Daily Times employees not paid for months

Daily Times newspaper has not paid its employees for at least a month.  The reporters and staff are suffering but for fear of losing their jobs have been unable to protest.

Dr Rubeena Kidwai wrapping up

Dr Rubeena Kidwai tells me she is wrapping up her clinic at the Pakistan Association of Mental Health. The most appropriate reaction is panic – I have three months to become completely non-mad. Can you become codependent on your shrink?

I join SAMAA TV as the website editor

I joined SAMAA TV as its website editor after I left Daily Times.  My direct boss is Amir Zia. He used to work at AP and Reuters, I think. He’s worked with Kathy Gannon, known as the Iron Lady in some journalism circles because she’s tough as nails and was the first journo allowed into Afghanistan when the Taliban took over.

I also work with Server Moosavee and Amir Jahangir and an incredibly bright Fatima Akhtar, who is the manager of the Interactive Solutions at SAMAA.

But all of that is by the way. This much I know; the media is changing and we’re trying to keep up. Sometimes I’m reminded of Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock.

I’m not sure why one should blog at all. Perhaps some people are fascinated in seeing their own words in ‘print’ or somewhere print-like. But don’t you have something to say – have some credible information – to be worth reading?

Februaries – 2 years since Nisha’s death

I point out to Abbas that after I revived this blog I realised that I was remembering Nisha February upon February.  She died in Feb 2007 when we did the stories on her. I wrote the blog briefly and then gave it up, only to pick up in Feb 2008. I then left it and after a year, now Feb 2009 , I go back to Khosa to ask about her death.

I think about her sometimes. It’s been two years since her death. What we keep wondering about, Abbas and I, is why she didn’t run out of the kitchen towards the front door? Why were there burn marks only in the kitchen, and that too in one corner?

When I mention it to Khosa, in his sterile white tiled office at the Arambagh police complex, he goes silent. If there had been anything, he says, he would have arrested the father. But his story had been corroborated by a shopkeeper, that he had been out to get something.

But then, I say to Khosa, what if he knew that she would go to make tea or something in the kitchen, leave the gas on and wait?

I go back to talk to the cop on the case

It is February 2009, two years since Nisha’s death. I quit my job at Daily Times after returning from a journalism fellowship. In the days when I am looking for a job, I decide to spend some time at Sachal police station. The thana is located at the end of University Road, in Safoora Goth, and to get there I have to pass NIPA chowrangi. I pass Ibn-e Sina Hospital. Each day, as I drive by I think of Nisha because one turn to the right would take me straight to the place where she died.

One day I decide I have to call SSP Niaz Ahmed Khosa up again.