Foreign Policy just named Sabeen Mahmud among its Top 100 Global Thinkers

On April 24, Pakistani human rights activist Sabeen Mahmud was shot in cold blood as she left T2F, the liberal space she created for Karachi's arts and activist community. Foreign Policy this week posthumously named Sabeen Mahmud to their top 100 Global Thinkers for 2015 list. This is an intimate profile of Sabeen by her lifelong mentor and friend Zaheer Alam Kidvai.

I don't know where to begin.

Sabeen Mahmud (or Sab, as I always called her) was a girl I met when she was just a little over 14 years old. She came to my company to learn about computers. and just stayed on.

We became friends about 6 months after we met. In another 6 months I started considering her like my daughter.

In the first few years I was her mentor. In the last few years she was my mentor.

In my 75 years I have not come across anyone like her

What was she like?

She loved sport. Was one of the finest athletes in her school. Played baseball. Came home and played cricket, on the street, with mohalla servants and their children. I saw her play, she was superb. A cricket ball was always in her office - and she often used it to play wherever she had the opportunity.

She loved music. All sorts of western pop and classical. I introduced her to jazz, Indian classical, and qawwali. She adored them, became fascinated with them over time. Her interest in Persian became immense and, in a few years, she was able quote a verse from Rumi and others at just the appropriate moment.

She started speaking in Urdu with a Bombay/Calcutta accent because her maternal grandparents came from there. But, like everything else she was fascinated by, she learnt more and more, ending up speaking Urdu like a Lucknow-vala. She hated her school because they never really taught Urdu well.

She was an Apple fan, having fallen in love with it at her first encounter at our office. She adored Steve Jobs. There was a painting of him in her office room.

Sab would come to my office after school or on Saturdays, and even come and work there when she came home from college on vacation. She programmed brilliantly but decided she wanted to learn to how to repair computers. The boys in the hardware team disliked that. But she practiced really hard. In 3 months the head of the IT department came and told me that she was better than everyone at soldering and repairing things.

On her college vacation Sab, now 17, was sitting in my office while I was talking to my manager about the amounts of money people owed us. When he left, she said to me that I needed someone who could get that money back, someone who could follow it up.

I called the manager and said Sabeen was going to run the company from next week when I left for Hong Kong for my holiday. He'd have to take all her instructions since she would be replacing me. She laughed. But I said that's true. Go and see how difficult it is to get money back. When I come back I'll see how good you are. She said this can't work. What if I don't get the money. I said then at least she'd learn about the trade, too.

I left for a whole month, with Sab in charge. I told her to call me every weekend and tell me the details. My office staff said I was making a mistake. But Sab, slightly afraid at first, went to town.

When I got back she had collected every penny that was owed to us. Wow!

That year she went to college and was featured in a weekly magazine as a smart young kid. When they asked her what she was going to do after college, she said she'd work in my company.

I sent her a message saying this was the first job application I had ever seen appear in the press. She joined me, officially, when she came back.

I had just started a Multimedia division, which soon became another company for me. She joined that and I will always remember the work she did there. Our finest CD (Faiz' Aaj Kay Naam) could not have been done without her.

She and I worked all day and wrote to the software pundits and got ideas. How do we get videos on it? How can we reduce audio files? Very few answers came. This was 1998. There were no mp3s and very few small videos on a couple of CDs. We did all of it ourselves and the Faiz CD became a 16-hour piece instead of the 2-hour piece we had initially conceived. The graphic design was hers. The transferring to Windows was hers. None of us wanted to work on Windows and we said to Sab: you're the youngest, you work on it. She did.

The CD was sold everywhere and loved.

In later years we decided we needed a bigger company and formed BITS (Beyond Information Technology Solutions) in Karachi. About two years later, I called the team to my house and told Sab that she had done so much for me and the company that I had decided to give her something: I gave her half the company as a gift.

She became Co-Director.

A few years later she came to me and said I have worked half my life with you. We'll put this company online, remove the staff, find them jobs, and I'd like to start a small venture where people will come, talk to each other, become friends. There's got to be peace.

I agreed to work with her on that and gave a whole office to her on the second floor. That's what T2F stands for: The Second Floor.

.....

She had been busy preparing for Dil Phaink. I used to see her for a few minutes each day and she promised to spend more time with me when she came back from the UK.

On April 24 she showed up at my house and said she was going to spend a few minutes with. That visit went on for over 2 hours. We talked of T2F and more. I asked her why she was doing the Balochistan event that evening and she said she'd just introduce it and go back to her work. There were no threats. A friend had asked this be done now, so Sab asked her to handle it and moderate it.

I saw her during the event. I left with her. My car was parallel to hers and then I turned left, waving to her. I had moved only two buildings away when her mother called and said they'd been shot. They were rushed to hospital. I got there a couple of minutes later. Sab had died on the spot. According to doctors, she died in under a second.

.....

Sab travelled all around the world for conferences and meetings. and most people learnt about the love she got on every one of those trips only after her assassination. Memorials were held everywhere. The Tunis Symphony Orchestra composed a piece for her (it's on YouTube).

She was not afraid of death and said so in many of her interviews. She wrote to Marvi Mazhar, T2F's new director and a close friend of hers, the following:

"I think that we are like stars. Something happens to burst us open; but when we burst open and think we are dying; we're actually turning into supernova. And then we look at ourselves again, we see that we're suddenly more beautiful than we ever were before!"

The 25 years I spent with her were remarkable. Since everything I've written is purely my own view of her, you could read more about her on the internet.