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.
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.
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.
“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 binsbelongingtopopular
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
I don't know why I try to be funny sometimes. It never works.
Why I'm concerned about ending up in jail has a lot to do with the way we are taught to treat our sources. Now I've read too many books and watched too many movies to know that a journalist's sources are what need to be protected and guarded. In this class, we have a strict policy of not accepting anonymous sources.
So essentially we're making a number of people uncomfortable by publishing their names and posts in the stories for our beat. These may seem like "random" or "ordinary" people (honestly, these are actual words which people use for staff the lower you go in the hierarchy) but if you really think about them, their randomness and ordinariness should not make us forget that they too have jobs to work on, families to support, and liberties which might be taken away from them if our stories get them in trouble.
It's good to make people uncomfortable sometimes and ideally it should lead to open and honest conversations about why and how we've made them uncomfortable. In the March 11 classes, we had discussions on our editorial policy in regards to Pakistan Ink and how certain sources were allowed anonymity primarily because we judged that the anonymity was essential to the source. So there can be times when we can step in to minimise some of the harm.
Who would know more about harm then people out there who are trying to make small but significant changes to cast aside this growing sense of apathy in our own domestic lives and in the lives of those around us.
Since 8th March - which was almost two months ago but hey, it is still important - was International Women's Day and women all over the world decided to share their stories, our teacher invited us to contact whomever we could to get insight about how they perceived this day and what it meant to them. The feature prepared by our class is available here, here, and here.
I was travelling on this day so I could not contribute but I did manage to see some discussions online. One interesting panel discussion was with Emma Watson where she sort of was her natural self, fumbling around with her notes and trying to keep the conversation going. It was one of the most awkward interviews I've seen and I loved it because of how genuine it was. I wish I had been the one asking her questions and tossing grand ideas of equality, representation, and combating stereotypes with her. My favourite part of the talk was this:
I've observed while interviewing people or just while talking to them, that women very often fit the stereotype of being expressive while men are generally attempting to come off as reserved. The former share their raw and unedited thoughts with far more ease than men do. The men I see on TV are, for the major part, trying to hide their emotions - the ones that present them as vulnerable - before asking or answering a question. The women on the other hand get their point across with far more clarity because of how they tap into most of what they are feeling at the time. I think people who attune themselves to what they are feeling and then share parts of it are all very brave.
Some recent lessons I've had on getting a message through or asking the right questions is really by watching people like Anderson Cooper and Jon Stewart. I've grown watching Christiane Amanpour and although I think she has a good interviewing style, I'm more comfortable with the informality of the men I've mentioned. It seems more real. If that realness can be transmitted through made up faces, camera angles, and all the space between us then I can only imagine what it might feel like to the people being interviewed.
(That's a Youtube version of this awesome panel discussion which Jon Stewart moderated in April. I learnt a lot from his moderating style. For those of us who cannot access Youtube, you can watch the facebook video here).
