Sara, I feel for you bro.

I will be very honest: I want a guy like Ashar Hussain. Just to be clear, Ashar not Fawad. I mean who would not want him. He is highly educated, a successful businessman, filthy rich, has above average looks and on top of all this, is portrayed as a well-mannered and modest person. I repeat, who would not want him? However, I cannot have him precisely because I wear jeans and I speak English and I belong from the class that has no morality, no conscience and is only concerned with the materialistic aspect of life. At least that is what Humsafar implies.

In a session at the Khayaal Festival called “Prevalent Themes in Pakistani Television Dramas”, Haseena Moin said that the purpose of television serial in the 80s and 90s used to be instructive: a means to correct the erroneous ways of the society. She further said that the serials of today are only reflecting the immoral norms and practices that only add to the corruption that our society is already plagued with. I would like to build up on her argument and say that, in the context of what I wrote above, Humsafar very successfully distorts reality, which I think is worse than reflecting reality. What it first implies and then later shoves in your face is that if you are Sara (minus the borderline personality disorder) you are not good enough for a) the perfect guy and b) pretty much everything else in life. And if you pay attention you will notice that AFTER Humsafar more and more dramas have started to portray this phenomenon whenever they deem is relevant to the story and so are reinforcing this concept. For example, Zindagi Gulzaar hai, Aasmaanon per hai likha, Daam, Tanhai, Shehr-e-zaat etc. are all such dramas that have punished the upper class girl for her western clothing and her western lifestyle through various ways, usually by taking away the man she loves and throwing him into the lap of what Sara would like to call “gaaon ki mutiyaar”.

What should be noted here is that some of these dramas e.g. Daam and Zindagi Gulzaar Hai like Humsafar gained massive fan following that only worsens the issue at hand. This is because when dramas likes Humsafar grab national attention, they propagate such biased notions and portrayals and interfere with the perceptions of many people. We may be just students who are watching the drama for a class who might not only most probably forget (sorry :p) our analyses after this semester is over but might also too busy to get affected by such depictions. Nevertheless, let’s not forget that most of the audience of these serials constitute the middle and lower middle class housewives who might take them more seriously than we do because for most of them this is the only entertainment available to them. Therefore, with every other drama reinforcing the idea that the upper class girl is necessarily evil, it would not come to me as a surprise if this perception gradually becomes seated into their minds.

This leads me to think as to what kind of values and ideas are we really portraying and teaching to the masses? Are all upper class girls so petulant and impudent that they have to be punished in order to ‘correct’ their ways? Moreover, is this some sort of a patriarchal strategy to suppress the so-called confident and independent upper class girl in becoming docile and amenable? I hope I have given you something to think about.