with flowery alleys, on top the view of peacocks dancing around make the setting utterly royal.

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Munaza Kazmi has recently done Master of Philosophy from Bahria University Islamabad. Her debut novel is Unrequited Love.

She’s an author, columnist writing in different newspapers and a researcher having seven publications till yet, she’s been writing since 2016.

You can connect to Kazmi at twitter @munaza_kazmi or on research gate as munaza kazmi.

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8 Profitable online small businesses ideas to start with investment as low as Rs 25,000

Starting a business in an online market is not tough if one has a fabulous business idea. Here’s a list of 8 profitable online businesses ideas that you can start with a minimum investment of Rs 25,000.

Starting a business may seem like a mammoth task, especially when the capital is limited. Thoughts like managing inventory, logistics, marketing etc., often shake a beginner’s confidence. 

It’s a long arduous journey, but when the plans are right, it reaps benefits for the founders, stakeholders, and several others who depend on it for their livelihood. 

Today, starting a business in the online medium with a small investment is not hard. SMBStory has made a list of eight profitable online businesses ideas, which can be started with a minimum investment of Rs 25,000.

Artificial jewellery

Jewellery never goes out of style neither its demand. Even during the COVID-19 lockdown, when most businesses were shut down, the demand for artificial minimalist jewellery pieces remained in constant demand. 

Setting up an artificial jewellery business is doable with an investment as low as Rs 25,000. Chinu Kala, Founder of Rubans — a Bengaluru-based jewellery brand — says launching an imitation jewellery business is a great idea, and suggests one can invest between Rs 15,000 and Rs 20,000 in buying products in bulk.

“THERE ARE PORTALS LIKE TRADEINDIA, WHERE PEOPLE CAN GET CONNECTED TO GOOD MANUFACTURERS FOR PROCURING JEWELLERY AND SELLING BY SETTING UP AN ONLINE SHOP,” CHINU SAYS.

She adds that the first customers of the business can also be friends and family who can endorse the products in their circle and urge them to buy online. 

Home bakery

Setting up a basic home bakery business doesn’t require a hefty investment but a strong intent to bake and a handful of money to procure an oven and buy ingredients for baking. 

Mariam Mohuideen, Founder of Baker’s Treat, Mangalore, started from a small bakery set built out of passion. She says baking is a craft, and to set up a business in this industry, “one has to think out of the box to succeed.” 

“THERE’S NO NEED OF DOING BRANDING WHEN STARTING FROM A SMALL SCALE, BUT FOCUS ON THE QUALITY AND DELIVERING A FLAVOUR THAT CUSTOMERS WOULD RELISH,” SHE ADDS.

A home bakery can be started with an investment between Rs 15,000 and Rs 25,000.

Homemade candles

In the last few years, people are taking to buying more candles, especially scented candles, to enhance their home interiors and for gifting purposes.

One can start a candle business with a minimal investment either by making it at home or procuring it from a third party.

The raw materials used to start the business include wax, wick, moulds, thread, aroma oils, and more. 

Besides, you also need to have some candle-making equipment, which includes a melting pot, thermometer, pour pot, weighing scale, hammer, and an oven (to melt wax).

Many beginner candle-makers can start by listing their products on Itsy Bitsy — a one-stop shop for art and craft manufacturing to retail to D2C stack in the country.

It has 26 stores across the country, including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune, Panjim, Ahmedabad, Mysore, Shimoga, and Delhi.

Bedsheets

Starting an online bedsheet business is quite pocket-friendly for founders as the products can be bought in bulk and at a cheaper cost from manufacturers.

Entrepreneurs can connect with manufacturers through Indiamart or can directly buy from cities like Panipat, Jaipur, Delhi, Surat, and Kolkata, which are famous for their bedsheets. 

JABALPUR-BASED ENTREPRENEUR REKHA SABHARWAL SAID SHE STARTED A BEDSHEET BUSINESS FROM HOME BY SOURCING PRODUCTS FROM DELHI’S SADAR BAZAAR. 

She started selling via WhatsApp groups, and today, she is running a successful business, selling in and around Jabalpur.

Papad

A papad business can be profitable, owing to the small investment required. One can start the business at a micro-level by making papad at home or can collaborate with papad manufacturers in Amritsar, Guruvayoor, and Bikaner to get started. 

Papads come in many varieties — from rice papad, urad dal papad, moong dal papad, aalu papad, or phool papad — one can select the SKU basis the demand prevalent in the region. 

