Fellow from Pakistan discovers Silicon Valley is a state of mind

Fellow From Pakistan Discovers Silicon Valley Is A State-Of Min

D.School has innovative approach towards solution of problems. 

When I arrived as a Knight Fellow, I asked the staff, “Where is Silicon Valley?” I was expecting that it would be a building like the Stanford Shopping Center, with every tech company inside.

“Silicon Valley is more like a concept, driven by the spirit and curiosity to build new things,” I was told. From that moment, I really wanted to understand what that meant. Now, I was looking for two different things - to explore and experience these ideas.

But the picture was still incomplete until I had the good fortune to attend the Boot Camp at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, commonly known as the d.school. 

The d.school works on the design of ideas.  Normally, we think of a problem as a challenge to tackle, but here they think of a problem as an opportunity to creatively explore and come up with a solution - and that solution might be something that has never existed before. 

As a group, our challenge was to help a new female student at Stanford. Her parents wanted her to be as religious as she had been at home. They also wanted her to talk to them every day. Being a student, these two would be difficult for her. At first, we thought about the many existing social media websites that she could use - but that wouldn’t suit the parents who also wanted to have a complete record of her activity at the end of the year. 

We brainstormed by empathizing, defining the problem, ideating, prototyping, and finally testing a solution. We came up with the concept of a new app that would help her share every activity of the day with her parents through taking photographs. The parents would also send their picture stories back to her. 

The pictures that she took would be automatically added to a calendar, and at the end of the year, the app would create a single story of her year, like a family picture book, telling every moment of her time as a student. 

The values that we demonstrated as a group (spirit, curiosity, collaboration and finding solutions for real-world problems) told me that finally I had found Silicon Valley. These are the ideas and culture that have turned many students at Stanford into entrepreneurs, inventors and collaborators.  

Unfortunately these values don't exist in many universities in the developing world. My country, Pakistan, is no exception. I graduated in Journalism from the University of Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, and I didn’t see any student follow these values. Some obvious reasons could be that the universities don’t encourage their students to be innovative, and that the students do not have the passion for such ideas.

Also, there is no space for immature ideas to breathe because many students have them, but they soon kill their ideas when they think of the resources they will need to make them real; they are scared by the amount of innovation that already exists elsewhere so they think there is nothing left for them to create, and in Pakistan, everyone is competing against each other, which makes it difficult for them to collaborate and increase productivity. 
  
But here at Stanford, students pursue their ideas regardless of the resources and the competitive marketplace by choosing to innovate and collaborate, and that is the beauty of Silicon Valley. 

Journalists: Are we driven by facts or egos?

 ICFJ Alumni  Group Photo at Media Summit  held  in Islamabad on Feb 1,2,2013. Photo taken by Alumni fell

My inner critic is always haunting me with this burning question: am I objective and unbiased as a journalist?

I found the answer in the first week of February, at a media summit organized by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) in Islamabad. More than 80 journalists from all over Pakistan, who are alumni of ICFJ attended this summit. Speakers shared their views on important subjects, like the state of media in Pakistan, and how the USA and Pakistan see each other through media. It also gave us a chance to get to know each other.For me, the most interesting part was a session where journalists quizzed the speakers. That’s where my burning question was answered.

From (L-R)Muhammad Ziauddin, executive editor express tribune, Muhammad Malik, senior anchor Dunya TV, Rana Jawad Islamabad bureau chief Geo TV. Photo taken by ICFJ Alumni fellow

A journalist issued a challenge to Rana Jawed, bureau chief of Islamabad Private Television. Why had the station “fanned” the controversy over a provocative YouTube film about Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) by repeating the clip dozens of times, and calling upon government to ban YouTube? And why did the station later boast – via breaking news – that it was responsible for the YouTube ban? Rana Jawad replied, but the journalist wasn’t satisfied. Neither was I.

