FAREWELL: Abdul Khader receiving a memento from Dr Ravindran on the behalf of Payyannur Souhrida Vedi (PSV)at a send-off function held recently.
By Ramesh Mathew
Kakkulath Abdul Khader’s journey as a news reporter spanned four decades. The Payyannur native from north Kerala, who may perhaps be the first Indian to serve as a journalist in Qatar, starting from towards the end of 1975 is bidding goodbye to Doha next week, after performing his duties at different levels for four decades.
Needless to say it is doubtful if any other media person who works here knows as much about this country as this 67-year-old veteran has seen and experienced. Recalling the times he used to flock almost daily to what he refers to as “the one and only link” those days for a news crazy person as he, the Souq Post Office, the Keralite recounted how tiresome and herculean was the task of collecting and sending local reports for his newspaper in India.
“Initially, my reports were used once or twice on the pages of Chandrika newspaper, where I had a brief stint before I moved to the Gulf,” said the journalist while recollecting how he worked to make it possible to file stories for different newspapers in the course of time.
The reports those days, he recollected, were mostly those concerning the events and functions involving Indian expatriates, mainly those from Kerala. Being a person from the media, organisers made extra care to bring all such “developments” to his attention even if he was not present at the function, he remembers. “However, the difficulties started only after receiving the inputs of such events from those who would bring their news,” he said while recollecting how he filed reports after his day’s work in the electricity department.
Virtually on every second day, I also had to make ‘trunk’ calls to India, a phenomenon which may not be even known to many in the present generation, recalled Abdul Khader while explaining the pains one had to take those days for filing stories. Other than public functions, there were some places where community members used to informally gather in the evenings and they also served as news points, he said.
Apart from the post office, journalists also had to go either to the airport or to any of the travel agencies in the city virtually every second day to identify passengers travelling to Kozhikode or somewhere in the Malabar region. “Since flights to Kozhikode from the Gulf region started only towards the end of the 80s, most of the passengers had to take either two or three flights to reach Kerala those days,” he remembered. While some of them carried his news packets voluntarily others had to be persuaded through some of their common friends.
On reaching home, sometimes the “local” journalists in their home town or its nearest area directly collected such news packets or the traveller directly delivered it to the office of the newspaper in Kozhikode or Kannur, depending on the proximity of their house to one of the two offices, recalled Abdul Khader.
“Most probably there may not be any other journalist in the country who has travelled either to the previous Doha International Airport or the post offices in Souq or the West Bay as me,” he recalls. On many occasions, Late K C Varghese, who arrived later in the country took me to the post office in his car for sending my reports to India. Those days, Varghese used to send reports to Malayalam newspaper Malayala Manorama.
“In short, daily travellers to Kerala, especially those from Malabar, served as my daily news couriers until the mid-90s, when communication facilities began to improve,” recollected Abdul Khader who has been serving as president of Payyannur Souhrida Vedi (PSV), an expatriate forum since its inception more than 10 years ago.
In the initial days when repatriating the bodies of expatriates in the event of death was an extremely difficult process, Abdul Khader and his long-time friend Ahmed Pathirippatta joined hands with late Abdul Khader Haji (Hajikka) to help out those who sought their assistance.
While remaining thankful to all those who helped him in pursuing his career as a journalist, Abdul Khader specially recalled the assistance rendered by his present employers, Bombay Silk Centre, for letting him carry on with his journalistic interests even while delivering duties as an accountant with the group, which also runs more companies.
