you know feel sometimes I have this feeling as a presenter I get this vibe that the audience well they're just not bad into me but is it something about me something about them or something else I reckon it's all of the above what do you mean well I think whether you're presenting in person or via a webinar sometimes there's invisible barriers that sit between you and your audience okay on one hand I'm relieved because it's not about me on the other hand what can I do about it well you can relax because there is something you can do about it now I might illustrate by way of example okay okay so I had to give a presentation to a group of active retirees some of whom had time on their hands now the issue was that my speech was designed to help time poor people engage more effectively with their communities then why didn't you decline the offer to speak or to speak about something else well the reason is there was something in it for all of them in the techniques that I was going to teach I just had to frame it in a way that would make it interesting to all okay so you've hedged your bets you've actually covered off for the time poor people and for the retirees that is cool precise amando and that's probably not so cool but the reason I do it is otherwise I run the risk that half the audience switches off because they don't think it's for them now I know how to do it how do I know what needs framing well I reckon there's three key areas that you as a presenter might need to frame things about you things about it or your topic and things about them the audience hmm well the audience might not like something about you it could be your job title your appearance your background or even your gender okay yeah as a small business owner I was asked to give a presentation for corporate employees who might have had an issue with the fact that I was a small business owner and thought what do I have to offer them but I let them know that I'd had a corporate role beforehand so that's great because you've let them know that you have been in their shoes before okay great so that's framing issues that the audience might have with me what about it my topic well your audience might not like your topic or they think they know more about it than you well they just don't see its relevance so in my active retiree example I framed it in a way that they would think it was all relevant to them you know a lot of presenters can also worry about questions can framing help with that so yeah framing is really good for that so you might say at the start of your webinar I really want to take your comments and questions as they come in today now I'll be able to answer some of them straight away but others I'll make a note of and follow up later you know that's so simple you know I actually think I do that instinctively I don't know why I didn't think to do it in a webinar yeah well we don't need to treat webinars that differently we just need to raise our level of awareness about these things and when it comes to framing out them you know issues that the audience might have well in my active retiree example knowing that some of them had time on their hands was a feature of them that I had to cater for yeah so there you have it folks to get the best vibe from your audience make sure you think well in advance about any issues that you need to frame for your audience about them you or your topic that you need to cover off on and make sure you do the framing and don't get framed by your audience


Hi, nice to see you all here. How was the coffee? Great. Nice. Okay, so I'm a person that always wanted to be an IT guy, computer science guy and so on. So I was working for 15 years in academic world, doing science, teaching students and so on. In the meantime, I did my PhD, but always the practical things were most important for me. So even in doing some science, I was always trying to do it more practical, available for developers. So you can Google something about it also. So now I'm now I'm working for FLYR and doing microservices for them. I was always interested in distributed systems. So it's perfectly aligned with what I what I was doing before. I'm also one of the people that organized Ruby user group in my country. So please be friendly. Okay, what about FLYR? What we do in FLYR? We do revenue management system for airlines. So actually we take a lot of data from them. So we do big data, ETL pipelines and so on. Then we do machine learning on this data and we tell them what prices should they sell, the tickets to earn most. That's our goal. We have an office in San Francisco and we have office in Kraków, Poland. So you can work for FLYR from European time zone and have a work-life balance. Okay, so that's some things we use, not everything.  We were recently on a Python conference. Some of us were in Czech on Python conference. And we've met their very interesting guy. So we hired him. You know, the guy in the middle of the photo, who knows this guy? Yeah, that's right. Kretek in Polish is Kretek. It's a, for the ones that didn't see it, it's a mole. And it's a character from cartoon in our childhood, very popular in our part of Europe. So we, we've met this guy. We took him on a conference. He was on a talk, on different talks. He even gave his own lightning talk. So if you are wondering if you should or not, he did it, you can do it. Okay, okay. So he is actually an exceptional data digger as a mole. So, you know, that's why we hired him. But to the point, the history begins like a year ago, a little less than a year ago when I started to work in FLYR and by then all microservices in our product were communicating over HTTP. And FLYR felt quite comfortable with this solution, but they also have the feeling that for some applications, it won't be the best solution. And that we will at some point probably have to switch. We already had some places where the services communicated over a Rabit MQ, but it was not perfectly implemented and we knew it. So there was a feeling that we should find an asynchronous way of communication. And the thing that actually caused the decision was a new requirement required to our e-commerce e-commerce use case. And the requirement can be described more or less like this. We had an UI interacting with the user. There was a backend for this UI. So there was some interaction. And at some point, this interaction between the user and UI backend caused the UI backend issue a query to the service our team was maintaining. And to fulfill this request, to respond to this request, we had to do we knew that we will have to find out a number of requests to the other services, some of them, most of them external, so we knew it will be time consuming to get the responses. But we wanted to give their user anything to show, to have anything to show to the user whenever we have anything useful for him. And when we get anything better for him, so we will update whatever we are showing. So that was the use case. So we actually wanted to implement something like this. We get the original query. We found out the sub queries. And whenever we get the first response to a query, we send a partial response to the original query to show something to the user. And whenever we get another response to a sub query, we will send another partial response to update this whatever this information that is showed to the user and so on. Okay, so that was the use case we wanted to implement. So that's the first thing. Second thing was related to performance. And I can't give you the precise numbers, but from what I can tell you was that when I looked at Rabit and Q, we wanted persistence in our communication. So when I looked at Rabit and Q at 5,000 messages per second that can be handled when you turn on the persistence, it was definitely not enough. So the requirements were quite high. So that was the second important thing. So of course, you can do it using HTTP, but we already felt that we will anyway need asynchronous communication. So that's the good point to start with. And how we did it, how we approached this situation. Okay, we decided, yes, okay, we need to do, we need to do a, well, but what and how. We have HTTP based infrastructure and it works. Okay, we have experience with it. We have developers experience with this way of communication. They have habits with implementing this way of communication.  So it's the hardest thing to overcome in some situations. Of course, we knew we lack experience with this kind of communication because we always did it using HTTP. So one more requirement. Of course, we must do it well and the first time do it well. Well, hard to do it well first time, but maybe. And of course, we knew we will get all these goodies when we switch to the asynchronous communication and even more, for example, more opportunities. Anyone knows what's the first opportunity we get in this situation? Anybody? What do you think? Sorry? Also, sure, you can always refactor the code. But I have some plans for you. Can you catch your plan? Thanks. Oh, sorry. But it's still perfectly operational. Anybody tries? It was probably on the previous slide. Okay. That's not along my line of thinking. Sure. Yes, you do. You can have all these things. But also, you have the perfect opportunity to make new mistakes. Isn't it true? Completely new mistakes. Completely new things can go wrong when you go to asynchronous communication. So we can have different concurrency issues, race conditions because we do asynchronous things. And in the places we didn't have it before. There is a problem, you know, we should choose a broker. We don't have experience. We can read a lot. We can do research. But there is always a chance we will choose a wrong broker because we didn't research for the right thing. If we choose the right broker, there's probably more than one driver we can choose. Okay? So which one should we choose? On what basis? How should we decide? We can use the correct driver, but use it incorrectly. Okay? If it's just in your one simple service, that's basic. But if it spreads all over your system and then you realize, well, you have to do this and that to make this communication stable and now you have to find all these places the other people just copied and pasted their incorrect code, that's hard to overcome. And finally, we can have correct driver and correct broker, but we can use the broker incorrectly. And a lot of different things may also go wrong. So we decided to contain all these horrible things in one place. Okay? A library and call this library asking calls. And that's another hard question. I have a cup for you. I won't be throwing it. I won't be throwing it. I'll walk. I'll deliver it by, you know, not by plane. Why asking calls? Okay? Don't answer. Don't answer. Don't answer. There's a cup for you. No, we don't use asking I.O. below. For some reasons. Okay. The reason is I just didn't want, I just wanted to give you the copy for you to try to answer because the answer is so strange that you didn't have a chance, okay? There's always this naming thing in computer science. Okay. So we wanted to create a library that meets our functional requirements. We wanted for developers, for this library to wherever possible resemble what they already saw, what they knew. And of course we wanted this asynchronous communication below. So whenever it's possible we wanted to join these three requirements.  