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I felt humiliated and decided to work hard as education was the only hope for my family. He was so angry that he even said that I won’t even be able to pass the Class 10 exams – something that my Class 10 teacher also told me. He told me how much he has sacrificed for our future and that if I fail, everything would collapse. My father was really upset with my academics and one day we had a big son-father talk that almost all middle class families have. What was the turning point? Why did you suddenly become interested in academics? Phir bhi chup chup kar baat ho jaati thi idhar udhar. As a teenager, if I’d approach a girl at school, my sister would either scare her away or embarrass me, and complain to my father. My sister was always keeping an eye over my ‘not so sincere’ school life. I flunked Class 6 and suddenly I was in the same class as my sister. Apart from one or two subjects, I either failed at the rest or got around 35% – the passing score. I loved cricket and spent time with my new friends. Had we not migrated to Bangalore, life would have probably been very different today.Īlso read: Backstory: Journalism Is About Fact Gathering and Fact Checking, Which Is Why Zubair Is a JournalistĮven after moving to the big city and joining a missionary school, I had no interest in studies.
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Eventually, she succeeded in convincing them. She had to face some resistance from my father’s family because it was a tough choice back then to move to the city. Then, my mother decided that we should shift to Bangalore. When I passed Class 1, my mother insisted on sending my younger sister and me to a good school in Hosur.įor three years, my sister and I traveled 60 km everyday to Hosur and back in a government bus for our primary education. My father was a farmer and he had a small fruit and vegetable business in Hosur. I am from a remote village called Thalli in Tamil Nadu, some 70 km from Bangalore. There’s a lot of speculation online about your past, so let’s start from the beginning. And we told him not to tell anyone that I am his father. We could not send him to school for many days. My son proudly tells everyone that I am his father. My parents, my wife and kids were scared. What was the most painful part of this entire ordeal? In fact, we received more financial help from them despite no appeal in the last two months. Our donors did not withdraw support despite threats.
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Pratik was targeted as well, but he maintained calm. Apart from keeping the work of Alt News afloat, they helped the lawyers prepare for the cases. They were constantly sharing updates of the cases and working round the clock to arrange local lawyers for five different places in UP, and also in Delhi. My family was scared but Pratik and his mother stood with them and called them daily. To know that so many people felt that my arrest was an attack on their lives and freedom is very overwhelming. I am grateful for the immense support I received from friends and well-wishers who stood by me.
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Read the excerpts here.Ĭongratulations on your freedom. The Wire caught up with Zubair after his release on bail for an interview. While Zubair has earned lakhs of followers through his work, he has also made some very formidable enemies. Amongst other things, Zubair is known for his tweets and instant fact checks, often disrupting emerging narratives in Big Media. In recent years, Alt News – a small team of over a dozen fact checkers led by two former techies, Mohammad Zubair and Pratik Sinha – has emerged as a giant slayer when it comes to busting fake news and motivated political propaganda. Chandrachud described as a “vicious cycle”. After 23 days of being caught in a cycle of arrest, bail and re-arrest, the Supreme Court granted him bail for all pending and cases filed in relation to the same set of tweets, thereby ending what Justice D.Y. Immediately after his arrest in June, Zubair received massive support from all over the world and #IStandWithZubair emerged as a top trend globally. Mohammad Zubair, the 39-year-old fact-checker whose recent journalistic work made the biggest headlines internationally and garnered a lot of attention towards the growing culture of genocidal hate speech and violence against Muslims in India, eventually became a headline himself when he was arrested in as many as seven cases one after the other for alleged hateful tweets.