Ludhiana-based entrepreneur S. Amanpreet Thind’s grandfather started the Amritsari papad business in 1937 with Rs 100. Today, if one wants to start the business, a minimum investment of Rs 25,000 is sufficient to source papads and start selling online through social media channels or on ecommerce. 

Disposable cutlery

From plastic, areca to bamboo spoons, bowls, and plates, the market for disposable cutlery has a constant demand in India, especially from Quick Service Restaurants (QSRs), retail, and from customers for several occasions. 

The disposable cutlery business is a low investment and a high-profit business, given the items procured are from local wholesalers or manufacturers. 

Spices

India is a big market for spices, with major demand coming from across the country. Earlier, we used to use fresh spices made at home, and continue to do so. Many spices, including garam masala, jeera masala, paratha masala, etc., are made at home and there is a constant demand for them.

Mother-daughter duo Urmila and Aarti Samant started Masala Tokri, a Mumbai-based spices brand, which they started by selling in their circle of family and friends. 

In a span of a little over two years, the duo now aims to touch the turnover of Rs 1 crore. 

The business is profitable and requires a small investment for procuring raw materials. 

The masalas are carefully curated by Urmila. Aarti says that their background of running a family business of masala chakkis helped them connect to premium raw material vendors from across the country. 

Buttons

Either in menswear, kidswear, or womenswear, buttons always enhanced the elegance of an outfit. The button business requires bare minimum investment and can be started from home to set up an online shop for selling.

From plastic to fabric and steel buttons, there are various categories in this niche that you can select depending upon your choice of business.

For selling purposes, creating a local group online on social media channels or messengers can be an initial step. SMB entrepreneurs can also set up their personalised online store within minutes on the MyEasyStore platform.

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COURTESY yourstory

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Nagarparker, Pakistan’s Hidden Sphere of Historical Architecture

Munaza Kazmi

Magical wells, Spectacular Jain temples, Gigantic sand dunes hiding several exotic tales, wow…sounds like “Ali Baba and Forty Thieves”. 

I believe readers could only imagine these enchanted tales in Arabian nights storybooks but never heard or thought of those in real world. For living your imaginations Come with me to a mesmerizing journey of magical and undiscovered lands of Pakistan.

Pakistan is not just about the mountains and streams like my friends think it’s far much interesting, full of mysterious stories, adventurous and yeah beautiful indeed.

Today am taking you to Nagerparker. Born from under the sea, Nagarparkar is a beautiful town situated at the base of the dramatic and mineral-rich Karunjharhills and neighbouring the Indian border in Tharparker, Sindh.

The area is surrounded by rocky belts and sand dunes same of that of Aladdin, also it is the home to centuries-old Jain and Hindu temples, a beautiful white marble mosque, a magical well, thousands of resident snakes like you see in National Geographic Channel, memorial stones, granite deposits also rare flora and fauna.

It is said that the Karunjhar hills provide 1.25 kg of gold every day in the form of red granite stone, china clay, and honey.

Nagarparkar is home to almost 200,000 inhabitants, who mostly belong to modest backgrounds. The town is majorly inhabited by Hindus, who have historically lived in harmony with the Muslim minority.

In fact, the famous temples of the area make it mostly a town of the Hindus and Muslim pilgrims who visit each year to perform religious rituals or attend meals at the local shrines.

In the past Nagarparkarwas largely populated by Yogis and Jain Munis, the followers of Lord Mahavira and Parsanatha, some hundreds of years ago. These Jains and Shaivites were known to practice austerities in the hills of Karunjhar.

Stories from the localsrelate that wealthy Hindu merchantsbuilt temples and dedicated them to Lord Parshwanath, the 23rd Jain prophet.

But with hardly any Jains left, these major archaeological monuments lie abandoned, neglected and shrouded in mystery.

Jain Temple

Apart from the golden sand, exotic wild life and rich mineral reserves, Nagarparkaris famous for the Jain history and their remarkable architecture.

There are over twelve Jain temples that you can find in the area. These dates back to as far as the 14th century – the era when the Jain architectural expression was at its ultimate – and are now one of the oldest heritage sites of Pakistan.

Some of the notable shrines include; Karoonjar Jain, Virvah Jain, Gori and a cluster of three temples at Bodhesar etc. These are richly decorated with sculptures and paintings.

The carvings on the pillars and entrances of these temples are magnificent for their intricacy. One of these sanctuaries is believed to have been built by a Jain woman and is locally called, PoniDaharo.

