Pakistani creators are competing with each other, not the world

A childhood routed through Army Public Schools

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Ali Sufian Wasif to the TBT Dubai studio on the three hundred and ninety fourth episode of the show, apologising for the holiday break, and noting that Ali is one of the oldest creators on the Pakistani internet — someone he has followed for a very long time, who has recently begun going viral again with a new podcast satire format.

The first stretch of the conversation is biographical, and the geography of it is unusual. Ali was born in Lahore, but his father worked in the hotel industry, which meant the family moved with the postings. From Lahore they went to Murree, where his father ran the line at PC Bhurban and Ali attended Army Public School Murree — a school he remembers fondly for the snow, the air and the standard of teaching. From Murree the family moved to Karachi, where his father took a hotel consultancy role and Ali joined another Army Public School. From Karachi they moved to Peshawar, where his father ran the Green Hotel. Another Army Public School. Of all of them, Peshawar was his favourite. “The teachers, the mall, the class — the friends I made there are still friends today,” he says.

There was one harder memory. At the Karachi school he was once locked in his classroom by the principal until four in the afternoon, on the suspicion that he was a troublemaker. He had been in second or third grade. He thinks the principal had heard him scream during a game and decided, alone in her office, that he needed to be disciplined.

After Peshawar the family moved to Bahrain — his first time abroad, although his father had spent years in the Middle East before Ali was born. The schooling there was a disappointment of a different kind. The Pakistan Embassy school in Bahrain was, as Ali describes it, lower in standard than the APS network back home, and he failed the entrance test twice. The third time, after taking paid tuition from the school’s own teachers in the evenings, he passed — with the same answers he had been writing all along. He stayed in Bahrain only a couple of months before the family routed back through Peshawar and finally settled in Rawalpindi, where he finished his schooling at Pindi Boys, did his I.Com and B.Com, and started an MBA.

Twenty, alone in Dubai, with a towel in a bag

He did not finish the MBA. His mother, he says, decided he had been around the house long enough. She told his father to start calling his hotel-industry contacts and find the boy a job somewhere — anywhere — abroad. The contact came back with a UAE opening for an accountant. His mother packed him a bag with a towel and a few things and sent him off. He arrived in Dubai in 2010.

Muzamil presses him on what that move felt like — the sudden price conversions, the loss of an ambient social network, the disorientation of being in a city that, on first encounter, is overwhelming. Ali’s answer is characteristically dry. He did not socialise much. He still does not. “I only go when someone invites me to an event. Otherwise the whole plan-banao, idhar-ghoomo, udhar-ghoomo scene is just not mine.” Muzamil reads it as introversion. Ali corrects him: “Lazy.”

He worked as an accountant from 2010 until the end of 2022. The creator work happened in parallel. He had launched the Urdu Classes meme page first, then Sarcasmistan with a friend named Hamid — what Muzamil calls “the 9GAG of the Pakistani internet” at the time. Other people joined; the page did well; eventually Ali stepped away and started making videos. The first video, in 2013, was a piece set to a poem by Anwar Masood, made with his mother. He remade the same piece last year with the format completely changed.

The death of his father, and the responsibility that arrived with it

About a year or two after Ali moved to Dubai, his father died. Ali walks Muzamil through the medical sequence carefully and without performance. A fever. An intestinal complication. Internal bleeding that began appearing in the stool. Three weeks in hospital. A senior surgeon — “a colonel sahab” — was brought in to operate. The family was made to sign consent, was assured the source of the bleeding had been diagnosed, and was told the affected portion of the intestine would simply be removed.

After the surgery, the surgeon told them they had not been able to find where the bleeding was coming from. His father, by then, had a cut through his abdomen, a urine bag, and no clear path to recovery at his age. They moved him to Shifa Hospital, where a second operation was attempted. He did not regain consciousness after it. “Two operations like that, and then it was done,” Ali says.

His mother moved in with him in Dubai. Muzamil, who has spoken to many guests about the loss of a father, frames the moment carefully — there is a kind of safety net a father provides that most people only understand once it is gone, and the day it is gone the world does not feel the same. Ali does not soften it but he reframes it. Within a month of his father’s death, a new job was offered to him — unsought — that paid enough to sponsor his mother, rent his own apartment, and buy a car. “Allah had already planned an alternative,” he says. “The responsibility shifted, and the means to carry it shifted with it. The only question was whether the person accepts the responsibility.”

He is direct about the relatives who arrived in the wake of the death and made things worse. One uncle pulled him aside for a dramatic speech: now everything is on your shoulders, son. Ali was already working in Dubai. Another uncle asked his mother for money. He calls it a cringe-inducing part of the culture — the way certain people, in the worst week of a family’s life, manufacture pressure instead of taking it off.

