 This is Islamabad today for Think Tech Hawaii. In today's episode, we're going to be speaking about arts and creativity. I'm your host, Hamza Rehfaza-San, and today we're going to be speaking to journalists and author, Mahina Usmani, on what she feels about the status of art and creativity in the country and as well, whether or not art and creativity can actually have a positive or negative impact on social change within the country. Mahina Usmani, thank you so much for joining me on the show. Hamza, thank you for having me on your show. All right, Mahina. So let's start off with a very basic question here. What do you think is the status of art and creativity in the country? Do you think there needs to be significant improvement? Is there mediocrity or is it a bit of both? I think there are very few exceptions to the general rule of mediocrity, which reigns in Pakistan, where literally arts is concerned. And it is not something that is confined only to the arts. You see every institution is suffering from mediocrity, whether it's the bureaucrats that we see, my father was a bureaucrat and we were just talking the other day with my family and some other people who that the kind of bureaucrats you had in those days, maybe when our parents were thriving in their careers, it was a completely different setup, completely different standard. So I would say that there's mediocrity, which is spread everywhere in Pakistan and the literary arts unfortunately is not immune from that. And the problem is that people feel obliged to praise mediocrity in the name of patriotism, which is what concerns me. Because if you praise mediocrity, then how will any improvement or any healthy change come about? People who are mediocre will continue doing mediocre stuff because they're being placed with the skies. And if you point out the flaws or you point out that there's some issues here, then you are immediately deemed to be unpatriotic. What do you think can be done about it? I think what we need to do is start speaking the truth and take a good long look at ourselves in the mirror and see where are we making the mistakes and where are we suffering and where are we not seeing where the gaps are. And for example, I like to give you an example here. Now, when I say that to my friends in the creative arts, I myself am an author and I've been a writing and I've been a journalist. And every time I point out this, they tell me that, oh, Pakistan, you know how it is, things are here, there's so many curves, there's so many problems. So I tell them, look at Iran, look at our neighbor. We do not have the kind of censorship they have. And look at the award-winning films and plays and short films, like even a minute long film of theirs is like stunning and it's impacted. They win awards everywhere. And they even have films and plays that are set in like two rooms. The entire action rewards are in two rooms. It's not like you don't need a massive current Johar kind of set to make an amazing film. You can have it, but it's the writing that is suffering. I think we have a problem with our screenwriters. We have a problem with our plots, our characters. There's no depth. If you look back at our plays from the past, people do talk about that, you know, plays like TV plays, like Haseena Moyan's plays. All these plays, I mean, they had amazing plots. They had believable characters, realistic characters. You don't have realistic characters now. There's no interest in exploring the depth of characters nowadays. So it shows in our writing. I think the basic problem is in our writing. I feel our Pakistani writers, because I'm also an author, so I noticed this. We become lazy. We just use things that sell, something that's assassinationist. We may use terrorism as a crutch to hang our book on, books on, or our plays on, or our films on. I mean, you see Pakistani films, I had the unfortunate experience of going and seeing searches. And I was just pulled along with my friends and family to see them, and people were praising them in the skies. And I said, I asked one of the film critics who used to work with me. I said, how on earth did you give this film such a brilliant rating? And he said, oh, you have to do this. It's a terrible film. If you had asked me directly, I would have told you that. But we have to do this because, you know, we have friends with celebrities and the actors and actresses. So there's a kind of dishonesty going on here as well. You know, you have friends with people, so you praise their products. You're not being honest. So you think there's a system of patronage? Oh, yes, it's everywhere in Pakistan. And literary arts is not immune from that. Having said that, there are some people, like a few standard bearers of excellence, there's Shima Kirmani. Like we had talked earlier, there's Jamal Shah. There are some other people who are doing very good work, but they're just like drops in the ocean. You know, I think I feel where we look at the creative arts when you look at creative people, we can do so much more and it's not being done, unfortunately. And they just make excuses. And we have terrible writers. Look at our films. Look at their plots. They're terrible. I had a bad experience recently seeing a film and maybe a few months ago, the film was built as an homage to Quentin Tarantino, who would be horrified to know that he's being used as an inspiration. Whereas it was like a distortion of everything that Quentin Tarantino stands for. So nothing makes sense in the movie. Everything was like totally out of sync and yet critics were saying that