Syed Muzammil Shah: I Came to Media for Power, Not Truth

A Conversation the Host Was Most Excited About

Muzamil opens by setting the stakes of this particular sit-down. He has done a long run of episodes (CEOs, corporate figures, established names), but this one, he says, is the conversation he was most excited about. Part of the reason is personal: the guest is also named Muzammil, the two men share certain physical and cosmetic similarities, and yet their lives have diverged sharply. The other part is the moment. Muzamil notes that the kind of unhurried, registered, on-record conversation he wants to have is getting harder to have at all, which makes the chance to slow down with a thinker like Syed Muzammil Shah feel valuable rather than routine.

Shah arrives a little late, which becomes a running joke about laziness, and the two settle into what Muzamil frames as a structured conversation: first understand the person and the themes that shaped him, then move outward into media, politics, and history. It is a deliberate arc, and Shah, a self-described student of political theory, is happy to follow it.

A Middle-Class Education He Is Not Proud Of

Shah’s origin story is one of dislocation and self-teaching. He was born in a small city in South Punjab, roughly 100 kilometres from Multan. His family had earlier migrated there from Gujarat, fleeing the violence and disorder of that region; his grandfather was the first to move, a common, middle-class businessman. Politics ran in the family. His grandfather was active enough to contest local elections from Fatima Jinnah’s side during the Ayub Khan era. Around the fifth grade, Shah moved to Lahore for education, because the south simply did not have the universities or the academic standard, while his father stayed behind to run the family business.

He is unsparing about his own schooling. “This is not something I am very proud of,” he says, explaining that as a middle-class child he attended modest government schools in Lahore’s Mughalpura area, then a government college in Multan, then F.C. College. He describes the experience as horrible. He could not learn a single thing, because, in his account, the institution was never really about learning. “Institutions are not for studying,” he argues. “They are for disciplining.” He traces the very concept of public schooling back to its German and secular origins, where compulsory attendance was designed to break the church’s hold, not to nurture curiosity. Once something is compulsory, he reasons, it can never be based on genuine wanting.

His own learning, he says, was almost entirely internal and self-generated, with very few mentors or teachers involved. He had a psychology that resisted being taught. He would sit in class understanding nothing, retaining only what he discovered for himself. To make the point vivid, he recalls discarding the seventy or eighty trophies he had won in school, throwing them away the way a character in a story burns his life’s work. He invokes the example of a writer whose father, on his deathbed, asked that his manuscripts be destroyed, only for a friend to publish them and inspire the world. It is a parallel for how the things forced on us and the things we are not allowed to do both shape who we become.

Crucially, Shah refuses to wallow. “These are very emotional things I am sharing,” he says, “but that does not mean I have regret.” He believes suffering is essential to learning. Without those impediments, he says, he would not have arrived at the ideas he now values. He cares about being entertained and being happy, but he does not mistake either for the meaning of life.

Discovering a Social-Science Brain

A turning point came when Shah realised he had, in his words, a social-science brain. He was drawn to the abstract, to history, to thought, and not to hardcore science, which simply would not register for him. His family, following the standard local script of “do F.Sc., become an engineer or a doctor,” pushed him toward the practical track. He went partway, then hit a break point: he could get the degree, he says, but he had no passion for it, and a degree without understanding was worthless to him. So he stopped.

He describes himself in those years as deeply under-confident and isolated, with no public life until his mid-twenties. But he also describes an early posture that set him apart from his peers: he was the kind of person who challenged. He recalls being among friends in Lahore who carried what he calls the upper-Punjab, Sunni-Punjabi lens on Pakistan, a worldview in which the country’s problems reduce to a single external threat, India, and little else. When Shah began to see women’s issues, minority issues, and the problems of the periphery, his friends concluded that he was the one who had gone wrong. He compares it to how a group punishes the defector first, the way patriarchy punishes the man who breaks ranks. That early ostracism, he suggests, taught him to take his arguments to a wider audience rather than to a drawing room where they would change nothing.

His formal education eventually included a bachelor’s in mass communication and a master’s in political science. The first, he says, taught him almost nothing of substance, a four-year drag with no practical core, where you are essentially handed a mic and sent into the field. The second, political science, was the thing self-discovery had pointed him toward. He valued the master’s not because it taught him from scratch but because it gave him a place to ground his ideas and debate them. The point of university, he argues, is not to learn everything fresh; it is to be allowed to have the debate.

Why He Went Into Media, and What He Found There

When Muzamil asks why Shah moved toward media, the answer is blunt and recurs as the spine of the whole conversation. He went into media for power, and power only. He did not arrive with inherited advantages: no sibling in the CSP, no officer in the family, nothing. He knew that to survive in society and not be crushed by those who already held power, he needed power of his own. Media was the fastest available route to it.