Sarcasmistan, sketches, and the decision to stop acting

Later in the conversation, Muzamil rewinds to the creator side of the story. Ali’s reinvention in 2023 — the deadpan podcast-satire format that pushed him from steady creator to viral — did not come out of nowhere. He had spent years making the kind of YouTube sketches that were the dominant Pakistani format at the time: three minutes, four minutes, seven minutes, with acting and visible jokes and the implied laugh track of the era.

He outgrew it. “The sketch-acting, the canned reactions, the over-the-top expressions — past a certain age that whole thing started feeling childish to me,” he says. He wanted to make something that did not need a joke forced into it. His two stated inspirations are Loose Talk — the long-running Pakistani format that, in its prime, made sharp political points without sounding angry — and the Pete Holmes YouTube interviews, where a Street Fighter character like Dhalsim is taken seriously as a job candidate in an HR meeting. Both, he points out, are character work played dead straight.

The first piece in the new format was a Canada-themed video. Ninety percent of its views came from India. Indian celebrities he had never heard of began sharing it; collaboration invites started arriving from across the border. Within a year the format had been widely copied, which has become its own problem for him. “Now I’m sitting here thinking I need to do something else, because everyone is doing this.”

The latest iteration is even more stripped down. In a forthcoming episode with Adnan, he says, he does not speak at all. He just changes microphones. “I haven’t said a single line. I’m only swapping the mic. And people are happy with that.”

Why Pakistani content stays small

The conversation turns to the broader Pakistani content scene, and Ali’s diagnosis is the sharpest line in the episode. He has very little idea what is happening inside Pakistan right now — he has been out of the market too long, and admits as much when Muzamil asks about Pakistani stand-up — but he is clear about the structural problem.

“Our people have limited themselves,” he says. “They’re sitting in competition with each other. They’re not competing with the world. Our thinking is stuck inside its own circle. The day people start taking proper inspiration from outside, that’s when something will change. They lack inspiration.”

Muzamil pushes from a different angle: Pakistani comedy on television is flat, the jugat-baazi format with four men from Faisalabad never evolved, the smart 1990s humour that could make a real political point through a routine has not been replaced. Indian stand-up, swearwords aside, has matured. Even in Dubai, the Indian stand-up circuit has a paying audience; the Pakistani one has not emerged. Ali agrees on the basic observation without claiming expertise. His framing remains the same — Pakistani creators are not in dialogue with the rest of the world.

He is generous about the good people who are doing the work. “The ones who are good aren’t making enough. The ones who aren’t are making content every day,” he says. He uses Junaid Akram as an example of a creator whose effort is visible — but whose schedule is irregular enough that you cannot say with confidence what is coming next week. Meanwhile the formulaic creators show up every week, and over time that is what sponsors pay for. “If you’re consistent, even bad work goes through. The whole thing comes back to consistency.”

It is the same logic Muzamil applies to a job — you show up, some days are bad days, you had a fight with your boss, but you were there. Creator work, Ali agrees, is a job in that sense.

Posting opinions on a hostile internet

Muzamil compliments Ali for being unusually willing to put his actual views online — something he says he himself found harder when he was still based in Pakistan, where four anonymous insults online translate into the imagined gaze of an entire city when you step outside. He admits the move to Dubai liberated him. He notices that Ali has been consistent about not caring whether people pile on.

Ali’s framing is risk-tolerance, not bravado. “I always think — what’s the worst that can happen?” He gives Palestine as the live example. He volunteers with the Red Crescent’s Gaza aid programme in Dubai. He helps pack the consignments. His mother contributes from home. But the people in his mentions are not satisfied with that. They want him to fly to Israel and slap Netanyahu. They believe an influencer is supposed to do that. He has been shadow-banned on Instagram in this period — his account only came back after he deleted a post he was forced to read from a PC because his phone could not load it.

He is also direct about a quieter calculation. There are things he does not post anymore because his mother lives in Pakistan part of the time, and because Ahmad Ali Butt warned him on the record that some kinds of post would close off his ability to travel back. So he writes less about politics now. Social commentary he still writes.

What he will and will not let into his own life

A long section in the middle of the conversation is about what acceptance means and where its limits sit. Both Muzamil and Ali are careful with it. Ali’s line is that people can live however they want; his objection begins only when the lifestyle is being taught at him or to his future children. He picks LGBT activism as the example deliberately. “If they want to live their life, fine. The problem starts when they come to lecture me or my children that this is how it should be. Why?”

Muzamil layers in his own observation about how acceptability has shifted in the wider culture — that alcohol, growing up, was clearly not for them, and nobody arrived to lecture them that it was; that on his first trip to the United States in 2008 he saw expressive subcultures in the open and nobody at the time was demanding he validate them; that the problem began when content started inserting these messages into his child’s books. The disagreement he is identifying is not with the lifestyle but with the imposition.

Ali extends the principle further into Pakistani society — he has no patience for the relatives who appoint themselves moral instructors at funerals, or for the social pressure to perform certain kinds of grief or marriage timelines. Muzamil asks him directly whether he intends to get married. Ali laughs. “The desire isn’t there. As long as I can control my mother on the question, I’ll keep doing it.” Muzamil reads it as a wall built around a private hurt and gently suggests that walls can come down. Ali does not engage on the diagnosis. He goes back to the same anchor: everything is already planned, his job is to keep his intent and his work clean, and the rest will arrive.

Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and the Pakistani passport that is loved somewhere

Asked where he would live if money were not an object, Ali names Azerbaijan. He went there first on a mobile-phone campaign, was told to shoot a travel vlog, and came back with a different question — why does this country treat the Pakistani passport with so much respect? He answers it himself. The Pakistani state supports Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia. Imran Khan is loved there. The visa is on arrival. The taxi driver knows the politics.

He tells the story of stopping at a roadside food stall where the women cooking had insisted he come home with them, slaughter a chicken from their own coop, and eat fresh — the experience usually reserved, he notes wryly, for the foreign YouTuber who turns up in a Peshawar village and is showered with free food. “I told my mother — let’s just retire and settle there.” Baku, he says, is a mini-Istanbul; the infrastructure works; the central heating works; the people are easy. He has been back three times.

Kyrgyzstan, also a campaign trip, was further behind than Pakistan in his estimation — visa on arrival, but printed on paper at three in the morning. Turkey, by contrast, he found exhausting. “Istanbul has a scam every two steps. The shoe-polish guy drops the brush in front of you. It’s not the country it’s selling on Instagram.”

The deeper observation, when Muzamil pushes him on it, is that the polished travel content most people consume is cosmetic. It is an experience built for an audience. Ali had to ask his fixer to take him to the villages no one else asks for before he saw what the country actually was.

The India–Pakistan question, and the bridge that hasn’t been built

This sets up the longest argument of the conversation. Muzamil has been thinking, he says, about the asymmetry of the population — India, Pakistan and Bangladesh together are a population large enough to be a single bloc and never function as one. He frames the problem cleanly. The political class on both sides does not want a cross-border human conversation; the algorithm rewards the loudest nationalists; and so the ordinary Indian and the ordinary Pakistani, who are 99 percent alike, never meet in the open.

He gives the example of his own comment section. Every time he discusses India on the podcast, a small swarm of Indian nationalist accounts arrives with insults. If he were unserious, he says, he would conclude that all Indians are like this. He knows they are not. He knows the cell is small and that it operates the same way wherever Indian political identity is contested — in America, in Canada, on Pakistani comments. The ordinary Indian, like the ordinary Pakistani, does not have a pathway to the conversation that goes deeper than entertainment.

Ali’s answer is gentler. The Indian creators he has collaborated with have shown him nothing but warmth — his viewership data alone tells him how far Indian platforms are willing to extend the exposure if you walk through the door. He receives positive comments. He sees Indians in his replies saying it is nice to see people from both sides like the same things. For him, that is already the bridge.

Muzamil presses for one more step. The current bridge, he argues, is careful — both sides walk around politics so they don’t lose the room. The next bridge is being able to disagree about politics without hatred, the way Europeans now can after spending the first half of the twentieth century killing each other. He makes a parallel argument about religion inside Pakistan — that the educated class relegated religious discussion to the fringes because it felt unproductive, and the fringes filled the vacuum with extreme positions. The same risk, he suggests, applies to the cross-border conversation.

Ali draws the line differently. A podcast or an interview where two people from across the border talk without screaming — that is useful, and that is content. An ordinary friendship pulled into political debate is not useful and not needed. “What are we going to achieve? It’s time waste. Stay focused, stay positive. Avoid noisiness.” Muzamil concedes the point on the ordinary-friendship case.

Dubai over thirteen years, and a country whose pride briefly broke

The episode closes with two reflective passages. Muzamil asks how Dubai has changed in the thirteen years Ali has lived there. Ali’s answer is small and specific — when he arrived, the metro was barely starting, transport was buses, and the neighbourhood where he first stayed had no shops in any direction; now parking is impossible there. He references a speech he heard from one of the UAE’s founders telling the rulers of the emirates that it was a matter of shame how many Emiratis still lived in rented homes — and contrasts that quietly with the leadership conversation he watches in Pakistan.

The closing question — the one Muzamil has been working toward all episode — is about being a Pakistani abroad. Ali is honest in a way that takes the wind out of the room. “Sir, until the cipher I was proudly Pakistani. Properly so. I used to defend it.” Something shifted in him during the cipher episode and the political fracture that followed. The pride he had carried abroad for over a decade became harder to wear. “If someone says now that what’s happened is wrong — yes, it is wrong. What can we do?” Muzamil asks if he thinks the feeling will come back. “InshaAllah,” Ali says. “It will.”

Muzamil — half-joking, half-aware that he has just put his guest on the record — points at the disclaimer that runs at the start of the show: the views of the guest do not necessarily represent the views of the platform or the host. He thanks Ali Sufian Wasif for sitting down, for being unfiltered not just on the show but in his life, and says it is the quality he wishes he had more of himself.