About
The Better Pakistan is a site that collects and publishes stories about changemaking and positive developments and achievements from across Pakistan, traversing the terrains of rural and urban, rich and poor, literate or not. Our mission is to identify the good and the viable in the nation that is facing a lack of cohesion, a collapse of order, and dispersion of energy with islands of sense and goodness within what looks like an ocean of dismay and chaos. The Better Pakistan is a venture and brainchild of thinker, leader, doer Ramala Hubb’Allah who is working to advance the proliferation of an Eco-Feminine order across the world, whereas ”the Eco-Feminine” is fundamentally a design ideology that puts the inner needs and expressions of humans first and ahead of the outer world.
To understand the Inner and Outer better, see Ramala’s model and tool, The Salaam Matrix.
Planting the Seeds of the Positive and the Creative
Ramala has a history of seeding the seeds of positive news and ideas in the collective consciousness, an Amelie-like mission that she has been on ever since she has seen the Internet (1998-99). She published a phenomenal blog, NEXT> by Ramla, since 2004, and earlier began blogging at Chowk.com, a community-generated site for independent bloggers from India and Pakistan. (See her page on the archived version of the currently defunct site). She also ran several Yahoo! Groups since 1999 and was influencing the world of tech, business, and marketing in Pakistan, often using pen names as was the norm in those days of the Internet. Regrettably, this may be why her contribution to the development of the nation is not widely known.
Her stories and articles were published in various media and magazines including:
Aurora, a marketing-focused publication by the Dawn Group of Pakistan.
Her articles focused on Lifestyles of Sustainability, Social Enterprise, Social Media, and like subjects that were emerging and contemporary at the time. An archive of her articles will be made available as soon as we can manage to secure scans of her articles, published in print.
The Triple Bottom Line, a print and later online journal about corporate social responsibility and related thematics.
See Ramala’s articles here, written under her then name, which has altered since.
While The Better Pakistan is nominally modeled after the phenomenal The Better India, in truth Ramala Hubb’Allah, the founder of Better Pakistan, has been working on positive and ecological stories about Pakistan since 2008 at least, and also writing articles to lobby for her vision of an ecological world order. This predates the Indian site, but Ramala finds the kindred-spirit India site a visualization of what her work would be were it published sustainably in Pakistan, under her own brand instead of being dispersed on other platforms and sites, or published on blog sites and not her own dot.com, a feat that was hard for her to achieve since she knew little about domains and web-building in 2003-04, when her journey into blogging started. Her finances and decisions were somewhat controlled, or, she figures, she may have had learned helplessness that kept her from developing her own dot.coms. However she did make use of the free web publishing platforms. She also was hindered from having or obtaining her own credit or debit card until 2012; if secured earlier, it would allow her to make online purchases. She had to defer to the males of the family to help her purchase web domains, and thereafter, she suspected a lack of cooperation for reasons unknown. (This story, while seemingly small, is important to tell because it is likely that not having her own credit/debit card stood in the way of her creative freedom; sadly that cage was constructed for her.)
When she first saw The Better India site possibly around the Pandemic time, it reminded her of her vision for a similar publication in Pakistan, one that she had creative control over, as opposed to her participating in other blogs. (Ramala did enthusiastically support blogs such as PakPositive, published by an anonymous man, but which invited cowriters.)
After admiring The Better India site from a distance but vowing never to get involved in writing about Pakistan again, Ramala decided that she cannot remain an affixed admirer of the Indian site and live her dreams vicariously by admiring good projects in other nations, and that goodness, perhaps, begins only at home. Therefore, after much inner wrangling and denying herself the dream of creating a site to feature positive, educative and constructive news about Pakistan, Ramala has finally yielded and created this site. Coincidentally, Ramala also started a business named BetterBonds in 2016, and the idea of “better” seems to her one that is more achievable than perfect or invincible. It suggests gentle and incremental progress, constant improvement, and a competitiveness that strives for excellence and improvement, not tearing the Other down for gains of the Self! What Better an idea than that!