brilliant film. And it's an experiment. It's something innovative. Innovative also means good, right? Innovative doesn't mean you don't be innovative and turn out trash. So I feel that we are really suffering where creativity is concerned in Pakistan. And we can use creativity with social change. We can do so much with the arts. So it's really unfortunate. Maheen, but we've also had blockbusters such as Maulajat. You've also, you know, if you look back in retrospect, you've had some brilliant movies as well. I mean, I do understand where your sentiment is coming from and it's based on objectivity. And I agree with you because it's based on facts and all sorts of realities that we see. It's based on empirical evidence if you want to follow that. But there've also been some outstanding movies as well with some great scripts, with some great writing ability and with some great characters as well. What do you have to say about them? I'm not saying that good films are not made once in a while they are made. But the problem is that if we as a nation are dishonest about praising mediocrity in the name of art, because we say, oh, we Pakistani and this is a Pakistani film or Pakistani play, we have to praise it. I don't understand this concept. If you are honest about what kind of a film that is, and I blame the film critics also, our film critics, they're not being honest. I think they have friendships with the actors and actresses and that's what my film critic friend said. Well, you know, I have to go to the premiere. I need to get invited here. I need to go there. So how can I give a very honest opinion about the film? And that certainly is the sad state of affairs because I've worked at newspapers and been a journalist. So I know what happens behind the scenes. So I feel that is something that we need to address. And creativity and art is a great medium for bringing about change and thought and narratives and social change and betterment of society. There's so many topics we can explore but we have the same old storyline in every film and every play, let's talk about TV plays. Look how it rushes there. Many of my friends watch TV plays and they keep telling me, see this play or see that play. Literally I can't go beyond one or two episodes. It's terrible. And I don't, if I just see it on YouTube or something so I can forward all the awful parts but I just have my friends, I can't bear this. It's decimating my remaining neurons. I feel dumber. I think it's finally speaking, I think it's a dumb and down of the nation by showing such plays. I was interviewed somebody who was the head of the channel and she was a very dynamic lady. And I said to her, she was talking about woman empowerment and I said to her, but what about your plays? This is not what you show in your plays. And he said, no, no, no. But my heroine did get beaten up and in the end she slapped the hero. I said, yeah, after like 35 episodes. So what kind of a message are you giving to the girls of today? What kind of message are you giving to the men? You're normalizing violence. And right at the end maybe you say, oh, it's not right and the man should, he's told off or he slapped or something but it's too late. Once I interviewed Hasina Moyin and I asked her, why are you not writing plays nowadays for TV? And he said, she said, look at what passes for creativity nowadays. I can't do that. So I said to her, okay, so what's the difference between your heroines and the heroines of today? And to be pleased, the heroines of today, she said, they are suffering constantly. My heroines were solution oriented. They had problems where they thought of a solution and they went ahead and they fixed their problem on their own. They didn't wait for Messiah. And so that is a crucial difference. They're not able to do things on their own. They need to sort things out for them. There are very few plays in which this sort of woman actually educated woman, actually standing her herself or a woman going for education. They don't show that in case, unfortunately. Yeah, I mean, I just don't mean to inflame your sentiment but there was obviously a lot of castigation and some show directed at that have been and the fact that domestic violence was pretty much normalized. And they received a significant amount of backlash in Pakistani social media circles. I mean, that is but first at your point that that is definitely a problem. And to try and make sure that you want to rectify that you need to come up with scripts which are more robust and characters which have more impact as compared to somebody who suffers domestic violence for, as you said, for like, you know, 15 years or maybe 10 years or five years and then eventually she stands up herself. So that's pretty much there. So Maine, let's talk about creativity and arts. When you go to Europe, you go to the United States. So even if you go to a city like Karachi or you go to Ravalpindi, you go to Lahore, you do see the impact of the treaty on social consciousness. Do you think that, you know, people who come up with graffiti are actually innovators and creative and they deserve a higher platform because they're actually rebelling against the established status quo? Or do you think that, you know, there needs to be more, you could say, it's more to do with elitism or this elite capture and arts and the creative industry which is hampering social thought in Pakistan? Yeah, I think all forms of creative expression are great. Except that sometimes I feel that some artists would come up with so-called installations at museums which actually make no