Everything is very personal-political, as it should be
Sports after all reflects society and the world we live in, it gives us heroes, it gives us villains and conviction a bit more real than any fictional work
If you are choosing to read this, then I must congratulate you for choosing to be actively political. I think reading is a revolutionary act too. Just know that I think its cool, just like the cat below.
I think reading posts of disenchanted legacy media correspondent is super radical. Its written in earnest and its read in earnest.
It was only last week that I finally understood my place as a journalist who happens to be a woman and who happens to write on sports.
It has been a week since I truly understood that being a woman, in sports writing is a very political statement.
In fact it is so political that as I am typing this I am stopping every two seconds because of the weight it bears.
The ideal to just write and earn a living, then to write as a woman in sports and earn a living, then to demand for a fair wage because being a woman and not actively participating into the practice of ‘selling oneself’ is also very political.
What if my selling point was always ‘not selling myself’?
Sports after all reflects society and the world we live in, it gives us heroes, to gives us villains a bit more real than any fiction. It gives us legends to feed on the stories of. It gives us cultural references too. So I guess I can finally write like everything is very personal-political, as it should be.
It has been a week since a meeting with the Editor-in-Chief of my publication who had no problem exploiting my passion for journalism and shaming me for asking for a fair wage.
It has been a week that I have had an unbearable ache in my nape. I am in need of writing this.
I think this need is very political too, dictated by the way media industry works or just find it in the convolutions of our brains to make things look better than they are and make them sell.
It’s been almost 15 years that I have been a published writer and I am still finding it hard to find my voice and not tell a story.
Its good to just not tell a story sometimes,not analyse, not srategise for a bit and just listen to the effect of the capitalistic, misogynistic, post and a very grim world on us.
For just a bit, it is not about analysing, but just about sharing.
I want this space to be such. Where I can engage in just limning the sports landscape through a lens of someone who is inherently competition averse and yet cannot take her eyes of the people who actively choose to carve careers in sports while holding a citizenship of a country that does not respect sports, literature, music, science or respectable life for that matter.
Its hell of a political statement by these athletes, big or small, accomplished or just getting there to carry on.
To not flee from their roots, to stand their ground, to stick around and to just carry on.
I have not written anything in more than two months, before that I became reluctant to write because the culture in the newspaper that I write for is toxic for mental health, because the paper is affiliated with another renowned newspaper from New York whose name towards the end rhymes and has utterly biased coverage when it comes to the genocide in the Middle East and complete disregard for people of coulr in general.
Anyways..this is going to be my first post.
My first post on May 24 2024, its meant to heal me and you too if you stick around, and the athletes and history that I will be sharing here.
It is also around two months before the 2024 Paris Olympics. I am the first female journalist from Pakistan to have gotten an Olympics accreditation so there’s that.
Many stories on that front…I guess I’ll finally be able to write things my way.
I am wrapping this up for now because I have four stories to write and hopefully I’ll find you here to read them, if you are reading this that is.
Best,
Natasha