Quite fittingly, the speaker of the session, ‘The Making of Political Satire’, was the much-loved Pakistani satirist Jugnu Mohsin, with Ali Aftab Saeed, who was the moderator.
Instead of immediately diving into a discussion on political satire and Jugnu Mohsin’s extraordinary work, the session began on a light note as she casually asked Ali to set the scene (Mood banao!) for the discussion, by reciting the first few verses of Sham-i-Firaq by Faiz Ahmed Faiz which she and the audience also delightfully hummed along.
Jugnu Mohsin described the concept of political satire as a way to bring out humour in serious matters, be it current affairs or politics. She said politicians were leaders who had been inflicted on us and it’s an amusing way to criticise them in the context of contemporary politics. She rightly justified it by saying that “we are all humans and hence should be able to laugh at each other.”
About the history of satire, she noted that satire was something that could be found everywhere in human history, describing it as a “universal thing” that people around the world have been using in different ways.
Talking about her work, she gave the credit to her husband Najam Sethi, who was also sitting in the audience, for encouraging her to write a satire column named ‘Dear Diary’ for The Friday Times, which was about Benazir Bhutto and her first term as the prime minister of Pakistan. The hall was filled with laughter and applause by the audience as Jugnu Mohsin mimicked the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto while narrating a story about one of their meetings in Islamabad.
Similarly, they discussed her other columns including ‘Ittefaq Nama’, based on Nawaz Sharif during his term as the prime minister in the 1990s, ‘Howzzat’, a diary of Imran Khan written in 1996, at the time he was establishing his political career, before finally moving on to the famous humour column called “Mush and Bush”, which was based on conversations between Pervez Musharraf and George W. Bush, written in 1999.
She also read out an excerpt from Howzzat, appropriately imitating the voice of Imran Khan and a British guy.
She commented on how each politician received her satire columns and her encounters with those politicians after they had been published by mimicking them, making it an extremely entertaining session for the audience.
Before ending the session and moving to the Q&A session, Ali raised the question why the diary of Altaf Hussain had not yet been written, which received a round of applause by the audience. Jugnu Mohsin answered it simply by saying that his diary could only be written in Urdu and not in English and joked how she might receive a phone call by Altaf Hussain himself inquiring about it, whose voice she also mimicked and left the audience in fits of laughter once again.
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