The latest example of why us Arabs and Muslims will always remain in the dark ages -

UK teacher goes to court in Sudan

A student in her class called Mohammed names a teddy bear after himself …. and now they want to give her 40 lashes and a jail sentence for blasphemy and insulting Islam!!

As usual, I expect riots and flag burning, since thats the limit of our communication methods with the world these days …

P.S. - Fact - The most common name in the world is ……………………….. Mohammad!

تحيا الأمة العربية

This is a picture from inside the hospital -

(click for better view)

They had 4 of these posters in one hallway.

I have three comments -

1. What if the patient was Buddhist or whatever?? Apparently there is no hope for him since the doctor can’t do anything!
2. جمعية إعانة المرضى is spending its money on this instead of helping the patients????
3. There is not ONE useful medical point in this poster which can benefit the patients.

Reminds me of this picture from the same organization 3 years ago in one of the hospitals that I posted before -

(click for better view)

Picture from a hospital’s entrance -

Who cares about other people’s lives when it means that I can walk 30 seconds less to and from my car!?

Typical.

There have been several new newspapers in the market. A friend was commenting a couple of days ago about the lack of creativity in their production, basically they all followed each other, take a look -

Notice the smiliraties? The main thing I would guess is trying to go away from the old newspaper styles, and using color for their branding. The fonts are also very different to what was previously used, although a few newspapers have already changed their font, AlSeyassah and AlRai come to mind, and I think AlAnba also did.

A quick look at international newspapers, you will notice that the logos above are similar to newer newspapers and closer to tabloid newspaper logos. You have all these newspapers which are older than 100 years old -

And then you have the newer ones and the tabloids -

Notice the similarities?

In line with the environment issue in the past post, I want to discuss corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Kuwait.

One definition for CSR is -

concept whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on customers, employees, shareholders, communities and the environment in all aspects of their operations.

The field is relatively new, and has been gaining attention slowly but surely in the region. Apparently there is an annual Corporate Social Responsibility conference held in Kuwait as well as a few in the region ( 1 , 2 ).

In Kuwait, as far as I can recall, the two companies that are the most active are NBK and Zain. The best example of their efforts is the NBK pediatric hospital and the Zain Hospital (previously MTC) for Ear-Nose-Throat. I can’t really recall any other company really contributing to that extent in that field. I am sure there are other examples but nothing comes to mind right now.

I was looking through several websites of Kuwaiti companies seeing which of them have a section for CSR, and to my surprise, there were more than I expected -

NBK
Zain
Gulf Bank
Agility
Commercial Bank
KIPCO
Equate
Sultan Center
KNPC (pdf)
KPC
Dar Investment

(if you know any more, please tell me so I can update the list)

I was surprised that companies like Wataniya Telecom or KFH didn’t have a section on their website. This doesn’t mean that they don’t contribute to the society as much as others, it just isn’t reflected as an important issue on their website. Some of the links above are very impressive, especially the NBK website dedicated for the CSR.

While looking for some information, I stumbled onto a couple of interesting links.

First, there is the CSR Middle East organization, which is the Middle East’s First Online Corporate Social Responsibility Platform. I like the concept behind it, which at least puts the spotlight on such an important issue.

Another interesting website was the CSR Awards website, which is basically a competition in Kuwait for Kuwaiti companies to award the best of them and give them the recognition they deserve. (Looking through the website, the deadline for submitting a company is in 4 days!)

Its great to see such initiatives from the companies and different organizations on CSR, and glad to see that it is gaining importance. I just hope to see more environemntal issues tackled in these efforts, like the one on the streets from about 3 weeks ago -

This was done by “Challenge the Era Company” (which is sadly a very poor translation of the Arabic name تحدي العصر), which also are related to Environment Friends Campaign (EFC) . Many companies mentioned above and others are involved in sponsoring this campaign.

We need more of that. The main problem we have right now in Kuwait is awareness. Many people are not aware about the environmental issues and their impact. Hopefully the companies with the CSR departments will start looking at this aspect to work on.

