Former Arab News staffer passes away
P.K. Mohamed, who edited Arab News opinion pages for 24 years from 1984 to 2008, died in India on Thursday.
He was 77 and leaves behind a wife, son Mohamed Asad, and two daughters, Fouzia and Hasina. He was suffering from heart ailments for quite some time and had two angioplasties while in the Kingdom.
He died while undergoing open-heart surgery at MIMS Hospital in Kozhikode. All his children and most of his relatives, including his favorite nephew Abdul Haleem Nalamkandy, were by his side when he breathed his last because of post-surgery complications.
He was a quiet man, and his colleagues at the newspaper always saw him bent over his keyboard in a corner of the Arab News newsroom in Al-Faisaliya, working slowly and steadily, editing, fine-tuning and pruning the dozens of "Letters to the Editor" and opinion articles that would come his way.
He was known for writing satirical pieces and wry humor. He always ensured that objectivity was maintained on the opinion pages. He would never take a letter that praised any article in the newspaper unless he had another one that criticized it. He always tried to strike a balance and that is what kept the readers hooked to the newspaper's letters page.
His colleagues knew him by his abbreviation P.K., which stood for Panambara Kottamparamb. He was very punctual with his prayers and often led them at the Arab News makeshift mosque.
Before landing in Saudi Arabia in 1983, the bespectacled P.K. was employed by the South Central Railway (SCR) in India. A thoroughbred Keralite, he was posted to Vijayawada in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. From there he wrote two columns every week for the famous Shankar’s Weekly magazine. Both columns were under two different names: P.K. and Razya.
He wrote at a time when media freedom was under attack in India during the Emergency imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Shankar’s Weekly, a magazine founded by the legendary Indian political cartoonist P. Shankar Pillai, was highly critical of this attempt at censorship, and was therefore closed by the government in 1975 at the height of the Emergency.
At Arab News, besides editing the opinion pages, P.K. wrote a humorous/satirical column in the weekend’s Review section. The name of the column was Second Thoughts.
Despite being at the newspaper for nearly 24 years, he did not socialize much and few non-Keralite expatriates outside Arab News knew him. He was in that sense a quintessential journalist who kept away from the limelight.
He will be buried in Calicut on Friday. Arab News staff members offer their condolences to his bereaved family and pray that Allah grants him Paradise.