The missing character in Midsummer Chaos

A guest four months in the making

The episode opens with Muzamil noting, with some amusement, that he had first invited Bisma Khan onto the show roughly four and a half months earlier. She had finally made the trip down from Lahore to Islamabad — and, she told him, she had come specifically for the podcast. Muzamil introduces her as Pakistan’s youngest self-made millionaire, a title that sits alongside her identities as a YouTuber, rapper, entrepreneur, and now a cast member in the web series Midsummer Chaos.

Before any of that, though, Muzamil wants to understand the origin story. “Run me through a little bit about how this started — essentially, how did you become who you became today?”

Failing at everything in school, then deciding that was the point

Bisma’s answer begins not with a success but with a catalogue of small defeats. She never made prefect. She froze at a dramatics audition and wasn’t selected. She played sports but never became captain. “I was always feeling like everyone is becoming something and I couldn’t do anything big,” she says. What she did have, from the beginning, was a conviction that she had to do something with her life.

In A Levels, she converted birthday money saved for an iPhone into a custom T-shirt business. She went to Shadra with her mother, selected plain shirts, had them printed at Liberty, and sold them to classmates. When the stock ran out, she had no savings left to reinvest — she hadn’t known that reinvestment was part of the model. The business ended. “I said, okay, fine, now focus on studies.” But she frames that failure as essential: “I believe failures are very important for a person. If I hadn’t had those bad events in my life, I wouldn’t be the person I am today.”

Rs 5,000, a kitchen kettle, and a hair-oil recipe

The second business came from a more personal observation. Bisma had very long hair, and strangers would stop her constantly to ask what she used. She was giving out the same recipe over and over. Her inspiration, she says, was Kylie Jenner’s lip kit — the idea that if people keep asking you about something you have, you make a product out of it and tell them to buy that instead.

She started BK Care with Rs 5,000. She ordered a handful of plastic bottles wholesale, bought ingredients from Al-Fatah, printed labels at a photocopy shop, cut them by hand, and filled the bottles from a kettle. “People don’t believe it, but I actually started like this.” The first batch brought seven or eight orders. She was thrilled.

The oil recipe remains a family secret to this day. “Only my mother and I know the recipe, and it is made at home.” The shampoo, conditioner, and serum that followed are manufactured at a factory in Sialkot — all made in Pakistan. When Muzamil points out that this helps the economy, Bisma doesn’t treat it as a talking point. It was simply the only option she had, and she made it work despite vendors who didn’t take a seventeen-year-old girl seriously, who delivered wrong colours, who told her that whatever they produced was what the market wanted. “I don’t care what the market wants. I have a vision and I want to create the demand for something better.”

The clothing line, the rap, and the cost of doing things no one else is doing

Between the hair-care brand and the web series, Bisma launched BK Drip, a hand-painted jacket line. She went back to Shadra, found a factory, had jackets stitched, and then painted each one herself with fabric paint. “I thought it would be very easy. I painted the first jacket and said, shit, this is going to take forever.” Friends helped. The jackets didn’t sell as fast as the oil. She moved on.

The rap came from a different impulse — she wanted to do something no girl was doing. Her first track was recorded in a borrowed office, with a mattress propped against the wall for soundproofing, a microphone taped to a rod, and lyrics taped to the wall above it. Her friend and filmmaker Hamza Chaudhry stood by her through the whole process. “Because of Hamza, I’m probably in rap at all.” The video gathered 647,000 views. It also gathered significant hate, particularly from people who were serious rap listeners and felt the flow and lyrics weren’t strong enough. Bisma’s response was to treat the hate as confirmation: “When something is getting hate, that means it’s moving.”

Getting her mother’s permission was its own struggle. When Bisma described rap as “fast singing,” her mother said she was not giving permission for her daughter to become a marasi. Eventually, as Bisma’s work became visible and her limits became clear, her parents came around. “I feel like our parents evolved with us.”