One ring to roll them all. So yes, one place to fix all the bugs. Yeah? One place to change decisions. So it's much easier to change decisions. You don't have to trace it all over microservices implementation. Just one place. And if we need to apply good patterns, it's not just that we teach all these people how to use this like Kafka driver well. We just use it well in one place. And we don't have to change what we thought to people because it's harder than just updating the code. But you know, Sauron had to sell these rings somehow to the people. So how do we sell it to developers? There must be something for them in this. Yeah. They can put Kafka on the recipe. Yeah, sure. And not no Kafka because it's hidden. But they do. The complexity will be hidden. If we do a good abstraction above it, so they won't have to think about all difficult things related to it. And lower entry barrier. It's a way different communication than using HTTP. So let's try to do it this way. So the decisions we had to take were easier because they no longer were final. We were more comfortable with the thought that we will have to change these decisions at some point. The decisions were that we will choose Kafka as message broker, not surprisingly for performance reasons. And for performance, it offers just out of the box. And we will choose Confluent Kafka as a driver because the performance reasons. And we also hoped that something supported by Confluent will be really stable and well. Well, that's what we use. We wanted to make it just a library. No framework approach. No put everything inside. Just a communication library. Make it simple. If we need something more complicated, maybe we will put another library above it. So that was first thing. We wanted to make it testable. First, okay, this Kafka is nice. How do I see you to this Kafka? Well, you don't. You can't issue HTTP to Kafka queue. So how do I test it? We need to give people a way to ad hoc send something to just let them test their service. And we wanted to make it testable automatically. So we wanted to provide some reasonable mocks for unit testing to make implementing tests easier. And if possible, maybe we could make it resemble flask just to let developers easier, get used to the new approach. Okay. But it's like half of my time and I'm talking, talking, talking and it's developer conference. So I probably, that's what you think. Okay. So it's okay. I'm showing you the code. To use it. How do we use it? We create an object. Given the service name as a parameter, it's just an identifier of the service. It should be unique across your system. And when you have this object and you want to create a server endpoint, so an endpoint that will be asynchronously responding for some requests. So you just create a function and decorate it with call server callback for. The parameter for the callback is the name of the endpoint. It resembles HTTP endpoint, but it doesn't have to. This slash is not necessary there. Just a convention. This function will get the request object as a parameter. You can do it the request whatever you wish. And you can use this request object to create a response, more than one response. And each of these responses can be sent back and they will be delivered to whoever sent the original request. So you can send zero or more responses to a request. Well, to create, to send a request, so to, oh, that's about identification. That's an ID of the service and a address of the service and this is name of the endpoint. So you send the request to the service ID and a specific endpoint. You can have a lot of endpoints in a single service. To send a request, you use as in calls client to create new message that will be sent. There's a destination ID in this message, target endpoint, and of course a payload. Maybe some more things. And you send this request, but wait, it's all asynchronous. The sending is asynchronous. It is not blocking. So how do we get a response for this request? Now before we send the request, we should define a callback to handle response we expect. So we define a function this time that the creator is as in calls client, not as in calls server. And we define callback for the service that will be sending responses to us. That's the first name and the endpoint that will be queried and will respond to our queries. So we can handle response this way. So that's just about how you can use it. Of course, in the most basic approach, of course, the last thing you should do is you should start listening. In the client, in the server, actually, you can have client and server endpoints in a single service. So you can get some requests, send some responses to fulfill them, and then when you get the responses, you can respond to the original request. It's all feasible. So you just call the asynchronous listening at the end of your program and it will make as in calls receive messages, route them to correct callbacks. So what we have? We have server which is like HTTP server even driven, the callbacks we know from Flask, for example. We also have client which is not like an HTTP client because it's not blocking. It's asynchronous. You send the request and just nothing happens. You should have a callback to handle a response. So if your request requires query from another service, you get the request, you send the query to another service, and your process is not blocked by waiting for a response. It can actually serve another request, waiting for the response for the previous request. A single process can be a server and a client, of course, and we can handle one request and a number of responses. So we can have more than one response to the original request, but we also can have no response to original request. We can just send notifications this way and if the receiver expects just to handle the notifications, it's not a problem. You don't have to send a response. So, okay, now when I showed you the basics, I could talk a long time about different things and the details that are inside, but I just want to tell about one single, for me it's one of the most important things, how do you test it? Is there a way to easily test this as unit tests? So, yes, I think calls have a testing mode. You need to enable testing mode and you can use it in your unit tests. To enable testing mode, you just set the testing flag to true, then you import your application, which defines all these callbacks, and finally you must have a fixture that will reset the testing mode between the tests, because we need to clear some buffers. And when you have the testing mode enabled, you can start testing, okay? So we can have different, different use cases that we want to test. The most basic is we have a server endpoint and we want to check if it gives correct responses. So we want to send it a request and verify what responses we got, and if it's correct. The most basic thing. So we need a way to send a test request to an arbitrary service. We can do it using that, because if you turn on the testing mode, you get something which is showed here, it's test client. And you can use this test client to create arbitrary messages and to send these arbitrary messages wherever you want in your unit tests, okay? So that's how you send the request to a tested service. You send this request and when you send it, the test client will receive the responses for you. So when you send the request, you immediately can check what responses were received. And then you can just assert for correctness of these responses. So you don't have to think about this Kafka below, about messages or anything. You just send a request according to business rules and verify the response according to business rules. That's all. That's the simplest thing to do. The more complicated is when we have another service and we are testing the service in the middle, a money broker.  So we are testing the original, the money broker, but while testing it, we want to verify that correct notifications would be sent outside. Of course we don't want to spin out all the infrastructure. We want to have it mocked in our unit tests. We don't want such a communication. So we need a way to mock this other service just to verify what it would receive if it worked, if it really was really started. So aside from test client, I think because in testing mode gives you also a test server. So in this test server we can register an endpoint for this service we want to mock. It was called notification receiver. There was a notify endpoint. And this test server will just receive these messages for us and will allow us to retrieve these messages and check if correct messages were retrieved. So we register it, then we trigger the endpoint we want to test. We can do some assertions about responses as in the previous example. And we can use the test server received requests to obtain the requests that were received by the service. And the most complicated thing is when the third service is actually expected to respond to some queries and these responses should be used to generate the response we are testing. So we want to mock all the service together with its responses to produce, to check that correct output will be produced. So here we need to mock the random service. And to do it we just define a generator function. And when we register the endpoint in the test server we just give it the fake responses generator and it will generate responses and we will be able to verify that payload on the output are correct. It's correct. So we have testing tools out of the box. We discolve, in testing mode are made on stack so they are deterministic. The tests are deterministic. We don't need message cube broker. We don't have to think about how this IPC is actually done below. Just think about the business level in testing. We have also many more features like before and receive before send hooks like endpoint context managers if you want to measure how long performance of your end points so you can hook a context manager around this endpoint. We have error handlers for end points, kubernetes health check because we run it on kubernetes. We have sewer like client and a lot of more things. Of course if we hide some complexity we also hide some opportunities not only to make errors. So if you want Kafka streams for example so sorry we won't be able to deliver it because we hid this specific of Kafka below the abstractions. Okay so we still have can have these problems like concurrency issues we will have because we have asynchronous communication we won't run away from it but it's all for developers. It's all on the level of the business logic they are implementing. They don't have to think about Kafka usage pattern driver usage pattern and so on and if there are some problems below that they can be solved in one place and actually were solved in one place without bothering a lot of developers. So switching from HTTP to async calls for server is straightforward. It's not a problem for client it's a little bit more complicated. We support one way communication. If we use more complex use cases yes it's a matter of doing it well. We have callbacks so we always can have a callback hell but we also know that there are patterns to do it well. Okay so we can build something above it if we need. We have easily disabled services so because we have tools to do it and we have now a standard project white layer to make asynchronous communication between the services. Thank you. I have three more cups I won't be throwing it but please grab them and don't make me take them back by playing you know to my place. Any questions? We have time for a few questions. What are two maybe. Yeah thank you for a talk. An interesting thing is how to design exceptions and errors. How did you approach that? We have as I said we have exception handlers so you can register an exception handler for specific exceptions for all your service. So exception handler is a function that will be called when an exception in your end point occurs. Okay for the HTTP developers they don't see much of it of the Kafka specifics but there's like layer, your library layer between throwing specific errors. Exception handlers are for the exceptions that are going out of the callbacks. As for Kafka exceptions, well they shouldn't see them because we should debug the library if not we must fix it. Yeah like message length is fixed and stuff like that. You kind of have too much payload and stuff like that you need to abstract that. Actually you know because in message given communication the errors are handled in the different place rather on the level of receiver than the level of sender of the request. That's also the tricky thing to switch from HTTP. You don't have error 500 because your service is down. Your message is just waiting when the service is out after like ten minutes it will serve your request and maybe it will also send responses to you. Unfortunately that's all the time we have but maybe you can grab... I'm around so... One big round of applause. Thank you very much.