The walls of these abandoned buildings are geometric steps of marble — a particular style that shows up everywhere from the temple’s steps to the frames carved inside some of its walls and are widely seen among Jain constructions.

The canopies at the entrance of these temples are decorated with paintings that represent Jain mythology.

It is believed that the frescoes at Gori temple are some of the oldest Jain frescoes in existence. Unfortunately, not much has been done to conserve these heritage sites and you would find some are merely ruins of what were once considered architectural wonders.

I believe we should not leave everything on government since this heritage is belong to the citizens as well, we our self could preserve our precious heritage for the coming generations.

Bhodesar Mosque

Going furtheralongside the pond at the foothill of the Karunjharyou would discover a beautiful, shining white mosque.

This remarkable structure, built entirely with cold and welcoming marble, is said to have been built by Sultan Mehmood Begra, the ruler of Gujarat.

On a closer inspection you could see an inscription on the mosque lists the year 880/1505, which is also a reminder of the Jain-inspired architecture at the mosque.

Durga Mata Temple

Next, lies on the ChurrioJabal hill, there’s a historic Hindu sanctuary hosts up to 200,000 pilgrims annually on Shivratri.

Visitors bring cremated ashes of their departed beloveds to immerse in the holy water. The valuable and multi-colored hill supporting the temple is mined for its rare and expensive granite, which I believe is posing a serious threat to the foundation of the house of the Hindu goddess, Durga.

By now you are in the thoughts of golden land, and its preservations that’s a great idea work on it. Well I think now let’s move to another totally different view of this beautiful land, something like we use to see in Bollywood movies…yeah, it’s a “Love Story”.

Marvi’s well

Located in the Bhalwa village, this well is regarded as one of the primary cultural standpoints of the Thar Desert and has now been extended into a cultural center.

This complex is a historical reminder of the story of Umar and Marvi. Umar Soomro, a local ruler of the area in the 13thcentury, fell in love with the beautiful Marvi while she was drawing water from this well, same as in films though.

The story, however, takes a bleak turn where after continuous rejection, King Umar kidnapped the girl and kept her hostage for a year in hopes for her to settle one day.

But after realizing that no number of jewels could waive Marvi’s love for her fiancé back in her town, alas, he had to let her go.

Marvi was immortalized because of her strong-will, determined character and her pure love for her homeland. She is remembered today as one of the bravest women in Sindhi history.

Interesting indeed…. hasn’t Pakistan.

However, there are some difficulties in to getting these vivid places reasoning the tough weather and security.

Also, the Lodging facilities have been almost non-existent in the area, except for a few rest houses. However, in 2017, the Sindh culture and tourism ministry opened the ‘RooploKolhi Resort’, in hopes of promoting tourism in the area.

On the other hand, ones with wandering souls can rent a charpai, from any local restaurant to spend the night under the starry skies of Thar.

Indeed, there’s a need to build the hotels in order to promote tourism.

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Munaza Kazmi has recently done Master of Philosophy from Bahria University Islamabad. Her debut novel is Unrequited Love.

She’s an author, columnist writing in different newspapers and a researcher having seven publications till yet, she’s been writing since 2016.

You can connect to Kazmi at twitter @munaza_kazmi or on research gate as munaza kazmi.

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5 SEO Tips for Non-SEOs in 2021

Believe it or not, you don’t have to be a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert to be a good content creator. However, it’s super-valuable to know some tips and tricks to improve your rankings on Google and user experience.

Here are five useful tips that you won’t read elsewhere. Since Google has many updates each year, you have to keep up with your SEO game in 2021.

Let’s start!

1. Look for questions people are searching on Google

In October 2020, Google improved BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) with their research in AI (artificial intelligence). BERT is language understanding systems that understand users’ written queries on Google Search, thus providing more relevant results.

This update improved Google Search in a way that now the systems can understand:

• misspelt words, thanks to the new spelling algorithm;
• the context of misspelt words.

Now it’s possible to provide a user’s requested information in under 3 milliseconds.

How is this related to questions asked on Google?

The BERT improvement allows Google to capture and understand the context of the article and page itself, making long-tail keywords more important than ever.

Let’s take the example of the keyword ‘rich media’.

The term ‘rich media’ is a short keyword with less volume and higher keyword difficulty compared to the long-tail keyword that’s also a question ‘how are rich media ads different from other ad formats?’.