موضوع البيئة حاليا هو الموضوع الأهم دوليا و متوقع أن يمثل دور كبير في انتخابات أمريكا السنة القادمة 

زيارة رئيسة الوزراء الألمانية ميركل لجورج بوش في مزرعته الأسبوع الماضي كان  من أهم أهدافها الاتفاق على ضوابط بيئية

الرئيس الفرنسي ساركوزي أعلن قبل أكثر من شهر عن بداية الثورة الخضراء لفرنسا 

رئيس الوزراء البريطاني يضع البيئة في مقدمة المواضيع المهمة لحكومته

جائزة نوبل للسلام تذهب لآل غور و منظمة بيئية

  أكبر تجمع دولي بيئي يقام في اندونيسيا الشهر القادم بحضور 180 دولة 

—————- 

سؤال بسيط … 

هل تتوقعون راح يكون للبيئة أي أهمية بانتخابات المجلس القادمة؟

ممكن أي مرشح يتطرق للموضوع في البرنامج الانتخابي؟ 

For some reason, many people voted for in the Zain logo and not the Wataniya one! Anyway, the scores are as follows -

   1.8 / 10

5.6 / 10

I can’t say I’m surprised that Zain got a low score, but I realllyy didnt expect it to be that low!!

Rate Zain’s logo Selection Votes 0 18% 12 1 13% 9 2 16% 11 3 12% 8 4 3% 2 5 9% 6 6 7% 5 7 6% 4 8 7% 5 9 0% 0 10 9% 6 68 votes total

… and Wataniya’s

Rate Wataniya’s logo Selection Votes 0 13% 6 1 9% 4 2 4% 2 3 7% 3 4 2% 1 5 7% 3 6 7% 3 7 18% 8 8 4% 2 9 9% 4 10 20% 9 45 votes total

The other day I had a discussion with a friend following the Logo R.I.P post on logos in Kuwait in general. We were discussing which logos we liked and which we didn’t like. We agreed on most but had some disagreements on a few. So I decided to have a Rate the Logo post, where I post the logo and the readers give it a rating from 0-10, in a couple of months we will have some idea as to which logos are most hated and loved!

There is no criterea, it is just a matter of taste, whether you like it or not.

I’ll start today with the telecoms, Zain and Wataniya logos -

I hope this leads to some interesting discussions! I would appreciate if you would say why you voted to what.

Let the voting begin!

Whoever did this card must have been drunk!

First of all, the name of the organization is wrong! I hope its just this card but I know I’m being overly optimistic on that.

The name of the organization is “Public Authority for Minors Affairs” according to the directory of the main e-government website (which is way better than any of the ministries). They messed up with the of/for and affair/affairs. So thats TWO mistakes in the name of the organization printed on their own business cards.

To make things worse, the guy’s title is Direczor! How?! The T isn’t even close to the Z to be a typo!

Of course, their Web.www.pama.gov.kw is also messed up.
But to be fair, this is a perfect reflection of the place and most governmental institutions in Kuwait. I have to admit its still better than the Pubic Authority of Agriculture, which was thankfully changed very soon afterwards.

I was working on a different post when I stumbled to this website - www.logorip.com , some sort of graveyard for old logos. They have some great ones such as the old Arsenal logo, the BP logo, Enron, PanAm, and even the swastika and interesting discussions about them.

Got me thinking about our dead logos here in Kuwait! Here are a few that would be added -

Kuwaiti Logos R.I.P -

Zain old logo, when it was MTC . Died in 2007.

Agility’s old logo, when it was Public Warehousing Company (PWC). Died in 2006.

NBK’s old logo, before they modified it with the red line and resizing he camel to match the words. Died 2005.

Old Bank of Kuwait and the Middle East (BKME) logo, before it was bought by Ahli United Bank and modified the logo to look closer to the AUB brand. Died in 2005.

(thanks to Ra7aLaH for finding it)

Wataniya Telecom old logo, before the whole rebranding.  Not sure if the reason was that it was an exact copy of an american company’s logo. Died in 2001.

Any others you can think of??