السلام عليك يا أبا عبد الله السلام عليك يبنى رسول الله السلام عليك يبنى أمير المؤمنين وابنى سيد الوسيد السلام عليك يبنى فاطمة سيدة نصا السلام عليك يا ثار الله وابنى ثاره الوترى الموتون السلام عليك وعلي حلت بفناء جميعا سلام الله أبدا ما بالمصيبة بك علينا ويبتك في السماوة للسماوات فلعنى الله أمة أسست أساس التي رتبكم الله لهم بتمكين من قطا وأشيار إنك وجيهم بالحسين عليهم السلام فد وبشأن الذي لكم عنده أن يعطي نيد مصابي بكم أفضل ما يعطي مصابا بمصيبة مصيبة ما جميع السماوة وماتيت به بلو منياه وابنى صلى الله عليه وموقف وغف فيه نبي صلى الله عليه أسقرب إليك سيدان الرجيم بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الحمد لله رب العالمين الحمد لله الذي هدانا لهذا وما كنا لنا احتدي لو لا ندان الله الحمد لله الذي أنزل الفرقان على عبده ليكون للعالمين نذيره الصلاة والسلام على أخير خلق ونور عرشي أفضل للأنبياء والمرسلين حبيبنا وسيدنا وسندنا وشفيعنا ومولانا أب القاس محمد وعلى آله الطيبين وطاهرين المأسمين والمغرومين أما بعد فقد قار الله سبحانه وتعالى في كتاب المجيل وخوله الحق وهو أستق الصادقين بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم الله سبحانه وتعالى يقول القرآن ووصينا الإنسان بوالده حملت أمه وهن على وهن وفصاله في عامين ينشكل ولي ووالده إلي المصير صدق الله العلي رضيم صلاة الله محمد وأهل محمد كل ما يبقى في الله وشكرا لك for granting us parents as you know parents are the closest means for you and I to recognize the mercy of Allah no one is closer to us in a practical way than our parents for Allah is the one who created us He is the one who shaped us He is the one who continues to feed us He is the one who continues to sustain us He is the one who has given us shape, form and beauty indeed we created mankind in the best of forms you and I are magnificent as a creation biped supine individuals intelligent capable of speaking intelligently and to be able to utilize all the resources in the universe for our benefits this is a unique gift and Allah being the beneficent the merciful His way of expressing that beneficence is through our parents it is our parents who become our ardent protectors and that is why we note that when we have to deal with orphans you will find that no group of children on earth are more abused than orphans because their parents are not there to protect them and as a result they tend to get abused parents when I deal with parents in school you see it in their eyes they have more passion for the well-being of their children than their selves and mothers especially are willing to give their hearts and their souls for the well-being of their children including the fathers and it's very very essential to understand that feeling that emotion is the greatest mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى even in the animal kingdom you will find among chickens you see that the mother when you go near the chicks the mother will come and snap at you and make sure that nobody touches her little ones because it's instinctually built within us that we need to be protected as children and Allah سبحانه وتعالى has made it very clear in the Quran بقضا ربك أن لا تعبد إلا إيا و بالوالدين إحسان in Surah Isra الله سبحانه وتعالى says و قضا ربك أن لا تعبد إلا إيا و بالوالدين إحسان verse number 23 17 23 إما يبلغن عندك الكبرة أو أحدهما أو كلاهما فلا تقول لهما أفهم ولا تنهرهما و قل لهما قولا كريمة الله سبحانه وتعالى و قفض لهما جنا حضر لمن الرحمة و قل ربي رب رحمهما كما رب يعاني صغيرة look how beautiful the verse is translation your Lord has commanded that you shall serve none other than Him this is the ayah of Tawheed و قضا ربك أن لا تعبد إلا إيا meaning Allah has commanded us that we must not do shirk only God is worthy of worship we must not associate anyone with Allah and I will talk about it briefly tonight the importance of maintaining the purity of Tawheed why is Tawheed so important and then Allah says and و قضا ربك أن لا تعبد إلا إيا و بالوالداني إحسات and this is the only verse in the Quran where Tawheed oneness of God is connected with obedience to parents and Allah says and goodness to your parents if either or both of them reach old age with you and you know when parents reach old age we tend to become very irritated with them because they are demanding more time from us and in our busy lives we feel that they become a burden forgetting that when we were children burdening them they gave up everything for us but we feel entitled as children that yes our parents should only be serving us when in fact our obligation is to serve them Allah says when they reach old age don't even say أف is the shortest word in Arabic don't say that and don't try them and speak with them a generous word قولا كريمة generous kind words very difficult I must say it's very difficult and Allah says make yourself submissively gentle to them with compassion and read the following prayer my lord have compassion on them كما رب يعني صغيرة have compassion on them as they brought me up when I was little this is a universal verse in the Quran and we need to understand that when we want to worship Allah if we do not respect our parents all our mention of Allah is nullified meaning to worship Allah to go to the masjid and to pray and to be disrespectful or disobedient or neglectful towards our parents is tent amount to doing nothing it's like a creature with no head when we pray to Allah people ask me this question people who say we stop praying let me touch on this this prayer is gratitude many times we ask children why do you pray they say if I don't pray I'm going to go to hell this is how we teach our children son, daughter make sure you pray if you don't pray you will burn in hell this child is trembling I don't want to go to hell so when you ask them why do you pray I don't want to go to hell that fear is only for reckless careless human beings you know in English the ones who challenge authority the ones who don't care about right vs wrong the reckless individual who is damaging society that's the one you threaten with fear that if you don't this will happen the way Imam Hussein was putting fear into the army of Yazid for they were misbehaving but among believers we don't need to use such verses although fear is there let's invite our children with love so that when we go to pray it's not because I'm avoiding hell I go to pray because I'm grateful to Allah I have gratitude I am thankful and the principle of thankfulness is universal when Allah says you know that He has enjoined upon mankind right mankind is a universal principle kindness to parents is a universal principle it is indicative of true essence of faith for if you and I claim to love Allah you and I claim to love anyone if we do not show respect and love for our parents then all the love we give out is fake it's false because it's misconnected for there are very root of love that taught us how to love from Allah through the Prophet and through our parents and if we do not understand the very hands that raised us and if we do not understand that there is no way you and I will ever understand what is the mercy of Allah we find that we have to respect so I ask children kids come and ask me brother why do you pray I said you must thank Allah there is not a moment upon which Allah if He did not allow its enablement I would not have been able to do it it's impossible not a leaf falls from the tree without His permission it is He who manages the affairs of the universe and it is due to His mercy when we ask the question why do we pray it's gratitude the outcome of prayer when you and I indulge in gratitude we become good people and when we become good people it means we avoid the haram when we avoid the haram it's just natural to be good we have واجب حرام واجب and haram are the two most important and of the two haram is more important than wajib from the perspective of keeping away from the filth for when you keep away from haram wajib becomes very easy so when Allah says what prayer does is while I am grateful while I am grateful I am no longer depressed while I am grateful I am no longer cursing while I am damming while I am grateful I am no longer complaining nor am I damaging myself so when Allah says صلاة keeps you away from wrong doing evil what it does is it makes me a happy individual when I talked about guided meditation many people showed interest in that meditation it's part of Islam the prophet is to meditate frequently there are ways and means by which to meditate amazingly but meditation with understanding particularly through the Quran where when you meditate and you reflect on the Quran you see when you think of the verse and why the verses constructed the way it is it is an Alexa as we say it touches the heart in a cathartic way and it takes the evilness away from us it takes the pressure away from us it takes the depression وننزل من القرآن ما هو شفاء ورحمة للمؤمنين ولا يزيد الظالمين إلا خسارة الله سبحانه وتعالى what we have revealed he is an Alexa reflect, meditate so when you are thinking and being grateful that when you are sitting standing and lying on your side and thinking why the universe exists and you look around and see the beauty of the human race and be grateful that somebody is looking at you be grateful there is somebody around you be grateful that there is somebody who is breathing next to you be grateful there is a society you know how gregarious and social we are we become very depressed when we are alone solitary confinement in prison is one of the worst punishments because you have no social environment you don't have anybody to interact with we humans are highly social do we appreciate that do we sit around and say thank God there are humans thank God there are a variety of humans gratitude so I asked children I said when somebody comes on your door and knocks on your door and you open it and they have a beautiful gift with no strings attached something you really wanted something you were thinking about that you couldn't have but somebody brought it to you I asked all human beings this question not Muslims all human beings and you open up this gift and by the way do you notice a surprise factor of gifts it's a very interesting conversation about the unknown we are afraid of death we're afraid of tomorrow but we love not knowing what's in the gift we're funny creatures aren't we we love it when we don't know the surprise factor of a birthday gift is so exciting why aren't we having the same excitement about tomorrow and the day of judgment because we don't believe in it it's amazing when you have a gift I don't know what it is are you surprised I'm excited you don't know what it is I know but I'm excited okay you don't know tomorrow you should be excited you don't know the day of judgment be excited no no no that's a I'm afraid of that day I'm running away see there's a difference but when a gift comes to us and we don't know what it is we love it then you open it up and say oh my god this is exactly what I wanted now what's the protocol ask anyone who's got any sense in their head what's the protocol thank you and what's the protocol about thank you how quickly should you say thank you imagine somebody brings a gift to you and you open it up oh very nice very nice