sense. Like somebody, actually, there was an exhibit I remember recently of a banana. That was the exhibit, the installation. And somebody, some visitor went and ate the banana and then they were upset. They said that was our installation. So sometimes artists do do these crazy things, right? And so I feel all forms of artistic expression are up to yourself in any way. Whether it's in your attire or you want to paint yourself and be creative, there are times you see people in the U.S. and who have amazing face paint or jewelry on it and they look like artistic installations themselves. So it totally depends on you. And recently I tell you an example of what I mean. I saw, recently I saw the film Bar Beauty. But when I saw the film, I found it very interesting because it was actually, it's not just about a doll. It's about a feminist narrative and it's written by a female screenwriter along with the husband, I think, Greta. And she's written a beautiful film. I was really impressed. And there were little girls in the cinema who were coming back with notions of patriarchy and how men suppress women and how a woman can stand up for themselves and how a woman can be happy on her own without having a ken in her life, you know? So I mean, it was very interesting and they were talking about finding yourself all these interesting themes. So you see, they use this film as a way for little girls and for women to think about themselves in their place of society. For example, they had a corporate meeting and it was about, it was Mattel which is the manufacturer who makes Barbie dolls. And when Barbie actually goes in and wants to meet the female CEO, they're all men. There are no females. And she said, where are the females? There are 15 men sitting there talking about Barbie dolls. And she said, where are the females? And he said, oh, there was a female CEO in the 1980s. So there are no females. So one of the men sitting there said, well, I'm a man who has no power. Do I qualify as a woman? So I found it very interesting, you know? The kind of dialogues you can put, the kind of script you can put to make people think. So my nieces went for the movie and they came back really thinking and they got put or taught and people, kids who were as young as seven and eight they were talking about this, right? So you can influence, that's what I'm saying. In our plays and our films, what is being normalized? It's a patriarchal notion of how women should behave or the same old hackneyed scripts. We get used to it. You know, you get used to the same diet of rubbish being fed to us and then we become dumber as a result. And also I noticed one thing that even in the creative arts in Pakistan, there are times when you're not free to express yourself fully. So people get very angry if they feel the writer is not. They also ask me, are you a supporter of this, of people's party? Are you not a supporter? Oh, then you must be a supporter of Navashree. Oh, you must be a supporter of Navan. I said, why do you have to be a supporter of any party? Why can't you be objective? And I said, I wrote about him because he was a former prime minister of the country. So I feel there's a lot of division in Pakistan and it's being exacerbated every day. Even if you go abroad, people are obsessed with this division. And so I feel that this is something that's also affecting the creative arts, unfortunately. So people who supports a certain ideology when you want to write about that, there's no objectivity, I feel. So if I wrote the story as objective observer of that time, based on my research and media I've done research, I made a documentary on Zafiqa Li Putu was his hanging a judicial murder. And I didn't know anything about that at that time because we are not taught about this in our history books. So I did my research of my father. I spoke to people who lived in that time. I spoke to Fakhruddin Jeebrahim and I learned a lot. I did another documentary on separation of East Pakistan. Again, we are not taught this in our history books. I had no idea what had happened in East Pakistan and I said to my boss at that time that I don't know anything about this. And he said, well, find out and they gave me three weeks. So I read the Hamudur Rahman Commission report. I read many other things that talk to people. I got an understanding of this. So you see, we don't look at our history. We don't even learn from it. I think in Pakistan we have short-term memory loss. So every two weeks there's a different scandal or there's something that distracts us. It's like, that's the door. Yeah, forget about 10 years ago. We forget what happened two weeks ago. When I was, I would ask my media friends what happened about that case, why aren't you going to pursue that, like, what is it? That's what they say. So we keep repeating the same mistakes again and again. And the same thing is affected in the arts. We keep making the same mistakes. We write terrible scripts. We have one-dimensional characters. We have the same hackney situations. We have the same songs, you know. It's the same thing in every film. It's very unrealistic. I mean, you do want a dose of escapism and understand that, but it should be realistic in certain degrees. It should make you think, at least. So when I leave the theater after seeing a Pakistani film, with the exception of Maulajat, which is actually a really good film, I really like that. I just say, oh my God, what was that trash? And if I hadn't paid for the ticket, I probably would have just left much earlier. So Maheem, when we talk about, for example, that