I’m sure, he would have laughed his heart out as I would continue to pull his leg. “That day you died [on January 17] was actually reserved for the Bohri community’s top spiritual leader, who as a matter-of-fact scored a respectable 102 on his way out. But what no one gets is, why you chose to join him and that too only after scoring a half century in this match of life?”
I’m guessing that Musadiq would have probably replied back with a glint in his eye: “Meri Jaan, had it been my choice, I would have probably chosen to stay decades longer and upheld the Dawn tradition, where the average age of retirement-upon-death is roughly 200 years.”
It was such a privilege and an interesting experience to have known Musadiq Sanwal that even now, after so many days of his demise, his well-wishers, worldwide, find it hard to believe still that he is no longer with us.
Like them, I too, night after night, try to find a strand of his forgotten memories in the heartbreaking music collection he has left behind for us. A photograph with him is a most sought after item in conversations with mutual friends and video interviews of him online are like historical footage that one feels compelled to preserve.
All this because Musadiq was so much more than just an editor of a news website. He was a lovely ‘Baba’ to his two wonderful children, a ‘dervish’ for his musician friends and ‘Meri Jaan’ for us fortunate ones who had the opportunity to not only work with him but also become friends in the process.
I still remember the day Musadiq Sanwal walked into the Dawn.com newsroom for the first time.
It was June 2008 and in walked a man, whom I thought looked a little like Farooq Kaiser’s Uncle Sargam character except that Musadiq had salt and pepper hair instead.
He wore his trademark short kurta [which I recall was parrot green that late afternoon] over a pair of jeans and had a somewhat heavy backpack filled with books strapped over his shoulders.
He said ‘Hi’ in the most humble way by nodding his head down a little and curling his eyes behind his then thin framed glasses with a warm and disarming smile. After brief introductions, it became clear that Musadiq was the kind of person whose heart shone on his face.
Dawn newspaper’s top boss and former editor Abbas Nasir had briefed me that a ‘wonderful man’ would soon be joining the team to get the new website up and running.
Musadiq turned out not only wonderful, but also genuinely sweet as a person, with whom everyone wanted an audience, even if it meant sharing just a few minutes over a cigarette.
During those prelaunch days, Dawn.com was facing a myriad of technical problems and many of us doubted whether the promised transition from the 90s HTML version to the 21st century version would ever take place.
After I had given him the lowdown of the historical issues with the website and challenges that lay ahead for him, Musadiq smiled and said, “Just give me six months.” He brought in a resurgence of hope that was desperately needed in those times of uncertainty.
These were also interesting times in the history of the Dawn Media Group, where a strange mix of gloom and bloom prevailed. There was a kind of ‘out with the old, in with the new’ air at Haroon House back then. The once-upon-a-time extremely popular eveninger ‘Star’ had been just closed down after having a decades-long run and in its exact office space, the new Dawn.com portal was being incubated.
I was 25 and already considered an ‘old hand’ in the team that Musadiq inherited, which comprised of very talented people who were all younger than me, including Quratulain Siddiqui, Raza Ali Sayeed, Shyema Sajjad, Taimur Sikander, Zeeshan Hyder, Hafsa Adil, Altamash, Yousuf Nasim, Ali, Wasif Khan and Iffat. Amazingly, some of these stalwarts from the launch team are still around Dawn.com and continue to carry forward the legacy of Musadiq.
The majority of this Dawn.com team was getting a taste of journalism for the first time in their lives. Even for people like me, who had some experience of working in a national newspaper, we only had a vague idea of this hip term called ‘online journalism’.
Musadiq was the one who taught us everything about this new dimension of journalism. Truth is we didn’t even know how to crop a picture in Photoshop. Editing audios and videos felt like rocket science. But Sanwal patiently armed us with all the tools we needed as multimedia producers and cyber journalists.
This was actually a watershed moment in the history of journalism in Pakistan. It was the first time ever that any local media group in Pakistan had invested and set up a dedicated newsroom, complete with a staff of trained journalists and special audio/visual recording equipment, for its news website.
Within three months of his joining, on August 14 that same year, Musadiq had launched the beta version of the website. It wasn’t a perfect liftoff to say the least, but he kept our spirits high. In a morale boosting email, he wrote to us kids that day, “Thanks a lot for making the site look really great today… we will continue to work as usual and keep the momentum going… Even if it keeps crashing, we will take it easy as during the Beta it’s a normal thing to happen.”