This long-tail keyword provides even more significant search volume and a lower keyword difficulty level.

This particular case proves that people search more and more by typing specific questions and looking for direct answers.

But how do you find the right questions?

You should focus on checking broader terms (short keywords) when doing keyword research because the questions will appear as a suggestion.

Then check pages that rank in the first positions and answer those questions better.

Remember that this question has to be included in your article as one of the headings or titles. Keep the answer to the question sweet and straight to the point!

So how to find those top pages?

If you use Ahrefs, scroll down in the keyword explorer, and you will see them. And in this particular case, the featured snippet for the long-tail keyword ranks Setupad.

Check the answer to a particular question on the search by typing the question in a Google Search.

As you can see from the image below, this particular site includes the question in its title plus the short keyword in the description. By this Google understands that this site’s article includes the information that users are actually searching for.

Remember to focus more on long-tail phrases because your competitors might be focusing on short keywords. Also, there is less competition, leading your article to rank in the first position on Google Search.

2. Add internal and external links

Yes, internal and external links are still important for SEO in 2021.

Here are ways to use them effectively:

Internal links

1. Don’t add random links that don’t explain specific terms or add additional value for the user. For example, adding an internal link under the term ‘SEO tips’ takes the user to another article on the page ‘5 SEO Tips for Your Site’.
2. If the internal link is reasonable, your article builds up a great user experience. By having internal links, you allow the user to spend more time on your site.
3. Internal links increase the other page rankings too.
4. If the user visits more than one page on your site, it increases engagement and lowers the bounce rate.

External links

1. Add external links only if necessary.
2. Link to pages that have high domain authority scores.
3. If you have used some data, citation, or you see that this particular other site’s article will add value to your reader, link the page to it!
4. By adding external links Google and other search engines understand what your article is about.

It helps to increase your rankings if your article is linked with the most valuable external sources.

Google’s algorithm follows the content that is linked. The first thing you can do is go through your articles and check if there is a possibility to link them. If yes, then great. If no, you can find a piece that’s related to it. And add it as a related article (the title of the article).

Example:

3. Entity based SEO

Many SEO specialists now emphasize that content marketers should focus on entity based SEO.

Entity based means one word that can be captured in the whole article. It’s more like a context-based word that can define the article. The keywords within the article allow the search engine to give the best possible results for a specific entity.

For example, the user types in the word ‘ROSE’ (entity), and the search automatically provides several ideas of what the user wanted to look for –plant, actress, or song. The entity gives ideas for users to jump into the right category and find the information they were looking for easier.

Simply speaking, Google emphasizes entities over keywords, which has helped provide more precise results for users.

Keywords and entities go hand in hand. Keywords help entities to be defined. So, before conducting big keyword research, focus on finding the right entity and then do the keyword research.

4. Optimized URLs

Each year you should go through your blog articles and see if your URLs are optimized.

Shorter URLs rank better on search results, and it’s way easier for users to understand what your article is about. And this improves user experience.

Here are some useful tips on how you should optimize them.

For example, if your blog contains articles that have to be updated each year, don’t mention the year in the URL; it will make your life easier in the future. When you decide to improve or update the content, you should only change Meta Title where you include the new year, but the URL won’t change.

Example:

• Non optimized URL

example.com/blog/top-trends-2021

• Optimized URL:

example.com/blog/top-trends

Long URLs make it harder to share on social media because the entire URL cannot be visible and could feel fake or scammy for some users.

Another tip is to use hyphens instead of underscores because Google robots read the URL by hyphens.

• Hyphens: –
• Underscores : _

Example:

Hyphens: example.com/blog/top-trends

Underscores: example.com/blog/top_trends

Don’t use capital letters in the URL, because it can confuse search engines.

5. Focus on user experience

In June 2021 Google will roll out an official ranking factor update called Core Web Vitals. This update will affect sites with bad user experience, so make sure your content is easy to read and is user and mobile-friendly. Make sure you use images, videos, and infographics, maybe some animations.

Check how fast your site loads, how fast it interacts with the user, and whether it is responsive.

SEO works hand in hand with user experience; if SEO is more for search engines, UX is for your site’s users. Both of them have the same goal of providing the most relevant information for users.

Keeping an eye on UX helps searchers to find the information they are looking for, thus increasing your organic traffic.

Final thoughts

As a content creator, use the tips mentioned above to improve SEO and UX. Make sure you are on your content marketing game in 2021 and optimize your content frequently.

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COURTESY jeffbullas

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