IDENTITY My sense of identity has changed quite a lot in the past 10 years. I grew up very much as an expat kid - in the Middle East. At that time, I had a very strong sense of connection with Pakistan. My parents would take us to see my grandparents [in Pakistan] every year; it was a strong part of my life. But then I went to boarding school [in Britain] and I suppose I didn't really identify with anywhere particularly strongly. In the last 10 years I've based my working life in London, I'm married to someone who is British by birth and our children were all born there. I have certainly realised over time that now I am British, which is something I didn't feel at the start.
I feel very connected to the east. I still go to Pakistan a lot. I sometimes go there for work. It's [important] to have a reason to keep up the connection beyond your family.
I grew up in a family that cared about the world around them. My father's a doctor and my mother was a TV producer in the early days of Pakistani television. These were the days before 24-hour international news but the BBC World Service was a strong part of my childhood. I remember [my parents], classically, telling me about the famine in Cambodia so I would finish my food. I remember overhearing them talk about the assassinations of Anwar Al-Sadat and Mahatma Gandhi.
I was brought up as a Muslim but I can't say I thought very much about it in my teenage years. A few things have made me more conscious about preserving that as part of my life. Firstly, the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 attacks [in London]; they made me think in a much more concerted fashion about that. I'm the mother of three boys and I want to pass on whatever is part of me. It would be a nightmare for my children to grow up feeling that I'd never talked about Islam and for them to wonder who they were later on in life. I speak to my children in Urdu, their father speaks to them in English. The rest of their world is in English but I really try to give them a grounded sense of knowing where they come from.
IT BEGAN AT 4AM My lucky break in terms of my on-air career was when I joined the BBC as a producer in the BBC World newsroom. I became a business producer and one of my editors knew I had done the odd bit of reporting, so he said, 'Would you fancy doing a one-month stint as a reporter?' I said, 'Great.' After he said, 'Would you like to try a bit of presenting?' Obviously you have to say 'yes' because nobody is ever going to ask you again, but it was quite a daunting prospect. I read a tiny bit of the business news - I didn't realise how nervous I'd be until I got up there. One thing led to another and I was soon presenting fairly regularly. Then I came to Asia and launched the Asia Business Report. But, it started with an editor who had a gap for the 4am shift.
In my brief, because it's so truly international, you have to keep abreast of absolutely everything. You go on holiday for a week and ignore the news at your peril. So it's the challenge of reading as much as you can and talking to as many people as you can. If you don't enjoy or want to know more about international news, I don't think you could really do this job, because the homework is endless.
