This week has been unapologetically cruel. We lost friends and colleagues and comrades. We lost stars that would shine both in their brilliance and in their ability to evoke immense nostalgia.
On Thursday night, our Twitter timelines rang with news of friend and journalist Nadir Hassan's death. Nadir worked for Newsline, Express Tribune and this newspaper (as editorial consultant). Nadir has friends who have written beautifully about who he was as a person. I knew him through work; and we spent many years in a daily routine of phone calls and messages and editorial 'lines'.
But journalism is a weird profession, and you end up talking about all kinds of stuff – especially when you're following more than a hundred days of a dharna and writing about it every night. For me, Nadir will always be that editorial phone call I never shied away from (a rare thing indeed); the one person who would type 380-400 words (rarely more than that!) on a phone even and send them on to me even at the worst possible time – while at dinner or at a shaadi and once he sent me an editorial while sitting outside a movie theatre. And, apart from some dates and numbers that we'd need to check, Nadir always delivered. You could get him to write about anything and he'd do it – without much fuss or drama.
At the desk, we would joke with Nadir about his byline columns being uneditable because he would mince very few words in what he wanted to say. In that sense, remembering Nadir also takes us at the desk back to a better time – a time when we could write and publish without red lines choking our words or second-guessing every single word written.
I hadn't been in touch with Nadir the past year. I wish I had. He has friends who loved him and whose lives he touched in a way that I cannot even describe (but they have done so beautifully on their Twitter timelines). But for those of us who worked with him for many years, in my case mostly through the phone and via email, Nadir's loss is deeply personal. He was one of the good ones and he left us far too soon. Where else can you find someone who can write effortlessly on anything, from the PTI dharna to missing persons to Abdul Sattar Edhi to elections in India and the US to Pakistan cricket. I don't know many people with whom I could dissect Buffy episodes while also talk about the American elections and local bodies issues in Karachi. I hope wherever he is, he's got an unlimited supply of weird – and great – TV, and football and music. Rest in peace, my friend.
A day after Nadir's death came reports that Sajid Hussain – a former reporter at The News and a brave and committed journalist – was found dead in a river in Sweden. Sajid had been missing in Uppsala since March 2. I never met him. But I work with people who have always spoken with such affection for this man that it seems like all of us lost a friend and a brilliant colleague. Sajid's body was found on April 23, just more than a week before today – May 3, which happens to be World Press Freedom Day. Friend and colleague Zia Ur Rehman has tweeted out (zalmayzia) a thread of stories Sajid did while he was working for this newspaper. The stories are enough to tell you the kind of journalist Sajid was and the sort of loss journalism has suffered with his death. Because of the nature of the death, there are reasonable demands that the circumstances in which he was found be investigated properly by the Swedish government. One hopes that at least in that respect the Swedish government will be different to what we here in Pakistan are used to when it comes to a journalist's death.
Remembering Nadir and Sajid may be personal for a lot of us in the 'news' business, but even just reading work under their bylines is enough to remind any editor in Pakistan just how little space is left for critical thinking within this 'free media'. This year's Press Freedom Day marks the role of journalists in a time of 'disinformation'. We live in an age of brutal twisting of fact, all neatly done so in the garb of 'neutrality'. At such a time, we are reminded of the craft of journalism – from reporting to writing and analyses – and how it can only suffer when it is deprived of the oxygen of freedom. We are reminded of all those who are in jail because of the words they write or print. Simply, we are also reminded of what good journalism is all about.
We lost two bright and young journalists this week, in different circumstances and different countries. We grieve today as friends and colleagues – and readers. May this coming week be kinder to us all, because in a time of an unforgiving pandemic, even a week seems like eternity.
The writer is deputy editor, oped at The News.
Email: zburkigmail.com
Twitter: zburki