In a very shocking development a young 32 year old person, father of four kids looses his life during the filming of a reality show sponsored by Unilever and being produced by their advertising agency Mindshare. Saad Khan was a game show contestant and the host/model Amina Sheikh, who also is the model of Clear Shampoo, she gave an underwater challenge to Saad and during the execution of the stunt he apparently lost control, struggled and pleading for help could not recover, the inadequate safety personal and the equipment could not react in time and eventually he drownedSaad Khan, 32 year old young man from Karachi and a father of four kids is sadly the victim, his body was returned to Karachi for burial two days back and the infuriated family has been running from pillar to post but it seems for some awkward reason it fails to catch the media frenzy and no media house is ready to ‘run the story’. It is a known fact that the media in Pakistan is usually head over heals on every other lame ass political slander, but surprisingly in Saad’s case this case of gross neglect is not worthy of even a short news item. Might this have anything to do with the influence of Unilever and Mindshare who are giant spenders armed with enormous advertisement budgets. Initially Saad’s family was furious to ensure that Unilever coughs up the responsibility, but at the moment the most important thing to look forward to is the future of Saad’s four kids who have no future.
Aarpix: These details are given by a 2nd cousin of Saad on the condition of anonymity. Saad was 31, 6′2″, handsome man was employed at RBS (formerly ABN AMRO). Saad live a very ambitious and thrilled life. In his professional life, he had accomplished more than his age. He had well established career and didn’t participate for the prize money or anything. He was rather very thrilling and adventurous. He was disqualified from the show after a few days but was then called by the death on a wild card entry.
He did not lose his balance in the water – he was an excellent swimmer but the doctors in Thailand after carrying out an autopsy told that his muscle had pulled and he had some weight tied up to his feet as part of the challenge and so could not make it back up. He was under water for about 6 minutes.
Saad has left a widow and 4 kids: Oldest one is 7 years old, then twins of age 5.5 and then the youngest who is only 1.5 years of age.
UPDATE: Just noticed that Dawn.com is also playing some mischief in this incident as well, the above Obituatry message was published in Sunday’s edition of Dawn, 23rd August, 2009. If you scroll to page 14 Karachi Metropolian section within the online archive hosted atepaper.dawn.com you do see this image in small print, but clicking on Saad Khan’s Obituary, and it comes with an error “The Article image is missing”, might this be an accidental mistake, possible but aint it too coincidental?
Source: http://teeth.com.pk/blog/2009/08/28/saad-khan-unilever-mindshare-accident
I suppose the family of Saad should file the case in the court and Media should help the family to bring this case to the notice of the Nation.
ReplyDeleteThis is a real sad story. If i am not wrong mindshare is owned by Mr TAK. And if this is the case then then it will be very difficult to handle the things in an easy manner. I suggest to find someone strong and already willing to go against these people, may be from the ruling or opposition sides. But one thing that can be done is a campaign for saad's family support.
ReplyDeleteFor them it was all a show. They would pay lac or 10 lacs and their duty will be over.
ReplyDeleteCorporate giants have very, very long histories of manipulating facts and their budgets and contacts with media ensure we hardly ever hear of them. Same is what happened in this case when Unilever exercised their muscle over the so-called “Independent” media of Pakistan and for a few days successfully buried the news of the so-called “Accident” that took the life of a Pakistani Citizen, Saad Khan. (Please see attachment for details).
If this was a political issue… the media would have gone bananas so much so as to ensure we got sick of that particular news item because all the channels kept running sad and depressing and horrifying images over and over again.
But because this case involves Mindshare and Unilever … HUGE SPENDERS …and well lets not forget Mindshare’s other clients… Telenor… Shell… Caltex…. etc. They simply can’t go against the hand that feeds them.
We need to be collectively much, much more informed and vocal before we can expect them to give a damn about accountability. And we need to be collectively braver. But how many will stand up to take a stand against these mega-billionaire corporations?
This is the real face of corporations. Everything is Business. If left to them … they would merely say in the words of ‘The Turk’ Solozzo (from the Godfather) ‘Hey its just business, nothing personal.’
Please forward this news item as much as possible to create awareness to counter the efforts of the insensitive media and Unilever management to hide / manipulate this news. They should be held accountable for hiding facts and for influencing channels of communication thereby creating deception and injustice. The unethical practice of Unilever PR trying to sugar-coat the reality has to be stopped.
Sameera Hashim