FBR educates NUST on becoming taxpayers

The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) launched its pilot project on improving taxpaying culture by hosting a "tax fair" at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) today. Journalist Syed Talat Hussain moderated the event, encouraging students to join the conversation on taxation.

"We've tried to create a national discourse. We want you to be a part of that national debate," said Tariq Bajwa, Chairman FBR. "Most of you are going to occupy positions of authority, responsibility, and influence. You have to commit yourself to being a clean taxpayer. You will be responsible for that change."

The program was structured to include keynote speeches, presentations by FBR representatives, a theatrical performance, and questions by the audience. Students appeared critical of FBR's apparent inability in overcoming "personal and political exigencies" to catch criminals who evade taxation.

But Change Agent Imani Mufti made taxpaying a personal feat by declaring taxpaying as an act of empowering people whom you may never meet. "Taxes are more of a moral obligation than a legal obligation," said Mufti sharing how taxpaying is no longer deemed appreciable act of community building. "Break the cycle!"

"The moral imperative of doing the right thing doesn't have to arise from tradition," concluded Hussain. 

by Ayesha Nasir

Assignment on Storify

This was an important assignment for me not because I spent 48 hours or so with it (it crashed and my work disappeared so I had to do it all over again) but because of the news I was covering. I'm satisfied with how it turned out. I'm happy to have worked on it. I was awake during at the time of the courtroom proceedings and was primarily gathering the news from the sources I quoted in this. It was a powerful experience. The live stream too had an impact on me which, ever since last year's Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip, has been amplified because of how the time difference ceases to matter and the distance and borders between us become less important than they were previously.

Finding my voice

We were asked to write in class.

How would you describe yourself?

Flawed. Patient. Hopeful.

How has this semester been like for you?

This semester I am learning how to not lose hope. Life has been kind but I have struggled with a growing disillusionment with the way the world works. The coursework has forced me to return to writing and believing that words can and do matter. I have finally arrived at a placed where I find peace in being alone and am trusting myself with my choices.

Share your influences.

Roald Dahl

Joanne Kathleen Rowling 

Dystopian fiction (e.g. Ender's Game)

Democracy Now!

Karachi

War movies (e.g. Grave of the Fireflies)

Documentaries

Write without thinking.

Force. He says to not force the words. But how I force what I dare not even touch. My words are not tangible; I cannot hold them, embrace them, or stroke their edges. I can only see them appear on a page. Like scattered raindrops inking the white bank age, except they are not as transparent. They carry a blueness that resembles sadness. I carry the words. I carry the sadness. I am asked to unload it onto the page.

Follow the paper trails

“I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.” ― Paper Towns

I read this amazing thing a journalist wrote about paper trails. The idea was that we are all leaving trails - birth certificates, identity cards, school certificates, district records, college applications, university letters of acceptances or rejections, postcards, certificates to announce your marriage and everything else. Someday an obituary, perhaps. That idea is scary of course but for journalism it's supposed to be this cool way of remembering history, people, and what happened where.

I was born in London, Ontario. My birth certificate tells you that. It cant tell you that the only place I've ever called home is Karachi. But it can give you something to start with. You can humanize me, understand me, and perhaps someday see yourself in me. 

Sometimes people leave trails they don't intend on leaving. Some "journalists" rummage through bins belonging to popular writers - I'm thinking of you, Jo - and try to figure out what story they can break from that crumpled paper and discarded material. 

The papers that document are lives are ones that you learn to appreciate the older you grow. You leave these trails and you worry about you'll be tracked down and given little privacy. On the flip side, you're able to figure out the way back to where you started from.

In class we were assigned a task to write a story that uses a document as a primary source. Mine is on the ACLU vs Clapper case where basically people who represent civil liberties organisations are suing NSA. With stories like these, finding human sources is hard. Not everyone is comfortable speaking on record. Those who are ok with doing so are usually from that community of activists who have just stopped caring about making those in power uncomfortable. Either that, or they somehow feel protected by the community they are part of. That at least these people will make noise if they are missing, being threatened, attacked, vilified, or killed.

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm."― Paper Towns

beginning-middle-end

In the last week of March, our focus was on getting the intro right. We had some examples to build on and were pitched with ideas in order to get started with writing our own intros.

From the reporting that has been published on Pakistan Ink so far, I've picked out a few which I really like:

1. Hassan's story - "In Pindi Drain, A Search for Scrap Finds Dignity"
2. Hajrah's story - "Balochistan Talk Cancelled: LUMS Student Body Stands Firm for Academic Freedom"
3. Sohaib's opinion piece - "Remembering the Tragedy: the 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan Team"

What I find interesting about each of these openings is that they trust their reader's intelligence and imagination. Instead of cashing in on sensational openings, these writers have poised the articles in a way that asks questions of the reader. Sana, too, began with a similar set of questions in her piece. 

In class we discussed a classic example by The Miami Herald's Edna Buchanan. Before proceeding to read the rest of the contents of the story, all of us had speculated about Gary Robinson and why on earth was the man hungry on the day he died. What was his hunger for? Did his hunger and his death correlate? How did he die? Why does his hunger matter if he has died? How do we know he was hungry?

Questions like these led us to share possibilities and very few of them came even close to what the reality was. It sort of reminded me of the epitaph I had written in Grade XI, for my Literature in English class. If you really want to them, they are still available here: "Students' Writing Epitaphs". The link redirects you to where a part of me still resides. 

Backgrounding may be synonymous with professional stalking

OK I realise it quite evident that I'm very happy to listen to what Emma Watson says not because of the invasive and quite honestly unhealthy celebrity culture my generation is supposedly engulfed in, but rather because I really like people who are unafraid to speak their mind.

Finding such people isn't that hard. In new week, we were taught tools which could ordinarily be labelled as stalkerish and obsessive. Our work as journalists, I have learned, is not really the most admirable of feats all the time. We're not always cracking cases, reporting on crimes, or shaking the dust off buried investigations. We're not always watching the powerful and reporting on their abuse of power or the snatching of power from whom it rightfully belongs to.

Sometimes, we're really just expected to be Googling facts and stalking people. This is tedious work and you might be called a researcher but essentially, you're doing what tons of people do on facebook: hunting what you're looking for or stumbling across something you weren't even originally looking for.

Now I know we're taught to remain objective at all times but the reality is, I've personally had to gather piles of useless data to dig out the needle in the haystack and sow together the story seamlessly. This is not always an objective process. Maybe there are multiple needles and I've only picked out - through a subjective decision-making process - only that which I deemed was OK.

I do need to write about Google and the ways in which I am grateful for it. I understand that I'm writing on a blogging service that Google itself hosts, but I think it is ok to say that Google is not a perfect company and its policies can be debated on. But its search engine - which has of course its own set of flaws - is one of the best out there. At least to my knowledge, the Advanced Search which we played around with in one of the classes is a brilliant invention.

I'm now curious about working with Google Alerts and I'm going to try experimenting with it just by tracking my own name - a bad idea obviously since my name is a common one - and seeing if it shows up on the Alerts.

Oh this is fun. And distracting.

Learned so much from this.

While we're on interviews, I was thinking of preparing an archive of some of the most decent interviewing done in recent times. I'll start with this one interview which CNN allowed Anderson Cooper to conduct.

As always, the non-Youtube version for Pakistanis or anyone with no access to Youtube is here.