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The good, the bad and the very ugly
Gaudy, brightly lit and just plain ugly billboards are nothing new to Karachi. In an age where crass commercialism is a competitive sport and all moral aesthetics have been chucked out the window in favour of the almighty greenback, ugly is in, disgusting is quite all right and crass passes for class.
But I’m not here to rant and rave about the downfall of all civic sense in our society. Recently, this beleaguered city has been bombarded by ever-mushrooming billboards advertising the latest glossy prime time soap operas on the plethora of our equally sudsy tribe of satellite channels. So the giant cold cream, soft drink and nappy rash advertisements that dotted the city’s roadways and roundabouts are fast giving way to a new brand of product.
Instead of a pretty young thing trying to sell you useless crap you don’t need, there’s a cast of characters staring down at you — dressed to the nines, with airbrushed, botoxed and plastic surgery enhanced faces — advertising the latest dreadful, overacted, over-produced, underachieving prime time soap. And what gets my knickers in a twist are the truly diabolical titles most of these dramas have.
So (the good Samaritans that we are and the fact that we have plenty of time on our hands), we have decided to come up with our own concepts for modern Pakistani soap operas, all the way from inane titles to horrific storylines. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Mujhay Mohabbat Karni Hai (I Want the Love): Twinky is 29, but still in college. One of the reasons she hasn’t graduated in the last 10 years is that instead of hitting the books, she spends too much time engrossed in the latest Bollywood love stories her cablewallah plays 24-7. Living in her crowded flat somewhere in the nether regions of Garden East with her parents and 12 siblings, Twinky whiles away the hours thinking about Bollywood dreamboats Shahrukh Khan, Vivek Oberoi and Prem Chopra.
When her mother gives her an ultimatum — graduate or get married to her cross-eyed cousin Pintoo — Twinky panics. She has to find true love and escape; she wants to be free and dance around trees and take expensive shopping trips to Dubai with her knight in shining armour. Unfortunately, all she sees in front of her is a banal existence with Pintoo, flipping chapattis. All of a sudden Timmy, a dropout who helps run his mammoo’s net cafe right below Twinky’s flat, starts giving her the wandering eye and before she knows it ... she’s in love. Stay tuned to see whether true love blossoms and Twinky and Timmy get to live happily ever after ... or will Twinky be doomed to changing nappies for Pintoo’s kids evermore.
Main Ne Mohabbat Kyon Kari? (Why I Did the Love?): In this spin-off emanating from Mujhay Mohabbat Karni Hai, we follow Twinky in her further err, misadventures. After eloping with Timmy and having a court marriage, the couple settle into a ramshackle little love nest in Baldia Town, all the while avoiding Twinky’s father and eight brothers, who are thirsting for Timmy’s blood for dishonouring them.
The days go by and the two lovebirds bide their time with patience and forbearance. But as the world turns, the fairy tale starts to sour for Twinky: there is no dancing around trees, there are no Dubai shopping trips and things are pretty lean as far as finances go.
It turns out Timmy was a monster in disguise: he sits around all day chomping gutka, combing his tael-immersed hair and chatting with goris on Instant Messenger. Forced into becoming the chief breadwinner, Twinky opens a little pakora stand on the corner of her street to provide for herself, her good-for-nothing husband and their expected child.
The couple are blessed with the birth of a roly-poly baby boy, whom they name Chintoo, and Twinky hopes fatherhood will inculcate a sense of responsibility in Timmy and that maybe, just maybe he’ll get off his ever-expanding backside and try and find work.
But to her dismay, nothing changes with the arrival of Chintoo, and Twinky discovers Timmy downloading porn in the middle of the day. She grabs Chintoo, kicks Timmy in the face and makes for the door. Where will she go? What will she do? Perhaps her estranged family will forgive her and take her and her newborn in; perhaps the sight of the little bundle of joy will melt their cold hearts. As always, stay tuned to find out.
