Ramadan Mubarak

It’s that time of the year again, when Muslims around the world gear up to fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, requires the Muslim community to fast during the daylight hours. The fasting doesn't just include starving off meals, but also requires devotees to refrain from drinking water. And of course, the festival is also associated with delicious treats such as kebabs, baida roti and Haleem, which are available across the city. 

Significance of Ramadan:

Ramadan is known to be the month when Muhammad, the holy prophet received the initial verses of what later became The Holy Quran. The story also goes that the holy prophet was meditating in the Cave Hira, which is situated on the mountain of Jabal an Nur in Mecca. The night that these verses were revealed to him is marked on the calendar today as Laylat al-Qadr. In these verses, it is believed, that Muslims were instructed to fast for the entire month of Ramadan, celebrating it as a month of worship.

Learn about Ramadan

• Contrary to popular belief, it is not compulsory to fast. Fasting is a choice that an individual makes and is a decision that is completely their own. 
• The elderly, young children, those with a medical condition and travellers are excused from fasting. 
• Ramadan is not only about abstinence from food, but also from intimate relations, cursing, back biting and anything else considered provocative. 
• People often believe that Ramadan is a month of abstinence from food and water for 30 consecutive days, but it’s just abstinence from dawn to dusk. Iftar and the period between iftar and suhoor is the time when you rejuvenate and replenish your body.

How to get through Ramadan

The heavy rain and hectic commuting can make it difficult to keep up with your fasting schedule. 

These tips will help make your experience easier.

At the time of suhoor, eat food that is healthy, which will keep you satiated for longer, while it is difficult to get up before the crack of dawn and to eat and eat till you’re full, it is vital that you do so in order to have enough energy to power through the day. Pick carbohydrate and protein rich food such as eggs on whole wheat toast, fruits and oatmeal, as these will help you feel fuller and digest slower.

Make sure that you drink just enough water between iftar and suhoor to keep yourself hydrated. Since water is prohibited, this is the only time you will be able to drink water. So drink up, even if it means visiting the washroom every now and then.

For a lot of people, Ramadan is a time of dwindling energy levels, so, try and get as much rest as possible. Avoid vigorous activities as much as possible and take a nap for at least half an hour during the day.

In most Muslim households, iftar is a grand affair, where families dish out lavish spreads. Make sure that you shop for groceries in bulk, so that you’re not spending all your energy on grocery shopping. 

If you must exercise when you’re fasting, pick lighter exercises such as walking, which won’t require a lot of energy or tire you out.

If being around people who are eating makes you hungry, just go out for a walk until they are done, or you can also how you feel to them and ask them to go eat elsewhere.

For a lot of people, tempers usually flare when they are fasting, meditating for at least 15 minutes every day will help you control your temper.

Interesting Facts about Ramadan

• There are some interesting facts associated with Ramadan that you may not be aware of. We shed light on a few.
• If you think that fasting actually helps you lose weight, you’re wrong. Most people actually end up gaining weight during Ramadan. This is because people eat more unhealthy food late at night.
• Both Muslim groups sunnis and Shi’ites break their fasts at different times. While Shi’ites wait for the last ray of light to disappear from the sky until they can eat again, Sunni Muslims break their fast when the daily maghrib prayer begins.
• In the TV industry, Ramadan is a long-awaited season. Wonder why? It’s because Arabic, and Turkish studios produce 30 episode miniseries one for each night of the month all year round, in preparation for Ramadan.
• Egypt is known to push back their clock by an hour to make fasting easier because the work day becomes shorter.
• Most people break their Ramadan fast by eating dates that have been harvested in Egypt, North Africa and the Arabian Gulf states. The second most popular option is a fruit juice called jallab, which consists of dates, carob and rosewater. 

Unacceptable truth of yourself...!

How much do you know yourself...? 100% or 75% or 50%..? No one can say that I know myself very well. Because our mind speaks one, our heart says one and we do something else. How many of you have planned something and have done right opposite to it or just not that exact plan.  Life is not a straight line or set timeline of milestones, you need to realize in the first place. It is fine if you do not complete your school or college, if you get married, finding a job which supports you, having a family, making money and live securely at this age or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as your realize that if you are not married by 25 or become a president by 30 or even happy, for that matter this world is not going to convict you.  You are allowed to retrace your steps. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, but often we forget that. We choose a subject right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we dint love the subject we have to do it, because we have invested lot of money and time into it. We go to work every morning because we need to support ourselves and our families abundantly. We keep on doing this assuming that we are fulfilling the responsibilities of our life, and one fine day we wake up depressed, stressed out with lot of pressure, not knowing where you went wrong and what’s wrong. This is how you ruin your life without knowing.

You ruin your life by choosing a wrong partner for your life. What is it with our need to fast track connection in relationships? Why are we so captivated with the thought of first becoming somebody’s instead of somebodies? Trust me when I say that an adoration bred out of convenience, a love affection that blooms from the need to sleep beside someone, a love affection that panders to our requirement for attention than passion, is a love that won’t inspire you at 6 am when your roll over and embrace it. 

Endeavor to find foundational love, the sort of relationship that propels you to be a better man or woman, the sort of closeness that is rare rather than right there. “But I don’t want to be alone,” we often cry out. Be alone, eat alone, explore the places alone, and sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow and figure out what inspires you, you will create your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity and when you meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it, because you are sure and confident of yourself. So wait for it, fight for it and make an effort for it. If you have already found it, care it because it is the most beautiful thing your heart will ever experience.

Most of them ruin their life by letting their past rule it. It is very common for certain things in life to happen. There will be heartbreak, confusion, days where you feel like you aren’t special or focused. There are moments that will stay with you, words that will stick but these cannot define you – it’s just a moment and simple words. If you allow every negative things in your life to outline how you view yourself, you will view the world around you negatively. You will miss out an opportunities because you dint get that promotion 2 years ago, convincing yourself that you were stupid, useless. You will miss out an affection because you assume your past love left you because you weren’t good enough or taken for granted. Because of this, now you don’t believe the man or the women who urges you to believe you are. This is cyclic, self-satisfying prescience. If you don’t allow yourself to move on what happened in the past, you will look at your future with that lens, and nothing will be able to breach that judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving and fueling a perception that you shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

You ruin your life when you compare yourself to others. The amount of facebook followers you have does not decrease or increase your value. The amount of money in your bank account will not influence your compassion, your intelligence or your happiness. The person who has twice the possession than you does not have double the bliss or double the merit. We always check what our friends are linking, who our significant others are following and at the end of the day this not only ruins our lives but also ruins us. It creates within us this need to feel important, and in many cases we often put others down to achieve that.

You ruin your life by pacifying yourself. We all are afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you open up and being honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl or guy know that she/he inspires you. Tell your mother/father you love her/him in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open up yourself, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who and how, you love. There is courage in that.

You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you naturally desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. A person could be sitting behind a laptop right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.