you take it away you take the box you shut the door on the person oh it was awesome thank you you know every 30 every second you wait in thanking for the gift you're belittling the act of the gift do you notice that somebody gives you a gift and said nice oh thank you oh you didn't like the gift why I loved it it took you a few seconds to say thank you imagine Salah when Allah has laid times by which you and I should be grateful and grateful for what He has given us we want to delay it is it important another 10 minutes another hour so basically we're saying to Allah your gift of life your gift of air your gift of breath your gift of health wealth everything children family you know what it's okay it can wait when we tell our children this oh you're so right now when this prayer become when does it become very pleasurable when you and I account for the gifts given to us because when somebody sends you a gift you never imagine possible you keep sending the message oh by the way I just can't stop thanking you oh my god that gift was amazing today Salah just by the way thank you so much for that I really the guy says thank you you've told me thank you no no it was an amazing gift I cannot stop thanking you no اللهم سلط إبراهيم وإذ تأذن ربكم لإن شكرتهم لأزيدانكم ولإن كفرتهم إن عذاب الأشديد we made a calling on you oh people that if you are grateful we will give you more you find psychologists have studied human behavior in stating that when human beings are grateful they have less tension less depression they are more vibrant they live longer they are happier they look deeper into their lives these are all processes of meditation reflection appreciation by which when I look around and say thank you الحمد لله الذي هدانا لي هادا هادا من فضلي ربي الحمد لله when you drive your car say بسم الله when you get in the car when you reach your point الحمد لله I arrive safe when the 80 there was all just chance no it wasn't chance there was divine intervention in my driving for how do I know that when I got delayed in that traffic it wasn't because Allah was averting me from greater tragedy how do you know the 80 says ohh that's just all probability probability doesn't work except in structure and order please understand that pure randomness does not exist in the universe إنه مجموعة ومجموعة لا يوجد such a thing as pure randomness إنه مجموعة يوجد randomness within structure within a frame that allows random things to move The structure is essential for randomness to work أي one who knows mathematics will tell you it's absurd to have pure probability even Roger Penrose who is a world class mathematician says the probability of anything happening in pure probability is zero it doesn't exist so the idea that you and I existed out of pure chance is nothing short of insanity so when we drive and when we pray and when we do things and when things do come our way we should be grateful not to say oh it was expected you know that's how nature works anyway but the irony of the human being is that when something goes wrong suddenly God becomes very prevalent when the tsunami took place in Indonesia and I had friends of mine telling me where was God to stop that a loving God I said before the tsunami it was sunny and you guys were sipping your nice juices to say where was God then then there was no God Allah said فلما نجاهم للبر فمنهم مقفصد وما يجهد بي آياتنا إلا كل خطار إن كفور when the waves cover them and they're about to drown they turn to God مخلصين الله الدين سنسيلي say oh God oh my God please before there was no God what God there is no God it's all probability it's all chance everything's happening out of chance oh yeah and then when you're about to fall or your plane is about to crash oh my God oh my God even the atheist says oh my God excuse me there is no God سلام عليكم you find that وَيَدَغَشِهُمْ مَوْجُونَ oh they turn to God and Allah says when I send them back to shore I was just chance it was that wave you know it took me الله says really you think that was a God God took me there I don't know you think so maybe not Shaytan puts his whispering in our ears said no you don't believe in that do you how do you know God did that this is the difference in Iman and Iman not in blind faith rational, logical negate this it's absurd the idea of a non-being where this universe is functioning without direction is absolutely insane it's impossible mathematically psychologically physiologically impossible and I'm saying this without any hesitation so please don't let it even feed into our minds because I'm telling you from a rational perspective logical philosophical perspective the very notion of proposing such ideas is totally false it's built on false assumptions which leads people to false ideologies so Allah is saying when you come to pray understand that even the تقبير you just did if I didn't allow you to do this you know this I'm doing right now I have no idea how I'm doing this just you know it I know it you know I just moved my hands here even when I'm speaking I'm speaking I said there was a very tall mountain you know I don't know how I'm doing this الله says علمه البيان we taught you how to do this الله says when children start to babble their first syllable you know they start making بابا جا جا you went and turned the switch on in a child parents are recording please amazing first word from the baby الله says I programmed this child are you excited oh my baby is talking isn't it beautiful الله says I did that are you grateful you think this is chance you think this is probability try it the probability of such things to happen are you kidding me we study molecular science if you have an iota of a mistake in the way the DNA replicates itself an iota it goes wacko and it aborts this is we get disappointed الله says millions and millions if you are born in the billions of societies who do you think manufactures this and look at every one of you that not a single one of you even though your DNA is identical not a single one of yours fingerprints are the same الله says banana all the way to your fingertips we have perfected you are we grateful for that قل هو الذي انشعك وجعل لكم السمعة والأبصارة والأفئدة قليلا قليلا ما تشكورون little you are grateful why because we say it's chance it's this wrong when you and I do that our body starts to become a complainer he's seeing the glass as half empty and the minute we live a life of half emptiness and this is common sense when human beings look at a glass that has water filled half you can see it as half full or half empty the choice is yours الله says if you see it as half empty your mind will create attitudes that's all half empty you will complain you will find reasons you will become reckless you will become rude you will become harsh and you will become disappointed and you will become unhappy and you will indulge in drugs and you may even kill yourself why because that's the only way God has created الله is so merciful that he said you have two options either you spiral into the eternal abyss of negative through negations or you rise up to the occasion and you accept its true reality and rise up to its true realities our obligation brothers and sisters as I mentioned the other day is Allah created us for paradise Allah did not create us for hell while hell awaits us if we wanted it is not where we are destined to be the question is not that the question you might be thinking oh well if I've been created for paradise then it's fine no matter what I do no there are levels of paradise there are low levels of paradise and there are very high stations in paradise Allah in the Quran talks about high stations called مقام محمود Allah says if you do Salatul Layl maybe we will grant you مقام محمود a great position in paradise where صادقون الصادقون shall enter it the foremost of the foremost now you and I should be thinking fantasizing and appreciating God for all that he has given us in Salah going happily ever ready to say thank you thank you how many times can I say thank you to my Lord I'd like to raise my hand a thousand times I want to thank you because everything around me is so beautiful I want to thank you if you and I pause at that thought then you and I will want to do good you and I will avoid evil you and I will say no I don't want to be impure you and I will look at all the values of life and you and I will practice patience for barrens love compassion giving forgiving because the natural body propensity is that the minute you and I see positive things and we're happy on that day we find it very difficult to complain صلى الله عليه وسلم you know if you ever got very good news let's say today you just won 100 million dollars and the bags of money just came and it's sitting in your room and you're counting it there's just material you know and somebody says hey there's somebody talking bad about you you say oh yeah no problem leave me alone I'm busy oh somebody's back biting you I don't care I'm so happy right now this thing that I've been waiting for right just imagine something you wanted you have it you notice that the minute you're grateful about it and you're basking in its glory you find that having negative thoughts becomes very difficult when you and I look around and see the grace and mercy of Allah سبحانه وتعالى you will find our tensions will go down our angers will go down our gratitudes will increase and if you and I can predict knowing that every one of us is going to die and if we can see each other potentially dead tomorrow then you and I will never be harsh with each other Allah says this is what Luqman the last verse Allah says indeed the knowledge of time is with Allah إن الله عند العلم الصعب وينزل الغيث He's the one who brings rain down ويعلم ما في الارهام He knows what lies in the wombs of the mothers their future, their destiny entirely everything وما تدري نفس الماذا تكسب غدا no self knows what they will earn tomorrow what will you send tomorrow no one knows yes Allah says you see تقل الله or you believe be God conscious and be aware acutely aware of what you send tomorrow but Allah says no one knows the outcome of tomorrow you know nobody knows ماذا تكسب غدا وما تدري نفس and no self knows on which land they will die وما تدري نفس وما تدري you and I may plan that my grave is here and we may die somewhere else today we have the luxury of shipping bodies to other parts of the world but in the olden days forget it you die you're buried right there you're not taken anywhere Allah says the whole earth is your platform so Allah says be grateful for if you examine what I have given you and what I am sending for you for tomorrow plan it think about it stand up to it and when you evaluate it our lives become much happier so when we are grateful and we indulge in gratitude and we refuse to complain neuroscientists have studied that when we complain we actually create neural pathways with glial cells in our brains that becomes a pathway of pleasure to complain there are people who have become persistent complainers because they've developed so much complaining we need to eradicate this complaining and say