Bharr Mein Gaye Mohabbat (To Hell with the Love): In the final act of the three-story ‘Twinky’ arc, things truly fall apart. Twinky returns to her family home but Papa will have none of it. Despite her mother’s protests, especially at the sight of her grandson, he slams the door on Twinky’s face and banishes her from the family home for eternity.
Teary-eyed and burning with rage, the spirit of righteous feminism comes alive within Twinky and she decides to smash the shackles of patriarchy that bind her to the ground. Inspired by watching Rambo films one too many times, she straps the baby onto her back, dons a bandana, blackens her face and loads up on ammo. She starts with her good-for-nothing husband and beats him to a bloody pulp, douses the house with kerosene and decides to have a barbecue by torching the place with her portable flame-thrower. Phoolan Devi ... eat your heart out.
But Twinky proves that underneath all that violent feminism, inside she’s still the cuddly, slightly plump 29-year-old with the hots for a balding Sanjay Dutt. After raising her son into a strapping young man, who makes good as a travelling insurance salesman, she returns to her family home. She finds her parents old and infirm, and all her eight brothers have run off to shack up with their wives. Seeing her sick, old parents melts her heart and from that day on, she decides to take care of them and lets bygones be bygones. To add a cherry to the cake, she calls into Kaun Banega Crorepati, gets all the answers right and is rewarded by Amitabh Bachchan with Rs500,000 for getting real far without using a lifeline. She uses the reward money to fix up her folks, gets a nice little FX for her kid and finally gets to take that Dubai shopping spree she’s been dreaming about since she was 23.
Yeh Kyun Huwa? (Why this Happen?): Annu bhai and Nannu bhai are the best of friends. Working at a fabric store in Jamia Cloth Market, they toil through the days to put food on the table and provide for their young families. But on Saturday nights they wind down by playing dubboo, drinking chai and letting loose by seeing who can come up with the nastiest Urdu curses. All the action takes place on their Lalukhait street corner in Karachi. Life is not easy, but they get by.
But things soon change for the better when Annu gets hooked up with a job through his brother-in-law as a custodian in a shopping mall in Muscat, while Nannu convinces people smugglers to transport him to the Ukraine, where he makes it big peddling used canisters of reactor fluid.
Both make good in their respective careers, with Annu using his day job as a cover for more lucrative — not to mention more dangerous and illegal — pursuits. You see he gets tangled up in the street pharmacy business — cocaine, hashish, etc, — while also making an investment in a racket which involves smuggling rare South American songbirds to the Orient for use in Chinese herbal medicine. Five years after separating from each other to make their fortunes, the two bosom buddies meet up again in Karachi.
Both have long bid adieu to their humble dwellings in Lalukhait and have purchased 14,000 square foot mansions in DHA Phase 8 in Karachi. To put it in George Jefferson’s words, they’re movin’ on up. But with wealth, prestige and illegal drug money comes animosity. Annu is interested in getting his daughter hitched to Nannu’s son to strengthen their decades-old bond, but Nannu will have none of it. How can a respectable businessman in the nuclear black market like himself marry his son off to the daughter of a lowly drug lord?
Annu doesn’t take to rejection kindly; soon enough he rats Nannu out to the Man, and the Man ships poor old Nannu off to Guantanamo Bay to be ‘debriefed’. In the meantime, Annu hires a Rwandan militia to guard his assets in Karachi, just in case Nannu is in the mood for revenge — which he is. You see, Nannu secretly smuggles out messages from Gitmo to his cronies and the plan is to dirty bomb Annu’s backside to teach him a lesson. The plan goes through, Annu’s house gets nuked — along with half of Karachi — which builds into a global nuclear conflagration and soon enough, the Apocalypse is upon us.
Stay tuned for the Eid special to see whether Annu and Nannu survive the nuclear holocaust and rekindle their friendship. It’s guaranteed to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
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