The state is not a political party, and its digital media shouldn't be either

From Pindi schooling to a FAST cultural shock

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Shahbaz Khan as a close friend and the person with whom he had launched his earlier platform, and noting that the two of them had studied computer science together at FAST. Before the conversation gets near Lall Studios or the Ministry of Information, Shahbaz walks the listener through how he got to that classroom in the first place.

He grew up in Rawalpindi and went through The City School’s Settler Town branch on Murree Road from nursery to O-levels — “a very good school,” in his words, where his entire childhood was spent. A-levels presented a choice of campuses across the twin cities, and FAST after that was a genuine break with the bubble he had known.

Muzamil names the moment directly. “When you come to FAST, you get a cultural shock initially,” he says, framing his own arrival the same way. Shahbaz does not minimise it, but he reframes it as opportunity. “When I came to FAST, I was very happy,” he says, “because I like exploring new things in new places.”

A computer science degree with an extracurricular itch

Shahbaz is clear that the four years at FAST were good ones, and equally clear about why they were never going to be only about computer science. He arrived with what he calls “a bug” — a sense that university was a window to explore, and that something else had to be happening alongside the degree. Sports culture at FAST was strong, the CS faculty was solid, and the campus had football and cricket running at all hours. But the itch was for something he could make.

He traces it back to a first-semester English course where the final assignment was a presentation. He and his group decided to add a visual experience to a topic on code-switching — “where you mix English and Urdu while speaking” — and shot it as a video. It was their first time. The class responded. A physics presentation came next, and by that point the group was comfortable enough on camera to take their shirts off in class for it. Shahbaz lingers on what the experience taught him: that when they got together to make something, the result was good, and that performance and craft were part of the appeal alongside the CS coursework.

Lall Studios and Pakistan’s infotainment gap

Muzamil bridges the FAST years into the work that followed. At the time, Shahbaz ran a page called Lall Studios that had started as a photography page — he had been posting a 500 Days of Lall series of pictures. Then one day, as Muzamil recalls it, Shahbaz came in with a new idea: “We make videos for class. Why not do it for social media?”

The team came together and chose a deliberate position in the feed. “We wanted to value-add for social media consumers in Pakistan,” Shahbaz says, “because at that time you didn’t get that kind of thing. You mostly got entertainment videos.” He places the page inside a specific phase of Pakistani social media — what he calls an evolutionary stage where infotainment did not yet exist as a format. The group’s working principle was direct: positive messaging, hopeful content, informational content, with brand partnerships layering on top.

The Lall Studios chapter ran until 2015, when the group graduated and Shahbaz took a break. He is honest about the reason. “I came from a humble background,” he says. He is the only son in his family, and the household had invested everything in the education of its three children. The constant sense of having to support his family financially meant Lall Studios was not, at that point, a path to sustainable income. He chose to follow what he had actually studied.

Ericsson, Teradata, and a year on a Saudi banking project

The corporate chapter starts at Ericsson. The Swedish networking company was handling the technical side of Telenor’s EasyPaisa application and had been outsourced parts of the operations, and Shahbaz joined the EasyPaisa project as a vendor. He is candid about how he held the work in his head. “I was never that serious about it, to be honest,” he says — not because he underperformed, but because he knew it was a transitional role. He had wanted to move into data.

Teradata gave him that move. He spent three years there, working on the side of the business that takes a client’s data and pulls valuable information out of it to inform strategic decisions. A month or so in, the company sent him to Riyadh for a banking project, where Teradata was the vendor. He went on-and-off across the year — about five months in Saudi Arabia, the rest from Pakistan — and he is clear about what made the experience formative: a multicultural environment with colleagues from India, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia all building a tech project together.

He left Teradata wanting to explore management and adjacent disciplines, having already done the data consultancy piece. And then, in his telling, the exploratory phase ended sharply. “Suddenly a panic situation arrived,” he says. “Now it’s about survival. What do you do?”

A friend, a job posting, a PO box, and two interviews

The answer arrived through a friend who forwarded a job posting from the Ministry of Information for the Digital Media Wing. It was a managerial role: come in, take responsibility for the government’s digital media, grow it, run it. Shahbaz applied.

Muzamil presses on the mechanics, and Shahbaz walks through them. The application had to be sent by post — TCS or courier to a PO box at the ministry, not by email. The first interview involved an hour and a half of waiting and a panel of at least six or seven bureaucrats, including the minister and the cyber secretary. The questions were what you would expect from a state digital media interview: fake news, digital media broadly, the things adjacent to the role. A shortlist followed, then a second interview with more grilling, then a selection.

The first weeks on the job were a guided tour of the ministry’s departments — PTV, the External Publicity Wing, the cyber wings — so that the new hires understood how the ministry actually worked before they were asked to do anything in it. Only after that did the formal work begin: projecting the Government of Pakistan on digital media, strengthening that presence, and building the capacity of the ministries to do this for themselves.

The state is not the party, and the digital media wing is the state’s

This is the section where the conversation sharpens, and it is the section that gives the episode its title. Shahbaz explains that the public misunderstanding he ran into immediately, and repeatedly, was the assumption that joining the Digital Media Wing meant joining the political party in power. “I don’t understand,” he says, of the accusations he received. “When have I ever been a PTI worker? I never even went to the Islamabad dharna.”