no from now onwards I'm always going to see in the glass as half full there's that joke of a man who used to in 80's would put food on the man's door the man would look at the food he would take it and say oh thank God second time he puts thank God third time thank God he says it was God it was me the man looks and says thank God there's an 80's like you to feed me صلاة الله محمد والمحمد you can't beat it always look at the bright side always Allah says عصان تكره شيئا ووخير لكم وعصان تحبه شيئا ووشر لكم that which you don't like and it happens could be good for you and that which you like could be bad for you why don't you turn it to Allah and say my lord you make it right I will talk about this tomorrow Insha'Allah if time permits the the companions of the cave Allah says أم حسبت أن أصحاب الكهف والرقيم كانوا من آياتنا عجب إذ أول فتية إلى الكهف فقالوا ربنا آتنا من لدنك رحمة وهي يقلنا من أمرنا يقلنا دعا دعا رائع كيف often we've ignored it we haven't even looked at it the sentence structure is magnificent the story is magnificent in سرط الكهف الله says have you not considered أم حسبت أن أصحاب الكهف والرقيم the companions of the cave and their inscription this was an incredible miracle آياتنا عجب عجيب مميز what happened it's when those youth were in the cave إذ أول فتية إلى الكهف فقالوا they prayed our lord give us from your treasury من لدنك رحمة give it because they are positive they are not complainers they are full of gratitude they are full of grace آتنا two prayers two I'll talk about it إن شاء الله how to pray when Imam Hussein is going towards Yazeev if you listen to his dua my God I wish there was time to talk about it where his prayer is nothing but Allah he is talking to Allah you ردام بقضا وتسلي من لأمري I trust you well I have trust in you قل هو الرحمن وأامن به وعليه توكلنا فستعلمون من هو في ظلال المبن Imam Hussein is really دوار my God he is teaching me 14 centuries later حسنين you have a problem you cannot your problem can't equal mine in a thousand years it can't equal my problem and look how I am praying look how grateful I am look how much I am in pleasure of God Imam Hussein these are the youth of the cave Allah says do you know what I did for them they prayed to me أدعوني أستجب لكم don't doubt this please I have lived in my life where I've been cornered put on the edge even my life threatened and you are trembling and there's nothing that comes in my mind then أمير المؤمنين the Holy Prophet أمير المؤمنين Imam Hussein and he's saying hold on Allah is testing you wait and around the corner the most amazing things happen so amazing impossible to achieve impossible but Allah says if you are patient and you wait and you trust me you will be amazed what you will conquer in this world there is a story to be told about Yousuf A.S it's so much these are all universities of conversations which I can't go deep into their conversations tonight or some other nights but we'll try to get a touch get a feel of this incredible ocean of mercy of God that you and I should have no excuse to be depressed you and I should have no excuse to be angry we all get angry believe me the days I get angry in my foolishness immediately I realize oh I forgot you Allah that's why I got angry for if I remember you I just can't get angry but the day I forget you I easily get angry I get irritated I you know burst into anger and then I stop and I say how foolish of me how foolish of me I forgot you Allah says when you remember me you will become you understand I am your source of gratitude I am your source of mercy hold on to me that even if the world is tabbing you even if the world is throwing arrows at you you will hold it with dignity and valor the way the people of Karbala did it when they used to charge in front of the enemies and they used to recite poetry with pride and say we are here sons of fulan bin fulan and this is how we fight the enemy was stunned why because they were grateful full of gratitude deep in thought so when you and I understand this the companions of the cave they prayed to Allah they were youth to be killed by Trajan who was what we call an emperor of Rome Byzantium emperor and he said if you don't worship me as your God I'll kill you they said kill us we say we say we say we say we say we say and Isa is the messenger of God he said I will kill you they said kill us he said I'll crucify you do it but they prayed to God O our Lord you give us from your infinite treasury و هي لنا من أمرنا رشد and make our affairs right we don't know we think we're smart we think maybe that pathway is right maybe that pathway is right maybe this pathway is right I don't know I say Allah guide me take me where you think is good see I'll crucify you leave it to Allah so Allah says look what I did for them I took them into a cave and put them to sleep for 300 solar years 309 lunar years amazing isn't it they were wondering how this tyrant who was so powerful who was so powerful that you could not escape his clutches how is he going to die and turn to dust Allah said watch I'll show it to you for time is a minuscule moment إنه الإنسان لفي خسر by time man is at a loss and time moves so quickly Quran addresses it beautifully no time to discuss it but understand it for now and 300 years later they wake up they think they're stuck for one day they go down to collect food حلال طيبا رسخ طيبا they're going to eat pure food they find that their coins are outdated three centuries that's how many that's six generations forward wow and now the leader is coming he's younger than his great-great-great-great-grandfather amazing how did you do this Allah says they prayed for me they prayed for me to give them something آتِنَ مِلَدُنْكَ رَحْمَا وَهَيَّئِ لَنَا وِنَا مِرِنَ رَشَدَا they asked me they were grateful they were willing to stand up against tyranny they did not sell their souls to the devil look what I did for them do you think I won't do this for you if you ask the companions of the cave before they were about to be crucified what is your wish never under the sky would they have prayed to go to sleep for 300 years never under the sky would it even cross their minds to be able to ask for that but Allah says when you ask for me my treasury is infinite and I will give you things unimaginable but when you achieve them the world will be wondering how did you get it Allah said just ask me وَإِذَا سَأْلَكَ عِبَالِ يَعْنِي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبُ أُجِيبُوا دَعْوَةَ الدَّاعِدَا دَعَانَ فَلْيَا استَجِيبُوا لِي then answer me Allah says you believe in me do you trust me or do you have have-heartedness believe here it's subservience to our parents when I've seen atheists who are honest to their parents and I've seen believers who are rough and crude to their parents I said that atheists is better than this one but this one believes in Allah what believe in Allah if he doesn't practice it that the very hand that raised this child is the one who I was condemning this parent this is not ibadah this is not iman for that one who doesn't believe in God maybe has not understood God but at least his actions are conducive to the command of Allah in the Quran but you find ourselves many a times I ask us all at home go hug our parents look at them my parents are here I look at them every once in a while I'll observe them I'll look at their hair I'll look at their skin I'll look at my father's hair and then I will sit and I'll memorize that hair when that piece of hair will be priceless but we're gonna hold it in our pocket that it's my father's hair but why when he was alive you didn't hug him why was he when he was alive you didn't but you're not nice to him you know I've seen some people say this is my aunt's spectacles when she died and there's a small piece oh don't touch it it's precious I said how precious is that hair oh it's the hair of that person I love that's my way of loving the person I touch the hair so why when they were alive you didn't hug them you think no no they're gonna go when we shake hands with each other when we hug each other how do you and I know that we will be alive tonight when we say salam to each other I've had situations where I've said salam to people and then I hear by the way that brother who said salam to you he just died today really I just met him this morning yeah he's gone what are you gonna go to the grave and cry for them are you gonna say forgive me and then when we go to the grave we put on a somber face oh we do five takbir you know in Salatul Mayit so all my bare witnesses was a good person were you were we or did we backbite did we fault find did we find reasons to belittle them why can't we be nice to them before they leave Allah says you don't know in which land you're gonna die why don't you be grateful why don't you love humanity why don't you forgive why wait for them to die and then you ask for forgiveness why not ask for it now Allah says means hasten run don't walk forgive them you know what أستخفار is غفرة has many meanings two main meanings one ask for forgiveness second meaning ask for protection when prophets ask for أستخفار in the Quran in their hearts they ask for forgiveness but the real prayer is asking Allah to protect them for they make no mistakes but they still think they are mistaken because they are so humble in front of Allah that though they are perfect in their actions they are still asking for Allah's forgiveness just like we say أف one they've actually pardon me forgive me excuse me I'm gonna ask you a question forgive me you say forgive you for what you haven't made a mistake no no what I mean is if I do don't punish me or protect me from that mistake oh I see this is Quran أستخفار in the Quran is that and the Holy Prophet was asked what is this life he says the distance between two sujuds two sujuds what do you mean you know yesterday I mentioned منها خلقناكم وفيها نعيدكم ومنها نخرجكم تارة نخرى from it you were created to it you will return and from it you will be raised the Prophet said the distance between the first sujud and second sujud is this life so you were born from the earth you live on earth and you go into sujud and you die and on judgment day Allah will raise you so every time you and I pray while we are grateful and full of gratitude and you are thinking I have this body I have the wealth I have the health don't think of negatives and by the way when Allah says take something away from you something you love say it's a gratefulness thank you my lord for testing me with that for there is no value but you and if you are going to take everything away from me you just don't take away yourself I am cave I can bear the heat of hell but I cannot bear the separation from you oh Allah if you were to cast me in hell Imam says I will bear it but my separation from you I cannot bear now when you and I go and pray with that kind of gratitude the body just resonates positively you go into ruku you go into sujud and you are enjoying it it's full of meaning so it's imperative for us that while we are grateful and you are thinking that I have parents I have a society if you have children