Zia-u-ddin, executive editor of Express Tribune, joined the discussion. He explained that television is part of mass media, so its priority is set by people’s emotions and expectations. If you ignore this reality they will switch to another channel. This made sense, but the journalist was still not satisfied.

Enter Muhammad Malick, editor of The News. His view was that no one is perfect in the media business, so we should learn from each other and develop professionalism throughout the industry.

But the journalist was still unwilling to let the issue drop. Later, I learned that he works for a rival television station. The episode made me realize how difficult it is for journalists to move from fixed angles. We stick to our position at any cost.

When another journalist – this time from Quetta – raised his hand to ask a question I gave him all my attention. I was keen to learn about the situation in Quetta, and the ongoing violence which is related to ethnicity and Baloch separatists.

But it was not to be.

“I am impressed by you, Mr Zia-u-ddin,” the journalist began. “You challenged the dictators. You did an excellent job during the Zia regime (and so on), and my question is: should I continue in print or switch over to television?”

I wasn’t expecting such a personal question. Neither was Zia-u-uddin. As soon as he sensed that the issue was superficial he leaned back in his chair and smilingly accepted the admiration. I am a hundred percent sure he wasn’t interested to hear flattery in such a public place. It’s well-known that he is a serious journalist.

This made me realize how important it is for us to ask questions on behalf of the people we serve, instead of just following our own needs. And, as the session also showed, journalists need to understand the difference between making comments and asking well-designed questions. Good questions generate news. The ability to ask good questions is the essence of journalism.

A journalist from FATA fell into the trap of confusing comment with question. “We are thankful to Pakistan for military operations, we are thankful to USA for drone attacks and we are thankful to the Taliban for destroying schools because you all taught us the importance of education,” he began. Personally, I didn’t like this attitude. 

But then the journalist redeemed himself with a strong question to Hamid Mir. Why, he asked, couldn’t he come to cover tribal issues? Hamid Mir explained that he is not allowed to enter tribal areas. He described how his DVR was snatched and smashed by Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA) while he was covering a drone attack.

At this, another journalist from Khyber PakhtunKhwa (KPK) pointed out that Hamid Mir had interviewed Osama Bin Laden in Tora Bora, Afghanistan. Why, then, couldn’t he cover issues in tribal areas?

I liked the question but not the challenging tone. Later, the KPK journalist told me that he had been “infuriated” by the “disrespectful” way in which Hamid Mir had responded to his colleague from FATA. Emotion had spurred him to join the debate. See? Egos are driving our journalism.

An ICFJ Alumni, Gharieda Farooq is asking a question. Photo taken by Alumni Fellow

I thought seminars were for listening and analyzing. But this one turned into a television talk show. It seemed some people were desperate to pull others down, just so they could enhance their own reputations.

Another interesting observation: those who were keen to ask many questions were not equally keen to report the answers. Yes, they were free to ask but they didn’t feel the need to write. Surely then, they had lost sight of journalism’s aim: to pass on information to the people, through traditional and social media.

So what did I learn from this summit?

Most importantly, that journalists should be clear about what they want to ask, and should have the skill to design their questions coherently and simply. Our questions must be challenging, but we should ask them in a polite way that shows we’re interested in information – not defamation.

Why Is Critical Media Important For Pakistan's Tribal Region?

The 18th amendment has abolished the “concurrent list,” and gives much more provincial autonomy than is now available to the provinces. If the provinces still have technical problems in having powers to establish local radio, they should demand this from federal government to inform marginalized communities across the country.

Picture source: BLIP.TV

In Peshawar, I met a radio talk show listener Haji Noor Zaman, who is 60 years old and is displaced from Khyber Agency due to operation against militants. I asked: Do you still listen to radio? He said yes, he is listening but only to news bulletins from Radio Deewa.


Radio Deewa is U.S. government-sponsored radio. I asked what’s new. He said America has diverted its cannon facing Baluchistan and has built up its human rights case against Pakistan.