Inside the industry, his disillusionment was immediate. He recounts walking into a PCR, the program control room, early on and watching an anchor about to go on air ask, casually, who a major political figure even was. “This man is sitting inside the studio without knowing anything,” Shah remembers thinking. Within a month or two he had concluded that the work required no real reading or learning. “You just have to be clear in your communication,” he says, “and you have to have an ornament value.” Borrowing a frame he attributes to Neil Postman, he describes how on television the language goes into the back seat because the viewer is watching moving images. Bosses cared about updating the on-screen graphics and the scrolling ticker, the “patti”, while muting the audio in their own offices. “They are not even listening to their own product,” he says. “They are just watching.”

He distinguishes sharply between two ambitions. The idealistic reaction, that this is wrong and educated people should step forward and fix it, is, he says, a moral war he chose not to fight. He cites a friend who devoted his life to teaching, and whom most Pakistanis would not recognise on the street, against the showman whose social capital is so large that people will defend even his errors to the death. From that contrast he drew a Nietzschean, will-driven philosophy that, he says, set his mind straight: goodness that does not work is not virtuous. He recalls walking up to a boss and telling him, truthfully, that he was a worthless person, a completely moralistic act that got him kicked out of the job. The lesson he took was consequentialist: judge actions by their results, and to make your ideas stick in society you need power first. He invokes the image of dissecting a rabbit to learn its organs: first you exercise power over it, then you gain the knowledge. So he hunted for power, converted his media capital into social and economic capital, moved it onto social media, and believes that had he not been part of the industry, he would have been removed long ago.

The Business Model of Pakistani Television

Pressed on whether the media can change, Shah reframes it as an infant industry. The early private channels, he says, were run like vultures by relatively smart people grabbing power; the top media celebrities of today were unimaginable as celebrities thirty years ago. Every new order, he argues, begins with a phase of pure power-grabbing by the comparatively clever, followed by an evolution in which problems first occur, then get identified, then get structured into visible institutions.

He locates the critical juncture for Pakistani television in the 2008 Mumbai attacks. After that confrontation with Indian media, he says, two things happened. First, the state moved in and decided it would now define the media’s role. Second, and here he returns to Postman, the function of the media became to gather an audience and sell it to the advertiser. He has no patience for the word “infotainment”; information never entertains, he insists, and the amalgamation is a marketing invention. Once you depend on ratings, content will always slide toward the superficial, because the audience you are chasing is not a quality audience. News language, he notes, is written for the lowest common denominator, so that even someone who never read a book can follow it. As long as the model is TRP-based and directly linked to public attention, he argues, the media will always be selling people, in his blunt phrase, garbage, because that is what sells.

His proposed alternative is a model decoupled from ratings: a subscription model on the BBC pattern, where revenue comes from subscribers rather than ratings and there is no pressure to chase the crowd. But he is honest about its limits in a free market, where subscription simply filters by wealth and education, and where the people who already have access to better content are the ones who can pay for it. He is sharp about Pakistan’s own public broadcaster: ordinary citizens pay roughly a hundred rupees of PTV fee in their monthly bills, get imported Turkish dramas in return, and watch the revenue flow out of the country, while whichever government is in power treats PTV as its own mouthpiece. The deeper problem with the public-sector channel, he says, is not the funding but the absence of permission to question.

Reason, Postmodernism, and the Post-Truth Society

The conversation widens into intellectual history, and Shah moves fluently through it. He sketches the Enlightenment claim that reason could be a better driving engine for morality than the church’s monopoly, which had bound kings and clergy together and stripped ordinary people of property and rights. The French and American revolutions, the printing press, the translation of the Bible, the scientific revolution: these, in his telling, were the machinery that freed people on the basis of reason. Then, he says, postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Derrida came and dented that confidence, arguing that reason is itself a force exercised to take power, collapsing the distinction between science and nonsense, between quality and non-quality opinion. The consequence he points to is leaders who have no respect for reason at all, a Trump who denies global warming and walks out of climate protocols.

He keeps returning to Postman’s argument from the 1970s: on television, whoever looks right wins, because they project a credible, presentable image, and credibility replaces reality. “I am looking credible on this camera,” he says, “even if I am lying, so I am true.” That, for Shah, is the post-truth society, where truth has no special authority; you manufacture carbon copies of it, and whoever out-numbers the rest wins. He sees the same machinery in Pakistan, where an objective tweet gets buried under a trend, and where whatever the masses can be made to produce as a stable consensus prevails. He links this to declining attention spans, the rise of entertainment consumption (Bollywood, Netflix culture, the Super Bowl as Chomsky’s propaganda-model distraction) and a Roman pattern of bread and circuses: when the ruler can deliver nothing, hold the Olympics, run the World Cup, and the people will be content.