I have children I have a spouse I have all of this and you are doing Alhamdulillah رب العالمين الرحمن and you are praying and you are looking towards the Kaaba and you are saying thank you my lord thank you thank you thank you I can't thank you enough now when you get into sujud sujud is the ultimate you know ruku is permission to go to sujud when you get into sujud سبحان رب العلا when you have lowered your head it is the ultimate position of gratitude and you know what's amazing about Salah Muslims only pray you don't have to tell anybody you're praying because every act in prayer is universally understood it's a prayer when you do khunut when you do ruku when you do sujud even a non-believer will know you are praying for that's the beauty of the action of a believer that when we pray but you know what's beautiful is when others watch us being grateful we are also inspiring them to be grateful on an airline one time on British Airways we were on the upper deck and we asked to pray so they were sure three flight attendants they laid the carpet I mean you know the cloth for us in the back and they said go and pray I said Alhamdulillah I asked my mother she said if this plane is flying who do you think is causing it to fly you the pilot no it's Allah it's prayer time time to pray and you know the most beautiful part of that prayer was my parents came out I was next and as I'm walking these three flight attendants are sitting there non-Muslims I just looked at them I said thank you for giving me this opportunity they said no no sir the honor is ours please you pray for us too you know how beautiful that is even my roommate who when I went to the university saw me praying the first time he observed me and then he was so impressed with it for the rest of his life until today he has not stopped speaking that that day I saw you praying and in the university you always used to pray I honored you so much I call you my teacher I said really I just prayed he said you have no idea how good I feel when you pray I told him I think you will feel better if you pray but that's a secondary matter parents let me read some hadith the prophet has stated some amazing hadith the holy prophet said read Allah في رد الوالدين وَسَخَتُوا فِي سَخَتِهِمَا think about it how important it is the prophet said the pleasure of Allah lies in the pleasure of your parents if one's parents if your parents are happy with you then Allah is happy with you think about it you want Allah's pleasure get your parents pleasure very important read Allah Allah says and the wrath the wrath in other words the wrath of Allah lies in the wrath his wrath lies in their wrath meaning when parents are angry Allah is disappointed so parents happiness is connected with our happiness think about it very important another Imam Jaffa Sadik says the best deeds are the following he says عمل الصلاة للوقتها وبر الوالدين think about it he says the best deeds are punctual prayer kindness to parents and contributing to the path of Allah meaning spending to promote the way of Allah سبحانه وتعالى three things very important punctual prayer kindness to parents you find that this value is exemplified in the Quran in all directions another Hadith I will say Imam Jaffa Sadik says he who wishes Allah the glorious to lighten the agonies of death سكرات الموت when you and I get into that pain of death when death is imminent upon us and if we are now having difficulty leaving this world Imam Sadik says he says he should have regard for his kinship and treat his parents with goodness then when a person does so Allah will make the agonies of death easy for him or her and he will not be stricken by poverty in life at all this is how important it is today we live in a world where our children abused parents parents abused children why we have disregard for each other sibling rivalry brothers and sisters fight brothers and brothers fight do you know why we fight it's sad but it's true we fight because you can't get rid of them how do you get rid of your parents they are always your parents no matter what you do your parents are always your parents shaitan whispers into you yeah even if you abuse them they still love you so kick them curse them smack them get angry don't obey them they will still love you anyway shaitan is whispering اصواصو خناص brothers too I see some brothers battered I said who's battering you oh my bigger brother stop this is your brother I've seen brothers punch their brothers I'm just teaching them how to be tough I said how come you're so gentle with your friends you know when your friends come yeah it's not like how are you it's my friend this is a friend who will leave you tonight yeah but it's my friend very precious but that's your mother yeah but she's always here my brother's always here I can't get rid of her get rid of my sister somebody will say I hate my sister I said don't say that oh I hate my sister she's always asking for stop I said if your sister gets ill and one hair in her body is hurt what do you think you will do will you go visit in the hospital oh yes I said then stop speaking this way and start nurturing this way and start loving this way for the gift God has given you which he cannot take away from me due to his mercy he's the one you should respect the most not the other way around but we do that where our friends become precious we cheat we lie to our parents just to keep our friends happy when our friends if you ask me when I grew up some of my friends were the most important people to me in my life as a teenager sometimes I would not speak the truth to my parents just to keep my friends happy you know what's the irony also sometimes friends will insult their parents in front of them just to let them know look how cool I am you know I had a boy who was training in tennis he was training me in martial arts and I was training him in tennis one time I went to his house and he was rude to his father not a Muslim and he was very harsh to his dad his father is a gentleman and he's calling him he says I don't have time for you right now don't bother me I was very disturbed now it made me realize oh my God I shouldn't be like this to my parents either as a teenager we were teenagers but he dawned on me something about it just bothered me so we came out of a tennis game and we were in a diner having a drink you know shakes and I said Clifford if I ask you if I tell you that your father just died how would you feel he stopped drinking he looked at me he said you're joking right I said what if I was not joking how would you feel please tell me he said I'd feel horrible I said when you were home you were so rude to him like as if you wish he was dead so why are you saying this now he said that's impossible that thought cannot cross my mind I said no I want you to think of that I want you to think of that that maybe your father won't be alive tonight what will you do you'll go to his grave now and ask him for forgiveness he looked at me I said no your father is not dead that's all I said we left two days later the father calls me frantic on the phone he says what have you done to my son I said what do you mean he says I can't get this son out of my face he's standing by my door he says dad can I do something for you can I take the trash can for you I love you dad he keeps hugging me this is not my son I said this is my religion he says you must have done something I said my religion taught me this my prophet taught me this my Quran taught me this وقضا ربك الله تعبضو إلا إيا و بالوالدين إحسانة love for parents that boy until today is married has children his father always says my son respects me so much that one moment of thought of accountability that's death that's death which is pending upon us which Allah can take this mercy away from us any second if you and I are neglectful of it and we do not care for it then maybe we will become losers forever this is exactly how shaytan wants us to think to say it's okay abuse them it's okay we can use them again because they'll come back to us you have no idea there's a really sad story of a mother in Michigan who said to her son I love you too much the son would disobey the mother the mother said you are my only son my husband is dead you are my only son he's a teenager boy his friends were so important to him and he went out jumped off the window and went with his friends to the club mother said don't go recklessness this is a society today if you look at the movies that are designed in Hollywood today they are designed this way they don't teach us morals they don't teach us values on how to love our parents if you watch majority of the movies they are not designed to teach us high morals in the world today we are just all a liability where we are rude and harsh and crude only to appear cool in front of people the police knocks on the door at four hours later and says is this your son she said my son is upstairs sleeping she said no ma'am is this your son she said yes she says we are sorry to let you know your son is dead he got into a car accident and got killed that night now tell me how his friends some of them survived and they are crying today regretting how long will you regret Shaytan says I got you how long will you regret why not preempt before you regret why not take the right action before it hits you hard isn't that the beauty of life they catch it early for Islam the beauty of Islam is prevention is better than cure better than cure these nights of Karbala when we read when we wonder why the children why the adults why Imam Hussein why his family were there why were they not indulging in the worldly pleasures why were they willing to give it all up my God it's that sacrifice that has brought us to this level of modesty and decency and deen for if Imam Hussein didn't go to Karbala you and I would have had a carcass of religion that is why the prophet said Husaynu minni و أنا من الحسين حسين is from me and I am from Hussain why I the prophet said he will save the deen I brought he will save the deen that I perfected for if not for his blood my religion would have been tattered like the other religions he has kept it intact and you will continue to make it grow that it will become the most powerful force in the world today and you will see the justice on earth which is around the corner and the tyrants will be crushed soon it is through the blood of Imam Hussein peace and blessings of Allah peace and blessings of Muhammad peace and blessings of Muhammad In conclusion my brothers you and I when we are gratified we are full of gratitude and we are grateful and we look at our parents we honor them when our parents look at their children said this is my barakah this is my child and we hold them with compassion and love and we know that this child and these parents and this society يكون في جرسيناك مجرد من مجرده فكذلك ستكون أمامك لكن لا أخيه و أخيه مبارك، ما أنك و أمانك يقول كل من of us يبقى لله لهو ملك السماوات والأرض كل شيء في السقايا في العالم يبقى له أماننا، أماننا أماننا كل شيء يبقى لله و الله يريد أن يتعجبنا هل تؤمنين فيي؟ maybe I will take it away from you that love one maybe I will take it away if you ever want to have firm faith hold on to Allah and move forward now you will see you will become a loving being and in games and in losses you will be neutral you will not go crazy in losses nor will you become extremely ecstatic in games you will know that every single day is the barakah of Allah this is how our imams were إمام السلام on Kufa when he was going towards Kufa the people of Kufa were unpredictable إمام says doesn't matter فرزدك says their tongues are for you but their swords are towards your neck إمام says doesn't matter we are going towards our destiny the world is upon us our obligation is to guide them whether they embrace us or they kill us it doesn't matter that level of certainty the way ashab al-kaaf were historians said that إمام السلام before his head was cut he was saying he was reading these verses as you know he was the Quran and natif talking Quran and he was reciting meaning meaning that I understand when you and I want Shahada to really understand the way الليل أكبر who was a teenager who loved Allah who was the son of إمام السلام his mother was Layla you find that she was a prominent figure but you find that Shahada that love of Shahada doesn't come until you've evaluated everything around you you know the value of humans you know the value of wealth you know the value of power you know the value of everything as the إمام is going towards Karbala and إمام is in a swoon إلي أكبر is next to him إلي أكبر as you know was about 18 years of age 19 years of age young and إمام says إنا لله وإنا إليه راجعون so إلي أكبر says بابا what have you seen he said when I closed my eyes I saw the prophet and the prophet told me you are coming to me soon your day is numbered be ready oh Hussein oh my grandson be ready your day is numbered so إمام looks at إلي أكبر says my son what do you think what do you think of that we are going towards our massacre we are going to be butchered a son looking at his father honestly in history if you and I were riding a horse knowing we were going to get butchered all our love and desires of the world would distract us you find a highly focused child who looks at his father he says بابا are we not in Haqq are we not in the truth do we not follow the truth and the father said yes of course إلي أكبر said then بابا let us proceed for if that is our destiny then let us go إمام says how blessed I am to have a son like you you know when إلي أكبر on the day of عشورة by the way he was the first one among the بانوهاش him to go and become martyred إلي أكبر was the first one إمام was saying son was the first one to go as you know إمام زين العبيدين was present but he was ill and إمام did not allow him to lift the sword إلي أكبر represented إمام حسين and the first one to go forward فجر time عشورة أمر إبن صاعد gets the letter from إبن زياد get the allegiance of حسين or give up or give up this authority to شمر إبن صاعد wanted to out do everybody so he takes the arrow and he screams he said observe I أمر إبن صاعد بنبي وقاص I am the first one to send this arrow to start the war for إمام السلام says حرام to start the war of جيهد until the enemy hits you إمام was so careful that شمر one time comes in the back of the tents while the إمام is digging a moat for he put fire in the back so they should not get attacked and he says حسين so you are now preparing yourself to go to hell taunting him مسلم بن أوسجا was present he became furious he noticed this indecent attitude this arrogant attitude cannot be tolerated the rage of Muslim became uncontrollable he put his hand on the hilt and he's ready to pull his sword out to strike شمر إمام looks at him puts his hand on his hand doesn't don't do that look at how perfect the إمام was that while he's being insulted he's telling مسلم بن أوسجا don't pull the sword out we are not here to start a war we're here to present peace we're here to bring harmony we are Muslims we are promoters of peace we do not start wars we end them that's how perfect إمام was so you find that أماري بن ساد throws the arrow and the war starts at fajr before fajr as you know إمام السلام wakes up and he says to Ali Akbar or Ali Akbar recite Agan for Salat al Fajr now historians say that the voice the face the demeanor of Ali Akbar was a carbon copy the holy prophet إمام السلام looks in the sky when Ali Akbar comes to him he says my father give me permission to go and fight now it's my time he looks up he says my Lord bear witness that when we want to think of the prophet and when we want to hear the prophet and when we want to hug the prophet when we want to see the prophet we look at this beautiful boy Ali Akbar for he is a carbon copy of the prophet his look his demeanor so إمام says to him you recite Agan and he recites Agan can you imagine a father knowing that this son who is going to die very shortly right before him that level of strength is unprecedented in history and you find Ali Akbar I mean recites Agan إمام السلام leads the prayers the war starts the battle starts the companions have been killed it's time for Ali Akbar he goes to his aunt Zaynab Zaynab hugs him she hugs him says my nephew you're going to leave he said I've come to ask for permission she gives him permission he goes to إمام her saying إمام looks up in the sky he said I complain oh Allah to these evil people for they are taking the apple of my eye away from me إمام takes his son and he helps him climb up on the horse you know Ali Akbar by the way they say has as much as Abbas he was an incredible warrior he was trained by Abbas Ali Akbar was trained was a very good fighter but the إمام helps him get on the horse I want us to embed that image of a man who is sacrificing his most beloved precious ornament on earth his son but his son was so kind to him so loving raised with such beauty the way إسمايل was to إبراهيم you know إبراهيم can see his son was born when he was very old and Allah said to him look at this child I'm going to ask you as a trial upon you to see if you can sacrifice but even إبراهيم closed his eyes إمام إسمايل puts his son up and as the horse is moving slightly إمام is following him and as the horse goes forward إمام is still following the horse Ali Akbar pulls the reins and said Baba why are you following me he said if only you knew what it means to be a father look at you my son who's not going to come back he says I am thirsty you are thirsty let me quench your tongue إمام puts his tongue on Ali Akbar it's too dry there is nothing to keep Ali Akbar gets back on his horse and he goes to fight he's watching this and Murrah takes a spear and lodges it into his chest deep into his chest and he cracks his ribs and Ali Akbar falls he says please be upon you my father and he falls off his horse إمام charges towards his son puts his hand on his head lifts him up and he sees this spear جابل and deep lodged into his heart Ali Akbar puts his hand on his chest and he goes ارجي إلى ربك رالية مرضية فدخلي في عباد ودخلي جنة اللهم إننا نرغبوا إليك في دولة إنك إليك في دولة إنك تعزبها الإسلام وأهلا وتضل بها النفاق وأهلا وتجعلنا فيها من الدعاة لا تعاتك والقادة لا سبيلك وترزقنا بها كرامة الدنيا والآخر ربنا خفلنا والإخواننا الذين سبقون بالإيمان ولا تجعل في قلوبنا غلل الذين آمنوا ربنا إدك رأوف الرحيم ربنا خفلنا أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا دعاوا ويكشفوا سويا سأسأل الله سبحانه وتعالى أن نقوم بحاجةنا بحاجة حشة وإن شاء الله بحاجة جميلة بحاجة جميلة بحاجة جميلة شخص جافة وجميلة جميلة في جميلة عامة راجة أن الله يعطيهم بحاجة جميلة يستطيعون بحاجة جميلة for us and for you and I to be healthy to be good role models for society إن شاء الله to maximize and to give us the energy to achieve the highest stations in paradise بسم الله يالرحمن الرحيم أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا شفوا سو أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا شفوا سو أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا شفوا سو أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا شفوا سو أمي يوجيب المقطر إذا شفوا سو إين it's been so long إما صعب الزمان and we pray to Allah صبحه وتعالى to make him reappear soon so that this justice can prevail on earth بسم الله هنجاتي رحماتك أريد فقط to make a quick announcement قبل أن تذكر I know we're re-setting Ziyara هناك تفصير 39 ألميزان كما تعلمت رطبا ألميزان في تفسير القرآن التي تصميمها أحيانا أجدنا أن نرأيها سوف أتحدث عن هذه التفسير القرآن كل أحدنا يجب أن نرأيها في مجموعة إنه مجموعة من المساعدات القرآن إنه مجموعة مجموعة وإنكم وإنكم يجب أن نرأيها even a chapter even a page and the whole book if possible but please let's gain knowledge let's acquire knowledge and insha'Allah I will also post I will have the brothers post the book list a lot of brothers and sisters have been asking me for the book list, the reading list insha'Allah we will post that too do you need this no but that's fine


Ladies and gentlemen, moving on. Our next speaker for today is going to be addressing the topic emerging role of mobile and consumer experiences and identity resolution. Kelly Cocanas, EVP, Global Data, StarCom Publisist Group. As StarCom's global lead on data technology and analytics, Kelly works with the agency's client teams to ensure StarCom delivers advanced data-driven strategy at scale. She is responsible for helping StarCom's global clients determine their over-reaching data vision, while also collaborating with client teams to create the roadmaps and project plans that will bring that vision to life. Kelly, hi. Hello. Hello. Time's on and ready to go. Yeah, reporting live from Chicago, so where we also enjoy pizza, including... So thanks to the previous discussion, too. That was really great. Hello, everyone. Well, good to see everyone. And looking forward to talking here, I'll share my screen as the process goes. And here we go. Thank you for that nice introduction. The work of my team is really how we use data upstream and in tactical applications. So how we use data in strategy work, identifying audiences for growth, then revealing insights about those audiences and finding inspiration for game-changing experiences, including mobile-first experiences in commerce as well as in media. And also how we use data in downstream ways, the tactics of how those audiences are handled in optimization and activation and measurement, and increasingly in this new wave of mobile growth and all the innovations in the mobile marketing space. The data that's created through these mobile experiences is increasingly important. So I'll talk a bit today about the role of mobile in data-driven consumer experiences, highlighting some perspective and research from some agency work we've done and some data with partnerships. And I'll talk a bit about another work stream that's emerging, which is, for more of our clients, very important. And that's around identity resolution and the role of mobile ad IDs or maids as data that's critical to that identity resolution. So as a point of introduction, and we just previously heard how important customers are at the heart of our products, likewise, it's a good reminder that when we think about data in all of its forms, from ID level to aggregated insights, that data is simply people in disguise. And this keeps me motivated to continue the work with data because it really is just about people and how we're interacting.  