As we were planning to organize our annual event ‘Shaam e Sukhan 2017’, our dear friend, a senior member of our team, Salman Haider went missing on Jan 06, 2017. That was a devastating incident not only for the the TW team, but also for his family, friends, and innumerable fans.
Safeer and Salman (the organizers of Shaam e Sukhan) had planned to do a session of Urdu humor ‘Mazaq Hi Mazaq Mien’. TW team, after much deliberations, decided to go ahead with the annual feature with one change. The event would be dedicated to Salman Haider. The team dug out Salman’s writings – both poems and prose, and chosen quite a few of them.
Salman was not the only one who went missing. There were quite a few other bloggers who were also missing. They all had one common characteristic. They were critical of state policies of using brute force to eliminate dissent. The missing bloggers, including Salman, were accused of being agents of enemies and also accused of posting blasphemous content on social media.
Though it was a difficult time for Salman’s fans, yet so many turned up to pay tribute to Salman in the National Press Club, Islamabad, on Jan 15, 2017. TW team had selected a few poems and blogs, but many fans came up with their own selections, and yet many other had written poems or articles on Salman Haider. It was probably for the first time that TW Team decided to drop the Event Agenda and turn it into an open-mic kind of event.
Some of the texts read out at the occasion were:
- Bach Ke Mangu Bach Ke
- Adalat Ke Naam Aik Khat
- Bangalan Bua Ka Beta
- Badnaseeb Maaon Ke Badnaseeb La’al
- Hamaray Apnay Shoodar
- Amreeka Se Likha Gaya Column
- Damagh Ki Monchen and
- many more
Many people took part in reading and recitation of blogs and poems. Some of them were:
- Farnood Alam
- Nusrat Zehra
- Kashif Farooqui
- Safeer Ullah Khan
- Ammar Khalid
- Imran Iftikhar
- Muhammad Usman Khan
- Hishaam Muzaffar
- Fizza Hasan and
- many more