He is careful, when Muzamil raises it, about the asymmetry in how “irrationality” is labelled. Muzamil notes that voices from the right are immediately tagged as populist and irrational, while the left gets a pass when it pushes its own contested positions, on climate and on gender fluidity, down people’s throats as settled fact. Shah agrees the death of contestation would be the death of a society; he reaches for Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis and the Socratic, Greek method of strangers arriving and arguing their ideas. His point is not to silence the right. But he insists on a precise definition: populism, to him, is not the same as taking a conservative position. Populism is selling simplistic, glamour-driven solutions with no connection to real, practical, material outcomes. By that test, he says, Jamaat-e-Islami is not populist, because it cannot sell a simple fix. It carries a grand narrative and does not even take electables. And he turns the lens back on the left: did Obama offer some profound, complex solution? When the right does it, he notes, it is called populism.

Religion, Politics, and the Honesty of Power

Shah draws a firm line between the personal and the public face of religion. He has no quarrel with religion in private life. His objection is to dragging religion into politics, which to him is inherently negative, “my enemy number one”, because politics is the science of practical action: collect taxes, invest them well, legislate. Whether he prays in the morning is, he says, totally irrelevant to whether he should hold office. He invokes a Machiavellian benchmark: if an agenda produces results, the person should be voted in, however moral or immoral they are personally. He reaches for hard cases to defend it. Churchill, a man of pathetic personal character, a drunk, an architect of the Bengal famine that he says killed millions, was nonetheless the right politician to refuse Hitler when Chamberlain wanted to negotiate. The genie Churchill kept in the bottle, Shah argues, was the larger one.

This same logic governs his reading of Imran Khan, whom he says he appreciates a great deal. In a personal capacity, Shah calls Khan one of the most successful men in the country’s history: whatever he touched, from the World Cup to cancer hospitals, turned to gold. Khan’s pursuit of power, in Shah’s view, is the absolutely right thing for a personal project; the hand he is playing is power, and that is correct. The problem lies entirely with the follower’s psychology. The danger is not the leader who pursues power but the disciple who completely hands over his own judgement, decides his leader can do no wrong, and begins to defend everything the man does. “The last Christian died on the cross,” Shah says, quoting Nietzsche, meaning the follower deludes himself that living in devotion to the man is the point, when the man’s own example was to pursue his own path. If Imran Khan is chasing power, Shah argues, your job as a follower is to heighten your own personal power, not to become his devotee.

He also catches the dishonesty in the framing. The politician who says “I need power to make the change” is being more honest than the one who claims, like Khan in his telling, that he is not doing this for power, that he already has everything, that he serves only the people’s good. That claim, Shah says, is hypocrisy, because the prime minister’s office is the best job in the country, with the biggest protocol. And he applies the same standard to himself: as a media personality, he is growing, his salary rises, his capital compounds, and he is not pretending otherwise.

Why None of the Three Parties Can Change Anything

The most pointed political claim of the conversation is that all three of Pakistan’s mainstream parties are equally incapable of delivering change, because power simply does not reside with parliament. Shah argues that the moment you enter parliament, the change is over. He points to Imran Khan’s own admissions: that he could not even appoint the adviser he wanted, that he had no say over the NAB chairman or the election commission chairman, that the foreign policy, the relationship with India, and the “deep state” were all beyond his reach. If a man who became prime minister concedes that nothing was in his hands, Shah reasons, then supporting any of them is meaningless and futile. He dates Khan’s failure to the first day he could not keep his own cabinet: “If I am the executive and I cannot get the cabinet I want, what work am I supposed to do?”

His alternative is a non-parliamentary struggle, pressure from outside, by people who are not hungry for the perks that silence those inside. He is scathing about the post-2022 reversals: the “respect the vote” movement that fell silent once its leaders got their posts, the establishment that went from villain to partner in a matter of days, the curbs being placed on PTI’s media presence. He praises consistency wherever he finds it, naming Ahmed Noorani as someone he respects precisely because that camp is consistent even when, in Shah’s view, it is wrong. The test he applies to any political actor is scrutiny and civilian supremacy: taxation begun in the right place, the military’s footprint shrunk, the institution brought within constitutional limits, its role in politics ended, electoral manipulation stopped. On those principles, he says, he is aligned. The failure of the two dynastic parties is that they remain stuck in 1990s politics, with no grasp of social media, digital perception-building, or modern communication.