I was surprised to hear this sort of comment from a person, who is illiterate and once had a hashish shop at Khyber Agency. I asked in the same breath, that if they are making human rights case against our country, then why do you listen to it? His answer was that no local radio is providing this sort of critical news and he can’t change the dial as long as they are providing critical local information.

I got his thinking. He wanted to listen to critical media, in the form of radio broadcasting. Readers of newspapers and viewers of the television are luckier than radio listeners in Pakistan because they can read and watch critical media. But the people of FATA don’t have access to critical mainstream media, and using the Internet for information is out of the question as most of the region has no electricity and telephone connections.

One couldn’t do private news business in tribal areas of Pakistan because of laws that prohibit independent local broadcasting. That is the reason the people don’t know much about their surroundings and even they don’t know about most of their rights: rights to good education, rights to good health, rights to freedom of expression, rights to freedom of assembly, rights to legal counseling and so on.

In the absence of local broadcasting, people rely on U.S-run radio services, which offer local and regional information in the Pashtu language. The entire FATA could tell you what happens to Muslims in Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan because they have access to global information through radio networks but they couldn’t tell you what is happening to them because a critical local media doesn’t exist.

A local reporter working for an English newspaper got a phone call from a person who was a native of Khyber Agency, telling him that his daughter’s polio case has been confirmed. After taking details, the reporter asked why you want to tell this story to people. The caller’s response was quite interesting. He wanted to tell the public to accept polio drops – otherwise they too would lose their daughters.

But to me, his choice of medium looks inappropriate, because he was about to convey his message to English readers, who already understand its importance. Ideally, this story should be told to people through radio, which is popular in the border region – and would be broadcast in their own language. Unfortunately, that father doesn’t call the local government radio station because it seemed he has no faith in that radio station.

Local government executives, who benefit profitably from border region, have no interest in encouraging the masses to speak in a community voice against injustice. The executives were allowed by the government to control, instead of serve, the people. The principle was left to them by British Raj and they continued with it to serve themselves instead of people. In fact, the Mullah Radio had grabbed people’s attention as they were critical of system injustices and offered solution to these injustices in the form of Islamic Sharia. We have seen how the Mullah has used radio for his political advantage in Swat and FATA.

The local government in FATA and Swat didn’t see radio as important in reaching the public as the Mullah did. Even today, local government officials still don’t prefer radio to newspapers, because it’s easier to show a newspaper to bosses sitting in Islamabad or Peshawar. Such officials often prefer to read newspapers rather than listen to the radio, which is regarded as a cheap medium for the masses. The irony is that local government has yet to establish radio in Swat, which was devastated by Mullah Radio.

The local media can lure back audiences from foreign radio if they were allowed to play that critical role. They would need to realize that they have competition from abroad, and they have to win local people’s hearts and minds through critical media. They would need to incorporate more important topics such as militancy, security, politics and good governance into the agenda. Today our thin Government and Commercial agency-run local radio lacks all these, even in Pakistan.

Good local radio journalism can’t be established in the region until and unless government ensures freedom and protection, with easy procedure and less expensive licenses. The federal government needs to understand that people have right to expression – to criticize policies – if they are not benefiting the citizens.

The 18th amendment has abolished the “concurrent list,” and gives much more provincial autonomy than is now available to the provinces. If the provinces still have technical problems in having powers to establish local radio, they should demand this from federal government to inform marginalized communities across the country.

Theoretically, everyone agrees that radio can play a very important role in governance and in alleviating systematic injustices. But in practice, they don’t want to give voice to impoverished communities. If we couldn’t establish and empower local radios, then listeners like Haji Noor Zaman can’t change the dial to listen local radio.

