The world will not be the same without Daniel Pearl. In case you haven’t heard of him, Danny was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, who was abducted on February 23^rd in Karachi. Videotape evidence released by his captors suggests he was brutally killed.

As a professional, he is best remembered for finding the nuanced realities behind the stories about the Middle East. Yet, reading about his short but interesting life, he comes across as a regular guy, which makes his abduction and murder even more senseless. He did not represent anyone. He had no agenda. He was just doing his job. He played the violin, loved to cook, and exchanged e-mail banter with colleagues like so many of us. The Wall Street Journal carried a story about an e-mail he sent someone who had apologized for doing a story about Pakistan although Danny was assigned that region. He responded "Okay, clean slate, but let me say this: I'm going to Pakistan Saturday, and from that point on, anybody who types the word Pakistan, Pakistani, Paki, Pak, Coldpak or Backpak without consulting me stands NO CHANCE AT ALL of getting illicit Cipro."

He was also the kind of writer who found the quirky angle, questioned accepted wisdom, and always seemed to bring out the human side of the country or people he covered. He wrote, for instance about the irony of how Western pop music –even Dire Straits’ "Sultans of Swing"--flourishes in Tehran, of underpaid pearl divers in the Gulf, and about the Grameen bank in Bangladesh. If you saw an odd finance story about a schoolteacher called Aziz, filing a lawsuit against the BCCI in 1981, it was classic Daniel Pearl. The story about the bank is seen through the lens of the former Oxford Street branch manager unable to get a job because of being branded as an ex-employee of a rogue bank. In the late nineties, writing of the U.S. bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, Daniel tried to pry open the truth by not accepting the official version. His sharp eye is trained on a scoop of soil, obtained from the site of the bombed plant. He questioned the finding that it contained traces of a chemical that could be used to manufacture nerve gas.

So why would any terrorist organization want to extinguish the life of a journalist who is their best chance of giving them a voice? From the outset, it appeared that those who abducted him were looking for a way of rationalizing the kidnapping. The group calling itself "The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" accused him of being a CIA spy, demanded the release of Pakistani prisoners and the return of the Afghanistan’s ambassador.

The journalist is often regarded as a cultural representative –or a cultural interference. In Beijing last year, a photo journalist was beaten and dragged through the streets by the Chinese police because he was photographing a protester against the 2008 Olympics. He was an American, but on assignment for a French news agency, AFP. Journalists are the transmitters of super-charged information that connect and divide the world. They are mistakenly treated as those who shape foreign policy, when all they do is bounce the signals from source to recipient and back. If they shape public opinion, it is because they provide us with an extra pair of eyes, or act as filters that make sense of people we are not familiar with, or events we are not privy to. Journalists like Pearl are also easy targets. They are genuine, trusting and idealistic.

Intimidating journalists isn’t a new phenomenon. Journalists know what they are up against. In September last year, a British reporter was arrested by the Taliban and accused of spying. The people who mailed Anthrax to the media took leading journalists head on, but achieved nothing In the their twisted logic, those who desperately need to broadcast their agenda, believe they can do it by attacking the transmitter. In this world, the journalist often becomes the scapegoat. But history has shown that ‘killing the messenger’ never expunges the message.

Words today evoke extraordinary power, no matter how they get ‘published’. They hover over our lives, taunting us with the ideas they contain. "Terrorism against the idea" is the new form of terrorism, wrote Abie Hoffman in "The Independent" newspaper in London. She was writing about Salman Rushdie, but he could have very well been referring to Pearl. For the moment, the tragedy is not so much that of how cruelly a stellar journalist was silenced, but how a life was taken for absolutely no purpose at all.

Daniel Pearl was the embodiment of the another idea, the idea that people were inherently good, and no different from us, irrespective of their circumstances or ideology. One of his friends recalls a song that Danny wrote for his son a few days before he was born. Its title: "The world is not a bad place." Danny ought to have known the irony. He moved in and out of what most of us would label ‘bad places’, but he found and wrote of great humanity inside. It is a lesson for us, who often brand people and events, to continue to look for those ‘good places’ because they do exist. That will be our greatest tribute to him.