He would humor us during these frustrating times. We were a young and impatient lot. But Sanwal kept us entertained with his amazing stories and great sense of humor. He was a man who had so much knowledge to share, be it about music or books or movies or history.
One of his favourite subjects was about preserving the oral traditions of various cultures in Pakistan and how perhaps multimedia could preserve that heritage. During that process, Musadiq actually succeeded in instilling a life-long love for the arts and pluralism in his team.
Under Musadiq Sanwal’s leadership as the Dawn.com editor, there were many milestones for which he was never acknowledged with a national media award. For example, it was during his tenure that a local news website for the first time had its own dedicated reporters and writers, who would write reports, features and produce multimedia content exclusively for the online section. The first multimedia documentary series [Urban Journeys] ever produced by any local media group in Pakistan was his concept and he introduced the idea of setting up dedicated pages on special topics at news websites in the country.
After I left Dawn.com in early 2010, there would be countless other gems under his leadership, including the ‘I am Hazara’ series and the idea of launching a Dawn Urdu website, which was a brilliant step.
His critics would say he was simply trying to copy the BBC where he previously worked. But that’s not true because he once told me that the idea was not to be like the BBC. “The plan is to be better than the BBC and make them take the lead from us one day and show them how one should tell a story from Pakistan online,” he said.
Had he more time on this earth, I wouldn’t be surprised if he had launched Dawn Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Balochi sister sites and online radio channels. He could really imagine the big picture and slowly yet steadily guide the team towards it.
I wonder how things would have turned out had Musadiq not appeared on the Dawn.com map at all. Especially since I remember, how before Musadiq stepped in, Dawn.com was a directionless behemoth and was considered a white elephant by the old-timers within the same organisation.
It’s funny how some of my former colleagues from the Dawn newspaper newsroom actually advised me privately to return and ‘come back to the mother ship before it was too late.’ Sometimes even I had thought that I had made a mistake by joining the dot com journalism gig.
But now that I look at the site six years later in 2014, I’m impressed how far Dawn.com has come. It is a source of pride for me to tell others that I was once associated with this great project and was led by Musadiq, without whom, in my opinion, Dawn.com would have not had such stellar achievements.
But had anyone told this to Musadiq’s face, he would have probably blushed and said that there was still a ton of work to be done. He was just a very humble man and never bragged about his achievements as a theatre artist or musician or a journalist. Even his music album is titled ‘Ajizi,’ which means humility in Urdu.
Some of us were lucky to have known him apart from work. One can write a whole book on the wonderful evenings at his home, where everyone came to lay down their guard and just be themselves. Musadiq would sing his heart out during such nights as he sat on the floor with his ‘baaja’ [harmonium]. On some nights there would be the versatile theatre artist Khalid Ahmed on flute, while on other nights there would be the-then-not-so-famous Arieb Azhar singing Elvis songs, while on some nights there would be our common Christian guitarist friends sharing Jimi Hendrix licks with Musadiq.
It was during these nights actually that Musadiq would appear in his true element. He would just let go of himself, sing and just let be. Not many people understood this about him, but he was an artist first and foremost, and then a journalist.
In fact, he once told me that journalism was something he was doing only so that he could support his first love, which was music. This may sound contradictory given his many achievements in journalism, but actually that’s where his heart lay always.
Unlike my former colleagues at Dawn.com and his family, I’m lucky that my memories of Musadiq don’t include witnessing his deteriorating health.
The only cancer we knew back then was the perpetual poor law and order situation of Karachi. His cheeks were still rounder and he would still call his cough a bad case of bronchitis and nothing else. Despite disagreements we had as professionals, in the end it was his laughter that would ring out louder and bygones would be bygones.
However, I do regret drifting away from him over the years. I lost touch and forgot to ask how he was as I tried to helplessly figure out my own jigsaw puzzle of life.
When I learnt about Musadiq’s lung cancer, I quit smoking. It was more out of guilt for smoking with him than out of shock and respect.
Now that he’s passed away, I’m thinking of picking up an instrument and learning music once again. After all, what is music but the ‘ultimate and complete truth,’ something which we all journalists seek.
And that is exactly what I have learnt from Musadiq. To see the story beyond the written text; to visualize it and feel it like music. No wonder then that such is his sweet memory that even though I may have tears in my eyes, I also have a smile upon my lips each time I think of him.
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