tl;dr : @PIDEpk plagiarised something I wrote and attributed it to @nadeemhaque. But do stick around for the full story, it's very interesting.

Yesterday at breakfast, as I was browsing Twitter, looking at the #EconFest day 2 program thinking about what session to attend, ...

and prepping some comments and questions for my own panel, I saw a tweet in which @nadeemhaque was quoted. The quote looked incredibly familiar. I double checked what I had written for the concept note for my panel and saw that the quote had been picked straight from there!

I immediately texted the person at PIDE with whom I was coordinating and told him that this isn't cool and to please ask the social media team at PIDE to take this down but of course they were welcome to use it to advertise the panel for which it was written. No response.

So I run into him later at the #EconFest venue and I asked him if he saw my message. He politely tells me that this opinion is something that they've been saying for a while so he doesn't think it's a problem. I can't believe what I'm hearing. But I have a panel to moderate so...

I think maybe just let this go. He offers a gentle "if you didn't like this (agar aap ko bura laga), i'm sorry". I smile, say ok, and move on to meet my fellow panelists. Panel goes great, and I'm grateful to all those who attended and to the panelists who made time for it.

And once again my apologies to all those in the audience, especially students, whose questions I could not take. This was my first time moderating such a panel and obviously I have a lot to learn.

So, I get home back to Lahore at night and see this tweet by PIDE, and realize...

that by the time I saw the tweet at breakfast, the quote had already showed up in Business Recorder. Check out the last paragraph.

brecorder.com/news/40270515

I was pissed at this point. Again, I thought you know what, this isn't worth it. I'm having some health concerns and I need to spend some time addressing them. No point creating a fuss after a great weekend with friends, colleagues. I'll let it go.

So, lo and behold, today I wake up to this tweet. For a second day running, they ran my words in a paper and attributed them to @nadeemhaque but somehow managed to mangle them this time.

Here's the link to the BR article from today.
brecorder.com/news/40270639

Here are the links to the tweets I've shared in this thread.

https://twitter.com/PIDEpk/status/1718239352118222998

https://twitter.com/PIDEpk/status/1718582305915347447

https://twitter.com/PIDEpk/status/1718834235736228165

Even if the BR stories and tweets get taken down, I have the BR stories in print because abba subscribes to BR. I will be framing them and putting them up in my office. Everyone who asks about them will hear the story of PIDE plagiarising me.

The little shield souvenir was going in the trash but it means a lot to amma who has worked so hard all her life and cherishes all my successes big or small, so I'll keep it in my office, right next to the framed BR stories.

Why create a fuss over this? Because writing and speaking is all I know how to do. And even those two things boil down to one thing: working with words. So if that's all I know how to do, you can be damn sure that I will protect and guard my words jealously.

Good luck getting me involved in anything to do with PIDE again, events, magazines, whatever.

Tata! 🫡👋