Short Bio of Radio Mullahs in North Western Pakistan

The Individuals, who rode airwaves in the North Western Pakistan used radio as an effective tool to get people support for their imposition of ''Sharia'' (Islamic Law) in Swat and Khyber Agency.  Here is the short bio of those:

Source: thenewstribe.com

Maulana Fazlullah started an illegal local FM channel in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa's Swat Valley in 2006. He preaches forcing vice and virtue and has an anti-Western Jihadi stance. He is considered pro-Taliban and a very powerful figure in the area. Though he considers most communication based electronics as "major sources of sin" he transmits broadcasts of his sermons on an illegal local FM radio channel, hence the nickname "Radio Mullah" or "Maulana Radio".

FM signals are relayed from mobile transmitters mounted on motorcycles and trucks. During nightly broadcasts, prohibited activities are routinely declared and violators' names announced for assassination, which often includes beheading.                                                                                                                        Maulana Fazlullah (born 1974) nicknamed the "Radio Mullah" or "Mullah Radio", is the leader of Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), a banned Pakistani Islamic fundamentalist militant group allied to the Pakistani Taliban, that aims to enforce Sharia in the country. He is sometimes referred to as "chief" of the Swat Taliban and is the son-in-law of the TNSM's founder, Sufi Muhammad. (Source Wikipedia.org)

Source: veengle.com

Mufti Munir Shakir (birthdate unknown) is a religious figure operating in northwestern Pakistan, and the founder of the militant group Lashkar-e-Islam. Shakir worked in Kurram Agency until 2004, when he was ejected by tribal elders following a mosque bombing.

Shakir's fame increased after he moved to Bara tehsil, Khyber Agency, where he established an FM pirate radio station. Using this vehicle, he began to promote his religious beliefs, based in Deobandi theology. Among his more controversial pronouncements was his alleged statement that opium is halal, provided it is produced and used for medical purposes^.

Source: news.pkvids.com

Mengal Bagh is said to be a successor of Mufti Munir Shakir, When Shakir was ejected from Khyber Agency, he turned over his radio station to Bagh, a local driver, and Bagh then formed the militant group Lashkar-e-Islam.^[3] Nowadays he is somewhere in the Vally of Tera. But members of LeI are still in Bara and areas of Khyber Agency. (Source Wikipedia.org)

source: irfankas.blogspot.com

                                                                                                       In 2005, Pir Saifur Rahman, a supporter of the more moderate Barelvi school of Islam, established his own FM pirate radio station to compete with Shakir's station. Rivalry between the two clerics increased, causing tribal elders to denounce the two in December 2005 for fomenting sectarian tension. Both clerics then went into hiding, with Shakir handing control of his radio station and Lashkar-e-Islam organization to Mangal Bagh. The hostilities peaked around March 29, 2006, when "hundreds" of Shakir's followers gathered in the Badshahkili neighborhood of Bara tehsil to attack Rahman's followers. (Source Wikipedia.org)

source: khyber.org

Ansar ul Islam (AI) was founded in June 2006 in the Tirah Valley of Khyber Agency by Qazi Mehboob-ul Haq who also belongs to Deobandi theology but had difference with Lashkar-e-Islam.  It was founded to counter the expansion of Lashkar-e-Islam who believes in strict implementation of Sharia.  Qazi Mehboob-ul-Haq used his pirate radio to counter the ideology of Lashkar-e- Islam and his radio is very famous in the Tirah Valley bordering Afghanistan. (Local Source)

Would Social Media Bring Change To Pakistan’s Tribal Area?

Published in the KUT News----Austin, Texas University.

I read on Facebook recently that the Taliban had attacked the Pakistan Naval Base in the southern part of Karachi. Karachi is Pakistan’s biggest shipping port. As I read the story published by the Express Tribune Newspaper, I saw a Tweet about what was going on in Karachi during the attack. To see a Tweet in the midst of a reported piece was astonishing to me. We have still traditional journalism in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. It’s very new there, and people don’t really know or understand citizen journalism. They don’t consider it meaningful when it comes to covering breaking news.

