Get Mansha!

Mubasher Lucman’s hilarious attempts at playing Ahab to Mansha’s Moby Dick

Do you watch Mubasher Lucman’s show on ARY? Me neither. But the troubled souls who do watch it, testify that, of late, the Lahore-based anchor has his guns firmly set on an unlikely target: Mian Muhammad Mansha. In fact, one of the viewers (who was, bizarrely, keeping count) called me up and said Lucman has referenced Mansha in a whopping twenty-two programmes in the recent past.

And, in signature Lucman fashion, he doesn’t let the facts get in his way. He always gives it a 110 percent. Nuances and accuracy are for wusses. Mansha is the Big Bad Villain behind everything. The Amrish Puri, if you will. The Kashmir earthquake, he’ll have you believe, was a result of Mansha’s machinations and so were the floods of ’11.

He can now work Mansha in any conversation on any topic. In the aftermath of the elections, when the PTI’s activists were protesting at the results of NA-125 in Lahore, Fauzia Kasuri says, on his show, that there is no respect for the poor in this country. Lucman’s reply: Yes, but Imran Khan doesn’t have money (!) but he is respected and Mansha has a lot of money but he isn’t.

Now this is no defence for Mansha. Already rich, Mansha had hit the stratospheric filthy rich category during the privatisation drive of the ’90s. There was the iconic MCB deal. Then there was the Adamjee insurance deal. The privatisation drive of the said decade (or, for that matter, the Musharraf era) was fraught with shadiness. So, it is natural to suspect that some hanky-panky took place even if it didn’t. But the have-nots can begrudge him even his non-privatisation wealth, like the Nishat Group. It is, after all, the only luxury the non-elite have in this country. And there is nothing wrong with that, really.

But Lucman presses the gas pedal all the way, blaming the Chinioti for things like the concept of interest in the first place. Yes, he had on his show a group of religious scholars denouncing interest, which Lucman segued into a denunciation of Mansha.

So, what’s the story here? We know from the now infamous Malik Riaz tapes of Lucman and Mehr Bokhari that he isn’t the sort who would do something like this because of the milk of human kindness. But whatever the reasons (ideological, financial or what-have-you) even the sharpest of Mansha-critics would find Lucman amusing. A tirade against IPPs is understandable (though debatable) but out of all those, singling out Mansha yet again makes little sense. It’s like attributing global warming to carbon emissions and then blaming it on Mansha alone for using a car instead of taking the bus to work.

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Making fun of Muneeb Farooq’s subservience to Najam Sethi is a lazy thing to do now, almost akin to making fun of Meera’s English. The anchor has blossomed into an impressive force in his own right and more power to him. The television circuit needs more mature voices like his.

But it is difficult to let Sethi’s first programme after his CM-stint slide. The programme contains nothing much; the second programme was more eventful and expect to see a write-up on that in this space in a day or two.

But the first programme should be watched in this clip only from 00:38 to 01:06 only for the inadvertent appearance of sexual tension between the two. Just for laughs.