Today, I received a message on one of my social media accounts that reads as below:
Kindly Share:
50 English teachers needed for Oman,
Male or Female
Govt. Job
Salary – 1100 (Omani riyal)
Indian Rs. 200000/
Pakistani Rs. 400000
– plus with Free Visa, Ticket, Accommodation, Medical and Annual leave with air ticket. If you are interested please refer.
Send CV at businessresource.hr@gmail.com
Cell # 00971506593123
Fwd to other groups might be helpful to someone.
I usually ignore such social media messages but what caught my attention was the currency exchange rate of Omani Riyal with Indian and Pakistani rupee. Any reader of this message will immediately take the impression that Pakistani currency is weaker than Indian currency with a 1 to 2 ratio. I knew that it is not correct. I checked on the Internet. I found that the conversion of 1100 Omani Riyals to Indian and Pakistani currency, as per today’s rates, was Indian Rs. 185,486 and Pakistani Rs. 296,159 respectively. [Source: www.oanda.com]
Before reaching my final opinion about this ad post, I sent an email to the address requesting the authenticity of the job ad but received no response as expected. Similarly, there would not be any response when anybody sends his/her CV.
Findings
With these findings, the following deductions are obvious:
- This social media message is fake.
- The real message being spread very innocently is that the comparison of Indian and Pakistani currencies is strongly but wrongly against Pakistan.
- The reader will recall that some years back the difference was not so big. It means the Pakistani economy is in extremely bad shape and declined very fast over the past few years.
- This impression will be registered in the subconscious of the readers and lead to his/her cribbing about the state of governance of the country, negative bashing on the political leadership, blaming bureaucracy, judiciary, establishment, etc., etc. This all will be triggered from messages like this which an average reader comes across in large numbers every day while being on social media.
It is very easy to say that the Government should take steps to stop the spread of such messages. But I don’t think any Government even in the West can do much about it. If the originators of such posts are sitting outside the country what any Government can do to stop it? In my view, it can only be stopped if we all Pakistanis commit to ourselves that posts should only be shared after verification or when these are from some authentic source.
To conclude, I would like to remind all my country fellows to recall the message from our national poet Allama Iqbal Which is shown in the image below its translation in English is as follows which is the translation of a verse from the Holy Quran:
Verily never will Allah change the condition of a people until they change it themselves. Al Quran Surah Ar-ra’ad 13:11
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