The Page of Tehrik-e-Mutaserin chairman in FATA.

We are familiar with SMS (texting) and we use it all the time to share news about what is happening around the area. Say you heard a sound like a blast, and didn’t know what exactly happened, you would send a text to your friend near that location to find out what happened. But you wouldn’t know what happened until you got his reply. This is one-sided communication.

But social media, like Facebook and Twitter, are different because you can follow things as they happen, or you can see the exact time and date someone posted an update.

This technology has not yet reached the FATA. We don’t really have the Internet in general, because we’re short of electricity, and computer and mobile technology are expensive. It’s fair to say that part of the world is without social media. This is probably ironic for the Americans I’ve met in Austin, Texas; they probably don’t remember what it’s like to be without social media.

Right now, in FATA, we depend on cell phones, but it’s not the same as social media. Things are changing, although it is happening slowly. For instance, the cellular companies have begun giving short packages of Internet access for mobile services so users can check and send email. These are specifically used by students, but not the general public yet. Also, in the areas where there is no military operation against the Taliban, it’s easier to get a cell signal and subscribe to the Internet. But in most of the areas that are under operation or surveillance, signals are jammed.


It’s not surprising that young people are engaging in social media. They’re more involved and capable of handling it because they understand what it’s about and think it’s important. If young people in the FATA areas were given the opportunity to use the Internet and social media, think of what could happen! They might even bring about changes like the Arab Spring. Social media has changed the Arab World and brought down dictatorships and bad governance. Why not in the FATA?

In the FATA areas, mobile phones are also used for many other reasons. Like, to play music, watch comedies, see pictures and movies. People keep all this stuff on memory cards, though, because they want to avoid militants who frequently check phones for “illegal” music and videos. Memory cards are small enough you can hide them, and you can keep your data without fear of it being seen by others. If you get searched, you can easily throw away a memory card.

Cell phones, of course, can be traced. So in FATA people are afraid to talk about Taliban and government politics because they worry that their phones are being traced and taped by either one. I don’t know how the Taliban has got this technology to trace people’s phones but they have it. In the case of the government, it’s because security forces probably got it from the US. But who helped the Taliban purchase it?




If social media and the Internet were to come to the FATA, a few things would quickly change. I believe people would begin to express themselves more freely and people would have access to international organizations and news sites and learn for themselves what’s going on in the rest of the world. Many laws – such as the articles of Frontier Crime Regulation (FCR), which is the system of governing the tribal areas -- would become inactive. It will also provide an online meeting place for many activists to work for human rights and legislation. The activists and lawyers who have worked for years to change the FCR would be able to get their message out to more people – especially young people. And they are the people who are going to change things.

Why Fighting Mullah Radio Is Not Easy

Published in Pakistan Express Tribune:                                                  http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/10611/why-fighting-mullah-radio-is-not-easy/

Picture of the Radio Khyber Studio.

It was May 7, 2006 that, as a team, we started transmission of Radio Khyber. It was located within Khyber Agency, one among seven districts of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the Northwestern part of the country. I started transmitting with a passion to empower local people and give them voices. Voices which had been kept silent since 1901, the day the colonial empire of India promulgated the Frontier Crime Regulation (FCR) in FATA. The FCR was designed by British, who used the region’s own tribal traditions and social psyche to rule ruthlessly over the territory. All of the sections of this law, which to this day are still intact in tribal areas, are authoritarian. One among them was a ban on freedom of expression.

It was ironic for me that even though the ban has never been repealed, the Pakistani government decided to establish four radio stations in FATA. And we journalists were hired -- after years reporting for newspapers.

As the days passed I came to know that the Khyber radio was established to give voice to the government’s activities and developments – not to its people. There was no element of local empowerment. The government was more interested in using the airwaves to fight back against three Mullah Radios, which were at that time broadcasting in the Khyber Agency.