Infrastructure, the Single National Curriculum, and the State’s Real Sin

Muzamil tests Shah on PTI’s record, raising the popular “they only built roads” critique. Shah pushes back in both directions. Roads and infrastructure are not bad. No economy in the world is built without them, from the Roman road network to China’s transformation. The real problem is infrastructure built without fundamentals, the “brain-dead infrastructure” of Sri Lanka building a port it could not use. On that test, he credits PTI with the micro-economic and sustainable indicators others ignored: export-led thinking, reducing consumption, freeing the dollar, an independent State Bank governor, the kind of structural moves, he says, that mirror what Modi’s India also tried, and that were undermined the moment a successor pegged the dollar artificially and let the economy crack.

His real quarrel with PTI lies elsewhere: in narratives, not economics. He is far less threatened by their economic missteps than by what he calls the war of delusion. He attacks the rhetoric blaming women’s clothing for rape, and he is most exercised by the Single National Curriculum. The state, he argues, downgraded secular schooling to the level of madrassas rather than uplifting madrassas, amalgamating religion into science classes, putting a dupatta on Newton, confiscating books, and trying to absorb hundreds of thousands of clergy into the modern school system without any idea where their salaries came from or how to regulate them. Religious philosophy as its own subject is fine, he says; mixing it into physics and chemistry is the sin, because a science textbook should show you science.

The deeper argument is about who gets to define religion. Shah’s position is that the state should neither force religion onto people nor strip it away, and that its fundamental error was handing the authority to interpret religion to the wrong people while consistently pushing the educated, intellectual class away from it. When you secularise the class that reads and reflects, he argues, and then leave religion in the hands of those who will hold it supreme without having read anything about it, you guarantee a default, rigid form of it. He distinguishes Turkey and Malaysia, where interpretation and the ruling class’s relationship to religion play out very differently, from a Pakistan that, in his telling, has tried to police every box of life, the way Iran’s morality police did before the backlash now burning at Khomeini’s old house.

The State That Decided to Define Its People

Shah’s most charged passages concern what the Pakistani state has done to its periphery, especially the Pashtuns. He argues that religion was forced down their throats while their children were handed guns instead of schools, radicalised, sent to fight, and then disowned as traitors when they came out the other side. He ties this to a longer history: the first operation of the new state, he says, was Operation Searchlight in 1971, aimed at intellectuals and professors, because the real enemy of such a state is not the man with a gun but the person with a pen or a mic, the intellectual who can deconstruct authority. He invokes the Bengali experience, the budgets extracted from East Pakistan to build Islamabad, and the bitter inversion by which people who were sold a war now get labelled disloyal for surviving it. “If your own children had died,” he says, “this debate would not be happening sitting here.”

The throughline is his claim that the day the Pakistani state decided it would define who a Pakistani is, it began destroying itself, because the Pashtun, the Baloch, the Sindhi, the Gilgiti do not fit the definition it manufactured. He reaches for 1984 as the reference for that kind of state, and insists the answer is to stop playing big brother and let the country be plural.

A Hegelian View of the Future

Asked to extrapolate to 2050, Shah calls it the hardest question of the conversation and answers it the way a student of history would. Quoting Hegel, he says that to take away a nation’s image of the future you take away its past, meaning that without a critical reckoning with what went wrong, no real forward motion is possible. Pakistan, in his image, is a country that has left the house without knowing where it is going, an existential crisis dressed up as movement. He refuses bureaucratic, policy-line answers; he does not see the world through that lens. What he calls for is a grand reset: a culture that, like a national council, throws out the ideas that are not working regardless of conviction or ethical premise, the way a consequentialist world should. He invokes the idea that peace becomes precious only after you have seen enough blood and ruin, and warns that face-saving over the current order, rather than its complete dismantling, will not work.

His closing is consistent with everything before it. Rational thinking, he says, is not derived from the bottom up; it has to be built. He ends with a plea for personal agency over collective drift, asking every citizen to ask where their rights are, to hold the constitution to account, to take personal responsibility, and to feel the wrong from the inside. Only then, he argues, does cultural change come, and only after cultural change does political change make sense.

Muzamil closes by naming what he found powerful: not whether Shah is right or wrong on any given opinion, but watching one person who has, in his phrase, lit themselves, whose knowledge is defined by that light rather than by the four things he was told to believe. It is a fitting end to a conversation that spent ninety minutes arguing that the first job, before any system can be fixed, is to think for yourself.