Social anxiety behind the loud persona

Muzamil presses on something he noticed when Bisma walked in — that she is a very different person in real life from the one on screen. She confirms it directly. Her self-esteem was low from early on, partly because she was very thin and experienced body shaming, partly because she was always on the outside of school activities. The outward confidence on social media is, she says, something she had to build deliberately. “I had to become that kind of person. It’s a coping mechanism — to tell yourself that you are strong, so people can’t shame you.”

In real life, she has social anxiety. Friends who meet her in person are often surprised by how quiet she is. “They say, you’re so quiet, don’t you like us? I say, no, I just talk less.” The persona and the person are genuinely different, and she is aware of what that means for younger viewers who might try to replicate the persona rather than understand the person behind it.

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises this directly: a fourteen-year-old watching her content sees the persona and internalises it as a template for real life. Bisma doesn’t dismiss the concern. She says that when young cousins tell her they watch her YouTube videos, her first thought is that she swears in those videos and is very loud, and she feels uncomfortable that they’ve seen that. “I’m not a perfect person. I’m doing good things that people can be inspired by. But I’m not perfect, and I accept that.”

On showing off, motivation, and what money means when you earned it yourself

A recurring theme in the hate Bisma receives is the accusation of showing off. She pushes back on this with a specific argument: she was not privileged growing up. Her parents spent everything on her education — Beaconhouse, then LGS for A Levels — and there was nothing left for travel or new phones. When she buys something herself now, she shares it because it genuinely excites her. “When I see a YouTuber buying a car for their mom, I get motivated. That’s why I post these things — to motivate people.”

She acknowledges that some people will see it as showing off, and that maybe she is, sometimes. But she draws a distinction between sharing an achievement and performing wealth. The deeper point she makes is about independence: “Why should I be dependent on anyone? Even my parents — as soon as possible, why shouldn’t I be independent myself?”

She also talks about her faith as a real constraint on how far she will go. She is genuinely afraid of her afterlife, she says, and that fear sets limits on what she will do on social media regardless of what gets engagement. “I try to stay within my limits. Whatever I do, I will die one day — what will I take with me?”

What’s actually missing in Midsummer Chaos

By the end of the conversation, the discussion turns to the web series that had just begun airing. Bisma had shot her scene the night before the recording, called in by the director Sarim at 11 p.m. She was nervous, then found her footing. The series was already generating significant backlash on Twitter, and she and Sarim had anticipated it.

Muzamil offers a structural critique that Bisma finds useful. He points out that A Levels students in Pakistan number around 40,000 per year, against 4 million FSC students — making the private-school elite a fraction of a fraction of the population. When a show is built entirely around that world, most viewers have no entry point. The shows that work internationally — he cites Gossip Girl — solve this by integrating a character from outside the elite who gives the audience a foot in the door. “That central character was missing,” Muzamil says, “who could have potentially been from a different background.”

Bisma agrees, and extends the point: “I think if you can’t relate to the parties, you can at least relate to a character emotionally — what they’re feeling. Right now only the first episode has come out, and stories will build slowly.” She defends the project as an evolution, not a finished product, and draws a parallel to her own first rap: “When I released my second rap, everyone said that was an improvement. Sarim’s next work will be better too. The people who come after him will have it easier because he opened the market a little.”

Muzamil’s broader argument is that Pakistani art tends to go so far outside the average viewer’s reality that the viewer rejects it entirely. “If you really want to change people’s minds, hate pushes people away. The right way to do it is to take people’s actual lives, represent them, and change one small element.” Bisma agrees, and adds that the controversy in Pakistan is also partly structural — an Islamic country where the flow of information has historically been controlled by a small educated class, and where TikTok has now introduced a counter-narrative that the middle of the spectrum doesn’t know how to process. “TikTok is also an art form. Midsummer Chaos is an art form. The audience in the middle doesn’t understand one and calls it cringe, and doesn’t understand the other and calls it vulgar.”

The episode closes with Muzamil telling Bisma he found a flavour to her personality that he couldn’t see on social media, and that he was glad to have experienced it. She says she had been looking forward to exactly this kind of casual, honest conversation — and that she wanted people to know she is a different person from the one they see online.