Although we tried to explain that without the buy-in of the local community, there wouldn’t be an audience for Radio Khyber, far less change a whole region’s mind. We argued that what was needed was a way to ensure the station’s credibility for the public – and that was not possible without news and opinion programming. The government was leery - news and views could bring about unrest - disturb law and order - and no local radio stations had been allowed to broadcast local news.

Nafees Afridi is interviewing local tribal on community issue.

Once, a political agent of the Khyber Agency in FATA Secretariat (FATA Secretariat is a body which runs the affairs of tribal areas and appoint political agents to each district of FATA) criticized radio and questioned the outcome of this radio and proposed to shut it down. If a top executive of the tribal district, who has the power of policing and prosecution was not supporting legitimate airwaves and at the same time couldn’t stop illegal firebrand mullah radios, what one could expect other than that to shut it down.

When the person responsible for the radio station tells you there’s no room for local news, how are you supposed to meet your mission of promoting a positive government image? It’s not enough to play music. Also, the hate radio stations banned music, labeling music as Saytan (Devil) work. So if music, in their opinion, is Saytan work and those radio stations still have a large audience, then it doesn’t make sense to fight back by playing music. This is a very basic issue that needs to be addressed.

When those mullah radio stations reported for their followers that the government wanted to modernize tribal women and men on the tip fingers of west by playing music? What happened, they started campaign against gov’t radio. For example, the chief of Lashkar-e-Islam Mangal Bagh twice warned people not to call for radio station because they are promoting vulgarity. But when we started local bulletins—brief news updates -- with the approval of high ranking officer, it went well enough that we had covered the whole military operation in Swat. And the hate radios didn’t have to offer news bulletin and opinion programing to community and therefore, the public turned on to the government station because it was giving fresh news bulletin and news programing. No one threatened us because we were seen as non-biased reporters. Impartiality is the only security guarantee for a journalist in Pakistan. But news bulletins were closed down in March 2010, for security reasons.

The people in FATA are very used to radio broadcasting and they prefer Pashto news bulletins from VOA Pashtu Service, BBC Pashtu, Radio Azadi Afghanistan Pashtu Service, and Radio Mashaal Pashtu. The literate people of FATA also listens BBC Urdu Service, VOA Urdu Service, Voice of Germany Urdu Service, Radio Veritas Asia Urdu Service, Radio China Urdu Service, Radio Tehran Urdu Service and Delhi Radio Pashtu Service.

How could Radio Pakistan compete with that much news broadcasting? If you have a news service that only provides information about the government -- what the President said, what the Prime Minister said and what the Information Minister said – then you are just ignoring community problems. You can’t compete in the tribal areas when there’s so much other, reputable, news broadcasting. The government has lost an important potential audience to Radio Deewa and Radio Mashaal. Those are funded by the US State Department. When I asked Shandi Gul, an office boy who works at Radio Razmak, North Waziristan why he listened Radio Mashaal, his reply was simple: he just wanted to know what was going on in his surroundings. This proves that days of centralized information dissemination has been gone and people are now more concerned about local news.


The total estimated area of FATA is 27,220 km2 (10,509 sq mi). It has been almost covered by foreign radio broadcasters providing news and other programming in the Pashtu and Urdu languages. The expert staffs are drawn from Pakhtun areas, which were earlier neglected in mainstream media of Pakistan, has been putting their head into tribal affairs and also they enjoy respect in their respective communities.

Reporting staff is doing refresher course at University of Peshawar 

The government is fighting a losing battle for the minds of the people in FATA with those four radio stations. One, in Wana, South Waziristan, was closed down in 2009. None of them will ever be successful until and unless local media is allowed to hold accountable the local administration, education, health, agriculture, sericulture, and forestry, public works departments and development projects.

Just talking about patriotism isn’t enough. That doesn’t solve the common man’s problems and if people’s wishes and hopes are not respected now in FATA than they were in the past, then those people will choose to change the dial – and listen to a radio broadcast that does.