Why Tabish Hashmi quit TBH to go to Geo News

A family that arrived late and left early

The episode opens with Tabish Hashmi explaining a biographical detail that most people in his audience probably do not know. His parents migrated from India to Pakistan in 1984 — unusually late — and he was born in Karachi the following year. His mother was five or six years old when she crossed the border, already enrolled in school in India. The family went through the formal process of surrendering Indian nationality and acquiring Pakistani papers, making them among a small number of Pakistanis who hold documented proof of that transition.

By the time this conversation was recorded, the family had dispersed again. His sisters hold American nationality, his mother is close to it, and Tabish himself is Canadian. “We had an exit plan,” he says, matter-of-factly. His entire maternal family — khala, mamu, nana, nani — remained in India, and he has visited them many times, travelling to multiple Indian cities. He notes, with some amusement, that his Indian cousins used to argue Pakistan versus India with him openly. For the last seven or eight years, they no longer do. They now drop pro-Pakistan lines between the lines instead. He does not say why. He lets the timeline speak for itself.

Engineering, failure, and a 97 out of 100

Tabish attended Abhi Public School in Karachi, a sixty-year-old institution with an astroturf field and an NB-approved gymnasium — a family tradition, since all his cousins had gone there. He credits the environment at home, where adults discussed their own pranks and jokes openly, for giving him an early comfort with humour. “Hume joke karne se dar nahi lagta tha,” he says. The jokes were appreciated, even if the language was occasionally corrected.

After school, he entered a government college during the first year of Karachi’s centralised admission policy. The experience was politically charged and academically turbulent. He failed his second-year mathematics paper — the first time he had ever failed anything — and went to the board office with a friend to request a recheck. When the paper was retrieved, his roll number was in his own handwriting on the cover page. He sat the supplementary exam, found it brutally difficult, sat it a third time, and scored 97 out of 100. He then went on to complete a degree in electronics engineering from Syed University Karachi.

Public speaking as the real education

University, Tabish says, was where he first encountered girls in a co-educational setting after years of all-boys schooling. It was also where he discovered public speaking. He saw a poster calling for an English humorous speaker to represent his university at a competition at Defence Degree College for Women. The category was rare. “English humorous speaker jo tha na woh poore Pakistan mein mushkil se milta tha.” He entered. His topic: Marriage is a story in which the hero dies in the first chapter.

He won. Over the following years he participated in approximately 110 competitions, winning first prize in 73 of them. His university, he notes with genuine gratitude, was probably the only institution in Pakistan that flew its students to competitions — an investment that cost the institution four to five lakh rupees over his time there. He completed his engineering degree for just 30,000 rupees of his own money, funded by a 50 percent scholarship for maintaining a GPA above 3.0 and prize money from competitions. “There is nothing like self-made,” he tells Muzamil. The people who claim that title, he argues, simply cannot register how many small acts of support shaped them.

Supply chain as a career: Maersk, 3M, and making yourself redundant

After engineering, Tabish joined Maersk — the world’s largest shipping line — almost by accident. He had been focused on his final-year project while classmates were anxiously applying for jobs. He scored exceptionally on an IB test, qualified for a programme based in Denmark, but the timing conflicted with his MBA plans. He applied elsewhere simultaneously and received an offer from Coats — the company that invented sewing thread. He joined them as one of the first young assistant managers they had ever hired, at 23, working alongside colleagues who were 48 and 49 years old.

His approach to that cultural mismatch was deliberate. Rather than resenting the older colleagues or waiting to be accepted, he made himself useful to them. “Agar mera boss mujh par depend kar raha hai… toh woh hai aapki game saari.” He is careful to distinguish this from manipulation — it was, he says, about creating genuine dependency through competence and then delegating, teaching subordinates, and making his own position redundant. That pattern repeated itself across every role he held.

He eventually joined 3M — Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing — which he describes as probably his best employer ever. He explains the company’s breadth to Muzamil: Neil Armstrong’s boot soles on Apollo 11 were made by 3M. The Littmann stethoscope, the world’s best, is a 3M product. Post-it notes, industrial tape, dental equipment. After four years there, he moved to a US-based company called Global Surf, an Arpatech venture handling global IT supply chains for Shell, Halliburton, and similar multinationals. He was hired to build the operations and supply chain desk from scratch, working virtually from Pakistan and travelling constantly. He built a team of 35 people. Then he made himself redundant again — deliberately promoting a junior team member to replace him when he moved on. “Woh meri sabse badi achievement hai.”

He later joined TCS, Pakistan’s largest courier company, to scale a last-mile delivery service called Hazir. The venture did not survive, he says, because TCS as an established giant could not think in startup terms. “Yeh per unit profit pehle din se nahi kamati. Yeh toh burn karni hai.”