Muzamil sits inside the same observation. “The government of Pakistan means the state of Pakistan,” he says. “That means irrespective of whoever is in power, government sustains.”

Shahbaz’s mechanical argument is the one a Pakistani policy reader should keep handy. If the ruling party wanted to push its own messaging, it already had its own social media handles, run by private teams, with reach that exceeded the government’s machinery on digital. “If they wanted to do something,” he says, “they would invest in that — the message is reaching the people anyway. So it doesn’t make sense” to weaponise the state’s channels for partisan purposes.

Muzamil sharpens it one more turn. “This was a way for the state to reach out directly,” he says — and frames the broader move as a win for democracy. The state had always been on conventional TV; it had always issued notifications that media outlets would re-interpret. A direct social channel meant the state could share more information, on its own terms, with the public. Critique of the state, both note, is the job of national media. Capacity-building for state communication is a different job, and Shahbaz had taken that one.

He gives a concrete example. The Ehsaas programme was a state initiative; communicating Ehsaas’s offerings to the public was inside the digital media wing’s remit. Doing that work, Muzamil adds, does not mean the people doing it cannot be privately critical of the state. The two roles are not mutually exclusive.

Restarting Lall Studios and the relaunch that went viral

Three years after stepping away from Lall Studios, Shahbaz came back to it. The middle years had brought repeated thoughts of restarting, but none of the ideas had clicked. He was unwilling to make content for the sake of making content. The pull he kept feeling was the same one that had defined the page the first time: Pakistani social media still lacked digestible informational content. News channels offered fights more than information. Lifestyle and entertainment dominated the rest.

The new series, Kaam ki Baat, took dry topics — economy, education systems, the kinds of subjects people will not sit through for eight minutes — and rendered them in a watchable form. The team set itself a careful threshold. “We targeted that the first video, if it gets 30,000 views, we’ll continue making these videos,” he says. The first video crossed a million.

Shahbaz is honest about how the format has aged on the broader Pakistani feed. Pop-up infotainment creators exist, but they have not gone mainstream. Three or four people are making this kind of content seriously, capping out around 30,000 to 50,000 views per video. The need is real; the supply has not scaled. He is hopeful the gap will close over time.

Turning thirty, marriage, and a son

Muzamil turns the conversation personal. Shahbaz is twenty-nine, turning thirty soon — three decades down, as Muzamil puts it, half a life. The exploratory mode that ran through the FAST years and the corporate years is no longer the operating mode.

He got married in the past year, to a woman he liked enough that he proposed. He is direct that the shift married life produces is not adequately described by the word “change.” “I think change is a small word,” he says. “Married life completely changes. The scope through which you see the world changes — you start seeing the whole world through a different lens.”

A child followed. Shahbaz describes the first moments after birth in plain language — the baby coming out blue and then turning normal, the impossibility of explaining the feeling to anyone who has not had it — and lands on a sentence that earns its weight. “The life before that moment is one life,” he says, “and the life after that moment is another life.” It is also tiring, he adds: nothing in adult life prepares you for someone being that dependent on you. He has heard the sleep returns at two. He is waiting.

Mortality, parents, and the trap of living forever

The closing philosophical stretch is one Shahbaz frames himself. “Most people don’t have a sense of their own mortality,” he says, “and so we live like we are here forever.” The cost is that every setback gets loaded with anxiety it does not deserve. The corrective, in his telling, is to ask: if life ended tomorrow, would you want this day to have been one spent inside that anxiety?

Muzamil pushes back gently, with his parents in mind. They lived a sacrificing life, he says, and he wishes they had invested more in their own experiences. Shahbaz agrees and extends the point through faith: a creation called the best of creation was not made only to spend its life serving, with nothing of its own. “Live a life,” he says, “that when you look back, you say — yes, I lived a good life.”

A hopeful Pakistan and the case for young leadership

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Shahbaz to look at Pakistan. The answer is hopeful, but specific.

Shahbaz says change is coming whether anyone wants it or not. The generational gap people already feel between themselves and their parents will replicate inside bureaucracy, government, the private sector, and businesses. The youth coming through is more equipped with information than any generation before it, because of social media and the internet. The hopeful situation is real. The open question is who provides direction.

Muzamil corrects the word. Not direction — leadership. “Young leadership,” he says, “is needed not just in government but in companies, civil society, startups, businesses, everywhere.” Shahbaz agrees, and Muzamil delivers the line that closes the argument. “Tomorrow’s Pakistan’s vision,” he says, “today’s youth has to give. The previous generation cannot give it, because their total shelf life is — understandably — what it is. You can only imagine as much as your life depends on it.” The vision of the next Pakistan, in other words, has to be carried by the people who will live in it.

The episode ends with Muzamil thanking Shahbaz, noting that the conversation has run differently from most of the sessions on the show, and pointing viewers to a related programme where he speaks to government officials, policy makers, and think-tank academics about the thinking behind major policy decisions.