Saad Khan looses life in Unilever / Mindshare Reality Show accident

Posted by Teeth Maestro, August 28, 2009

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, 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 drowned

Saad 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 attention and apparently 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 hoping to have Unilever cough up full responsibility, but at the moment they feel that 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.

While this story is slowly making its way around, it seems that some serious counter efforts were made against Farhan Janjua of Aarpix, who first broke the story, WebHostingPad suddenly issued Aarpix a short notice disabling his website for "nature of content" [do have a look at Aarpix and see if you find any objectionable material] they then told Farhan to quickly move his data with immediate effect or else they will delete his content [4 years of hard work] – panicking the poor chap found a local friend willing to help him, but as soon as the DNS prorogation started 'someone' called Farhan's friend and asked questions about Aarpix and if they can possibly 'have the owners cell phone number' worrying for the safety of his friends Farhan resolved to buy a sever internationally and used their support services to help salvage the at-risk data. As I write this post at 2am Aarpix is slowly coming back online.

I strongly believe these scare tactics must be condemned, Unilever/Mindshare should be held accountable for this accident and must be forced to offer compensation to the grieved family with immediate effect. I do not mean merely doling out a paltry 1 lac rupees to the affected family but stress a far more expensive compensation to widow and the four kids who now have a life to live without the primary bread earner and literally no husband or father to look after them. May Allah give them the courage and patience to recover from this tragic incident

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 at epaper.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?

UPDATE 2: The missing image from the epaper edition of Dawn.com has been fixed, one of their adminstrators personally called me up to inform me that it was a site-wide problem for that particular day, and the website administrators are fixing it with immediate effect, he has reassured me that there was no foul play. It was an Obituary ad and does not come under the editorial control of Dawn, even if they wanted to