How TBH actually happened

Muzamil asks Tabish directly about To Be Honest — who conceived it, how it started, and why it worked when so many similar formats had not. The answer is more contingent than the mythology around the show suggests.

Naashpati Prime had been approaching Tabish for a long time. He kept declining. He was earning well in his corporate roles and told them plainly they could not match his salary. When he finally agreed, the first episode was with Ayesha Omar. The brief from Aswaar Bhai was minimal: here are twelve questions, ask them. “Koi brief nahi thi.” The questions were loose enough that the conversation could go anywhere — serious, funny, personal. There was a live audience of roughly 25 to 50 people. The episode was recorded and then sat unreleased for thirteen months. When it finally aired, it performed well enough that a second season was immediately discussed.

Tabish flew back to Pakistan for twelve days, recorded twelve episodes in four days, and left again. The show’s strong association with him — to the point where audiences think of TBH as Tabish Hashmi rather than as a format — came directly from that absence of a brief. “Woh isliye aksar log TBH ko Tabish Hashmi samajhte hain, To Be Honest nahi samajhte.”

He has since quit TBH. He is matter-of-fact about it. Whether the show continues with someone else is not his concern, though he acknowledges the next host has a difficult position to step into.

Why stand-up comedy hasn’t scaled in Pakistan

Later in the discussion, Muzamil raises a question that has clearly been on his mind: why has stand-up comedy not mainstreamed in Pakistan the way it has in India? Tabish’s answer is structural before it is cultural.

India has thirty cities where a comedian can perform the same set. Pakistan has three — Karachi, Lahore, Islamabad — with audiences of three hundred at best. The economics simply do not work the same way. “Main kar hi kahan sakta hoon? Chhe: Islamabad, Karachi aur Lahore.” Beyond the geography, he argues that coaching has done more harm than good. Teachers impose arc structures and conflict frameworks onto students who then produce technically correct but emotionally hollow material. “Bookish comedians hain. Koi real life experiences nahi hain.”

The only real teacher, he insists, is a live audience. A comedian becomes a comedian by performing, failing, bombing, and learning which specific moment made people laugh. “Usko stage par jaake bomb karna padega.” He adds that watching recordings of your own sets is essential — something he says many comedians avoid — because it shows you precisely where the audience responded and where they did not.

He draws an analogy to English cricket before Andy Flower became director of cricket. England had invented the game but produced average teams for decades because they taught it too orthodoxly. Flower, an unconventional Zimbabwean batsman himself, changed the training systems. The parallel to comedy coaching in Pakistan is direct.

Geo News, prime-time television, and the bet on difference of opinion

By the end of the conversation, Tabish is talking about his move to Geo News for a prime-time show — a transition from digital to mainstream television that he frames as genuinely unprecedented. “Digital se uthke TV par koi show kar le, yeh toh aisa nahi hua.”

He is clear-eyed about the challenges. Geo carries a perception among some audiences of being anti-PTI or anti-government. His inbox has messages accusing him of selling out. He records four episodes a day, and the last episode of a long day with a monosyllabic guest is genuinely exhausting. Television audiences are different from digital audiences — roughly 75 percent of Pakistan still accesses content through TV, and the urban digital commentariat is a small fraction of the actual viewership.

But the ambition behind the move is specific. “Main ek cheez ka ambassador banna chahta hoon — woh hai difference of opinion ki acceptance.” He argues that Pakistan’s political parties have no fixed ideological identity — PPP can be liberal or not depending on the season, PTI and PMLN shift positions opportunistically — and that the real problem is the absence of policy discourse. “Policy making hi politics toh bilkul bhi nahi aati na politics mein.” What he wants to model, through the show, is the simple idea that two people can disagree and both be allowed to exist.

Muzamil notes that Tabish going to Geo — rather than a smaller channel — is itself a meaningful signal. “He is going to Pakistan’s top channel. And he is starting from there. This is an incredibly powerful disruption that has never happened before.” Tabish accepts the framing but adds a counter: Geo’s 2002 programming, with shows like Alif and Aalim Online, was in some ways more radical than what is on air now. The baseline has deteriorated. The task is not to import a Western model but to at least deliver a Pakistani version of honest, relatable content to the people who are still watching.

On Pakistan in thirty years, he is cautiously optimistic. When he visited India in the 1990s, Indians assumed Pakistanis were coming from a more developed country. That is no longer true. “That gives me hope. If they can do it, we can do it even better.” The political awareness that has grown in Pakistan over the last several years — whatever one thinks of its origins — is, he believes, a genuine foundation. Young people are a large and growing force. The direction of change, he argues, is bottom-up, not top-down. The question is whether the institutions can keep pace.