Pring Blog

There is a hot debate in the country about how we can save it from the chaos it’s been dragged into. Some say corruption is the cause and some blame the system. Political forces are calling for a change. Political system seems to be inching towards a breakdown. What is the solution? We Pakistanis unfortunately look for shortcuts. As a matter of fact, there aren’t any.
The plight of Pakistan is not corruption or any other social ill for that matter, rather lack of education. When the Mughals were constructing tombs and palaces in the subcontinent the English were building institutes like Oxford and Cambridge and the result is obvious. To move in the right direction we need to address education as the only solution for the country.
Large number of children do not go to school and there are those who study but could not get through because of the flawed system of education and lack of resources. Waqar Karim was one such student. Here is a glimpse of his struggle with the faulty education system that we have.
Waqar was a 2nd year pre-medical student who dreamed to be doctor. Even with a humble background and limited resources his parents sent him to Lahore for MCAT (Pakistan’s Medical College Entry Examinations). Finally the day came when he appeared for the MCAT examination. He was all geared up to become a medical student. The hope with which he entered the examination hall fell to pieces in a jiffy. It was not what he had prepared for in the last two years. He was misguided. Who could be accounted for a hardworking student’s future thrown to the wolves? He felt miserable and could not believe all this.
As they say the night is the darkest before dawn Waqar Karim got a message, a glimmer of hope, from his friend Mehsim Abid Samir asking him to come to Model Town Library. When he reached there he saw a group of students studying and helping each other. Samir has been using his mobile to SMS MCQs to his friends. Waqar was delighted to see all that. He decided to work with Samir in order to study and guide their fellow students in the right direction.
Waqar and Samir interacted with students preparing MCAT, F. Sc. or any other examination they could help them with. It so happened that the number grew much higher than they imagined. The question was, how could all this be managed? Samir had an idea. He thought that social media could help in this regard. Facebook or other social networking websites could not be the option as they required internet which was not available to majority of students. Samir wished for a social network that could be operated though mobile. Then somebody told him of Pring, a mobile social network. Pring is mobile social networking which functions as good through SMS as on web. Waqar and Samir joined Pring and created an account titled D-study.
They invited their friends and students on Pring and the number kept on growing. Now Waqar and Samir are helping countless students with lectures and MCQs. Many teachers and professors have also joined Waqar and Samir’s team and they are helping students. More than 10,000 students are following D-study including students of MCAT, ECAT, intermediate, A level etc. They have also created separate accounts for separate subjects like D-biology and D-chemistry.
Both Waqar and Samir have become a source of inspiration for young students, to study hard and never to lose hope. The credit goes to the Information technology and the revolution of social media. And Pring is an example how we can count on our own ideas and resources and contribute in the progress of the nation.
Today we live in an era in which developments do not take more than a second to reach from one end of the world to the other. Information technology is all encompassing. Pakistan has not cashed on the promises that IT offers. Just like Samir and Waqar made use of Pring as a launching pad for their ideas Pakistan should invest on social media and information technology to educate the people. Education if integrated with IT can work wonders. The world is changing fast and we have to change in order to survive.

This article was published in Sunday Plus magazine. Follow the link below to see the print version.

http://splus.nation.com.pk/E-Paper/Lahore/2012-01-15/page-28