On November 3, 2007, President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, declared “Emergency Plus” in the country and used it to curtail basic rights such as freedom of speech, movement and expression. The plethora of new, private television channels that had, for most of a decade, dazzled our minds by their sheer numbers, were shut down. The talk shows, the commentary shows, the cooking shows – all gone. And so, the Conversation was gone.

November 3 doesn’t have any direct relevance or causal relationship to the creation of Chay Magazine. I only mention it because it made me aware of something: in my entire lifetime, I had never before seen in Pakistan this level of open discourse. It wasn’t that, pre-Emergency, we spoke of everything in the world, freely, openly, happily. But we had started conversations: politics, covert military operations, health, marriage, women’s rights, law, HIV awareness. We had started conversations about these things. And then that conversation was killed.