Pakistan's biggest meme page is run by a district medical officer

A doctor, a meme empire, and three months of trying to book the interview

The episode opens with Muzamil acknowledging the obvious: it has taken roughly three months to get Dr Naseer Ahsan on the show. Naseer is based in Gujranwala, works full-time as a district medical officer, and runs Pendu Productions on the side — a page Muzamil describes as, at the time of recording, the biggest or one of the biggest meme pages in Pakistan.

The framing matters because it sets up the contradiction the conversation keeps returning to. The man behind one of the country’s most-followed comedy pages is also the person signing off on hospital admissions and chasing down complaints on the PM portal. Muzamil flags this early: “He’s a doctor. He’s working full time as a district medical officer and on the side he makes memes.” It is not the standard creator-economy story, and the conversation is better for it.

The NLE, the missing house jobs, and what a district medical officer actually deals with

Before the meme question, Muzamil takes Naseer through the medical side of his life. The discussion settles on the National Licensing Exam — the single exam that now sits between a medical graduate and a house job, applicable across Pakistan.

Naseer is supportive. As Muzamil puts it, the NLE matters because “the common man, for him, NLE is a good step, because tomorrow these doctors are going to be looking after you. You need to have that quality at the end of the day.” Naseer flags a problem the exam is starting to surface: in plenty of local-graduate cases, the paperwork said a house job was being done while in practice it was not. Paid seats were being taken and wasted. A standardised exam forces the issue.

The deeper structural problem, as Naseer describes it, is supply. There are more than enough patients, and there are doctors sitting jobless, but the well-known hospitals are running at double and triple occupancy while the rural side has almost no infrastructure. The fix, in his view, is investment in new hospitals on the periphery, not more pressure on the urban centres that are already saturated.

The Sehat Card, ID-card coverage, and a decade-long policy that is about to land

The single most concrete policy thread in the conversation is the Sehat Card. Naseer walks Muzamil through what it actually is and where it is heading.

The earlier model required a specific Sehat Card. The new model, he says, is moving to ID-card-based access: you walk into a participating hospital, hand over your CNIC, and your treatment is covered against a listed amount allocated per family. Coverage is selective right now, but he expects something close to 100% rollout in Punjab by January, with the broader national picture following.

He frames this as a quiet structural shift. “In Pakistan, within nine or ten years, the result is in front of you,” he says, comparing the timeline to the much longer arcs other countries have taken to build out similar coverage. Muzamil pushes on a point he considers under-discussed: that medical bills are one of the largest drivers of downward social mobility into poverty, and that universal coverage is the policy intervention most likely to interrupt that slide. Naseer agrees, and adds the practical texture of running a hospital under it — including the steady volume of PM portal complaints, many of which he characterises as invalid (“we were treated for lakhs of rupees for free and the complaint is that we weren’t given food”).

Why he started a meme page in the middle of medical school

Muzamil pivots to the question the title promises: how does a serious person doing serious work end up making memes?

Naseer’s origin story is unromantic. The page started in 2012, originally under the name “Nazi Mughal,” with no plan or expectation behind it. He had no idea it would become anything. He was watching television at the time and found the news cycle relentlessly heavy — blasts, plane crashes, train derailments, body counts. Memes were, for him, the counterweight. There was no strategy. There was a TV in the background and a feeling that something lighter ought to exist.

Pendu Productions today sits at roughly 1.3 million followers, with other pages around it that Naseer declines to name on air. The network, taken together, is the actual business.

How the meme industry actually makes money

This is the section where the conversation gets specific about the economics, and it is the part most listeners will not have heard laid out before.

The pattern Naseer describes is straightforward. News channels and brands cannot directly target the audiences that meme pages reach. So they approach the pages: here is the content, here is the money, please post. The pages get pre-made material and a fee for posting it. Some YouTube channels are growing through the same loop — a template lands, it goes viral, and the format gets reused until it stops working. He cites the “Camera Thi” template that came out of a government clip as an example: once a meme template is established, it gets recycled across both image and video formats.

He also describes the friction between memers and another part of the same ecosystem: TikTokers. Muzamil pushes him on why the animosity exists. Naseer’s read is partly economic — “if you’re showing your face, your worth is different” — and partly cultural. He points to Mathira’s show as an example of the loop in action: TikTokers get invited on knowing that meme editors will clip the segments, and the meme pages then build content off it because, as he puts it bluntly, memers do not like TikTokers. The hostility is the engine.

Free media, moral guardrails, and what changes when the masses get the mic

The longest conceptual stretch of the conversation is Muzamil and Naseer working through what happens to a society when free media stops being the preserve of the educated class.

Muzamil’s framing is direct. The educated class had built itself a small society and assumed its norms were the country’s norms. They were not. Once the masses gained access to free media, the assumption that everyone would handle that access with the same internalised moral guardrails turned out to be exactly that — an assumption. As Muzamil puts it, “someone who has something to lose will make a moral boundary for themselves.” Someone at the bottom of the economic ladder, whose primary problem is not yet solved, will not relate to that concept of morality the same way, and may use the medium in ways the educated class did not anticipate.

Naseer agrees, and pushes on the commercial logic underneath: “Vulgar sells.” The market rewards what gets traction, and what gets traction is not always what the people writing op-eds about free media had in mind. Both men land on the same conclusion without quite spelling it out — some degree of check and balance is needed, and the absence of one is not actually a neutral state.

The discussion bleeds into the dank-memes group controversy. Naseer says he tried to expose one such group some years earlier and the defence he kept hearing was that the activity was private — the group was closed, members were not posting publicly, so the question was why he was making it public. Muzamil’s response is plain: the content of some of those private spaces — material covering rape and harassment as jokes — is not redeemed by being private. “That’s just messed up.”

News channels mining meme pages — and the copyright strike loop

A specific irritation Naseer returns to is the relationship between Pakistani news channels and the people producing the content the channels increasingly run.

The pattern, as he describes it, is one-sided. News channels lift content from meme pages and YouTubers, and then aggressively strike the same creators for copyright infringement on Facebook. Muzamil cites cases he knows where his contacts did not even hold the clip in question and the strike still landed. Naseer’s read is partly that the channels are extracting value, partly that they may be paid for the strikes themselves, and partly that they are simply gaming the system.

His counter-strategy is to lean into the asymmetry. Facebook’s algorithm, in his experience, favours pages that produce original content and gives outsized reach to smaller, newer pages. Strikes against copycats end up working in his favour because the platform reads the original creator as the source of value. The advice he hands out — and he says he gives it for free, including to people who have called asking how their kids might start making memes — is to learn Pixart and InShot on a phone and start.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes with the question he tends to use to land these conversations: where do you see Pakistan in thirty years, when you are at the back end of your career?

Naseer’s answer is, in keeping with the rest of the conversation, more pragmatic than poetic. He sees improvement. The country’s awareness is rising. The educated population is growing. Programmes like the Sehat Card are the kind of structural floors that, once installed, are hard to remove. He believes the trajectory is upward.

Muzamil signs off at the fifty-minute mark, thanking Naseer for the conversation — particularly the meme-industry portion, which he admits he had been excited to get into — and flagging that he is genuinely interested to see how the Sehat Card rollout lands, first across Punjab and then, hopefully, across the country.