there's one very interesting aspect about this entire discussion is that a lot of Indians are actually going to pounce on this conversation and be like, okay, fine. Well, you see, Pakistanis themselves are castigating their own movies and scripts and their dramas and their film industry for that matter. So what would your message be to them that maybe they should take care of their own business? Because if you take a look at Bollywood in general, you do have a few good, very good movies, but you have quite a few abysmal ones as well. Yeah, of course. Well, look, India sometimes, once in a blue moon, makes a good film. I wouldn't say that their films are uniformly good. Some of them may be films in a suit and shine it, or films that, for example, one film that I saw sometime back when I was really stunned by was Masan. And it had, I think Vicky Koshyapal, it was his debut movie, it was a very good film. It was a dark film, but very interesting. So it was done by, I think, Varun Grover, who is, I think that's his name. He's a stand-up comedian also. He's a great satirist and he writes beautiful scripts. So he wrote that. So, but to see that such people are actually stepping forward and writing something. So where are script writers like these? So I feel that India's concerned, of course they can comment on our films, that's fine. We can comment on their films. I think there should be a medium of expression from both sides. Be honest and look at yourself critically. That's how you improve. That's how you learn. Otherwise, you'll never learn. You just keep going backward. So I think, and that applies to you also as a creative person, myself also. I also look at myself critically. Maybe I'll look at my book and I say, okay, next book I'll write will be even better than this. The actors will be even better and have greater ideas. So, I hold myself to the same critical self-evaluation that I would hold a film or a play or anything written by anybody else. And there are times when I used to get confused in Pakistan because there were like on my Facebook such great place for an amazing book by Pakistani fiction writer and I said, go get the book. And it was so terrible. I would just read two or three chapters and I said, oh my God, what is this? I can't understand it. And I thought maybe something is wrong with me. And then I asked one or two of my friends and one of them was honest enough. And he said, oh my God, you also hate the book? I'll show you the terrible book. I said, why is it being placed with a Sky DJO because they have connections. They know the publishers, you know, their friends are celebrities. So I was like, I don't understand this. And then how will we... I mean, you're just fooling the public by saying this, right? And the public is falling for it. I mean, I felt forever and bought the book. But now I'm more circumspect. I just pick up the book at a stall or something, go through the first chapter and see if it's interesting and engaging enough or not. So I think, yeah, I think creativity and arts can be used as a great medium for change. And, you know, you have Iran, you have many other countries who are doing that. And you also have the movie, Oppenheimer, which I haven't seen as yet. And they're looking at their past. They're looking at the nuclear bomb. The mistakes they made. I haven't seen the movies, I cannot comment on it, but these kinds of films are not made in past. We don't look at our history. So why not look at our history? Why not pick up events from our past and make movies around them? Why not do screen adaptations? Like we used to have, you know, I think the past Ida Kazmi and also do like, you know, I and Randall Fountainhead. Now we don't have anything like this. We have the same or we have the same, like, you know, Urdu digest writers writing scripts based on the, you know, what, you know, I don't know how to describe the Urdu digest kind of thing with an awful of romance and nothing. And that's the message that I'm thinking. Personal experiences or maybe construction of society or construction of reality, maybe that's the way to put it. Or they failed love affairs or, you know, their bitterness comes through in the, I mean, once in a while it's okay, but every script shouldn't be like that. I think we are lazy as a nation. We just tend to jump on the bandwagon. Oh, this script worked. This play worked. So let's write a play based on this because all, you know, TRPs and ratings and battles. So we basically don't care about standard of the play. We just care about the TRP and the market rating. You don't care about the criticism. So you talk about Theriband, well, who cares? You know, that scene was problematic. They got great market rating. They made a lot of money. People still tuned in. They complained, but they still tuned in. So that's all that the channel cares about. If you take away their business by not tuning in, that's when they will care, but you don't do that. You still watch it and you critique it and you go on and on, but just keep watching. So it's like, it's like looking to the eyes of Bobra. You can't look away, you know, but if you just accept things the way they are, then they will change, right? I mean, it's funny, journalists, we're not so, thank you so much for joining us. So yeah. All right, so that's all that we have for now on Islamabad today for Think Tech Hawaii. This was on the river of the sand. You can follow us on our social media pages because you'll give your feedback on this episode. Until next time, take care. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.