And through this, so much data is being created. And so we as marketers and agency partners, we are looking at all of these data signals that are given to us. And we have this opportunity now, which is more at the forefront, more than ever, to illuminate this incredibly dynamic consumer journey through the data lens. And so for many of my clients in the work we're doing together, it's about having a data strategy to capture the data, capture, enrich, manage, have respect for adherence to consent and privacy. But it's about creating and maintaining a first party data strategy, whether it's through CRM or loyalty programs, but also through media and mobile first media experiences. So this is the great opportunity that we face today. The other lens that we can take as marketers in this mobile first world is that this landscape is truly a platform world and successful marketers may also want to consider to act like a platform themselves. We know from our familiar platforms that are part of our daily lives listed here below on the bottom of the chart, some examples, these platforms are data rich. They know us as customers better than anyone. These platforms are, they benefit from network effects. They're their own personalized ecosystems and they are direct to consumer. And so in this rapidly evolving platform world, companies can afford to operate independently, orgs and their partners, like marketers and agencies need to work alongside each other to deliver this real transformation, to stay competitive with these other platforms and lead for category growth. The consumer category and competitor shifts demand a new approach as brands are competing for attention, retailer frenemies are disrupting different modes of business. There's new D to C models that are challenging how consumers buy the products as featured in the previous discussion. And we have shared distribution partners who are starting to know more and more about our own customer. So we're in this new era of working together. It's more holistic, it's more integrated and we have to work together in new and different ways to navigate this platform world and winning in this platform world gives rise to indeed the importance of data in all of its forms. Here in India, actually across the globe, I'll say we have about 14 different data intelligence centers within the publicist group and one of them located here in India and in these data intelligence hubs, we have the practice of applying qualitative and quantitative analysis to respond to these real world marketing challenges as in the platform world. And so I've got a few charts here that are illuminating some insights from this tracker work. It's inclusive of consumer sentiment, attitudes and search trends, social insight behaviors, media consumption behaviors from a variety of different sources, social listening, net base, TV viewing data from Bark, website behavior from ComScore or similar web and then various publicly available data sets, especially in recent months, tracking COVID infections and vaccinations, mobility data through Google and economic government sources. So I wanted to just share and reveal a few highlight data points here. Some may be a surprise, some may be very familiar, but mobile behaviors are certainly dominant in consumer experiences and the pandemic has shaped new behaviors, no surprise. But I think that the stat of one billion smartphone users by 2025 in India is really an incredible data point to watch. Monthly usage and new internet users are also on the rise and the search, whether it's a, you know, vertical search or voice search are certainly also at great rates of increase. With all of this data, we're also looking at keeping track of shoppers and coming into this festive season, swear shoppers are clamoring for different sales for Diwali, I'm sorry. The sentiment, we're tracking sentiment of course, and there's a lot of sentiment around celebration and shopping and sales are top keywords. And of course, many of our retail clients are capitalizing on these festival offers in order to drive their own sales. And important to us gathered here talking about the mobile growth, I think it's interesting to notice that some of the top conversation themes during this current season are inclusive of conversations around smartphones as one of the top conversations. And those conversations in the aqua green, blue cluster there are around season, the deals and discounts. So certainly part of our everyday discussions. Looking at this data here from our tracker, these are website visits. And what we notice here is that digital adoption is being driven by some old school industries. We noticed in the previous discussion there was discussions about the rise in visits to food and drink sites, which is also inclusive here. But the thing I think is interesting is in that lower right corner there around education visits. And the lockdowns have definitely opened up avenues for experimenting with digital forms of education, showing a 181% lift versus the base. And so certainly we are using not only our mobile devices, but other technology that is adopting those different digital, whether it's the products themselves or whether the behaviors of visiting different websites, those are certainly something to keep an eye on. Certain websites, this is looking at here. You've got visits to different websites. This is year over year. So 2020 on the bottom, 2021 on the top. And what we notice here is that certain sites like Google and Facebook continue to benefit from people seeking information and socializing on the internet. And they just continue to have that strong presence in our everyday lives. And of course, the access to Google and Facebook oftentimes overindexes mobile versus desktop. But we have to beware because of course, even we as consumers and also as marketers, we need to keep attention to the potential overreliance on platforms in our daily lives, which was a good example earlier this month when Facebook with the Facebook outage and certainly brought that to life. And many of us were worried about how we could connect in our normal daily lives during this outage. But certainly it will happen again and we'll need to take note of how we can maintain consumer connectivity, not only through these major platforms, but also make sure we have our own connections to them through potentially through our own platforms. So shifting from these highlights from our tracker, I wanted to share and this is really fresh and hot off the press. There's a new report that I'm excited to share. Actually, it's just dropped today and there'll be press on Monday globally. It's our global media intelligence report, 2021 that we publish year-over-year with eMarketer and GWI, primarily GWI data. And the entire collection is an impressive and comprehensive compilation of data and traditional and digital media usage across 43 countries, including India. And it's a really useful report for anyone looking at that market level data and looking for global trends. It's one of my personal projects and it's a fun time of year when this comes out. Featured here, I've got two charts to share and of course I encourage you to check out the full report when it drops on Monday by visiting eMarketer. But the penetration of desktops, laptops and tablets is actually falling across the globe. But in certain markets, PC ownership is on the slight rise. And so you'll notice on that second line of data here in India that PC ownership is on the rise. And I wonder, I can't help but think that potentially the rise of PC and tablet ownership is driven at least in part by some of those dynamic, those education dynamics that we mentioned earlier. Another chart to show from the global media intelligence report in many countries, digital video is overtaking broadcast TV and a good portion of that can be on people's mobile devices. And so India is among the 50% of countries surveyed where 75% of internet users had watched streaming video on demand in the past month. So another important trend to keep an eye on as we think about the branded experiences that we create for people on their mobile devices either as part of their streaming video experiences or adjacent to. And a bit of a pivot I wanna just touch on the second piece of the second part of the theme in this discussion today is that in addition to all this data for consumer insights, which of course typically is more at the aggregate level, data at the aggregate level, my teams and the work with clients today are focused on data for personalization. And we do this through partnerships and identity resolution. I think we all, many of us here gathered, realized the ambition for those journey-centric personalizations and all the stages leading up to that in understanding people through the data profiles. And within Publis's group and Publis's media, all of our data partners, excuse me, are prioritized against our group data strategy. So we're looking to create accurate and scaled identity data. We then create a deep understanding and measurement framework by enrichment and have quick and high fidelity connectivity with those consumers that we come to know. And so I wanted to share this as an offer as we think about the role of mobile and data collection. We know that each market has its own place in the data maturity continuum. And of course, within Publis's group and our Epsilon colleagues, of course in markets like the US, France and UK, where we have very advanced core IDs to understand people with a high fidelity of data. I'm working with clients across, you know, market lists that can be upwards of 90 different markets. And so what we need to understand is what data is available to create identity level data about our consumers. And so we look at device, digital device penetration. We of course keep tabs on privacy regulation and then marketing spend and we're looking to work with partners that lead in the local markets against whatever the local market conditions may be. So we really do recognize the role of maids and mobile ad IDs as really important consumer data signals and the consumer journey. And we're working with key partners like ZOTAP, for example, here in India to help make those connections and to build that ID level understanding of our consumers in partnership with our clients. So I wanna say thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions here or by email and follow up and good luck with the rest of the conference today. Hi Kelly, thank you. Yes. Hi, it's really enriching, extremely lovely and I'm sure the audience has enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you so much for making the time. I know you're overseas and it must have been difficult to do this but you've done it and we are so, so, so grateful for you being here. Great, thank you so much. Take care.