India brought the hysteria, Pakistan brought the memes

KARACHI: Have you heard of Captain Janabuddin? No? Well, the Indians have. He’s the imaginary pilot Pakistani memers have been mocking Indian journalists with on their claims to have ‘arrested’ Pakistani pilots.

And that’s certainly not all. An Indian tweet says: “Tomorrow Pakistan will experience something it never has”. And Pakistani users on X take it as a challenge of: who wins this meme? Answer: pretty much all of them. From quote tweets (QTs) that said “Rule of law” to “Democracy” to “Gas after 9pm” to the more political “Avenfield ki raseedein” -- that original tweet ended up being ridiculed and reduced to nothing.

That is the power of a meme. And we have seen plenty of that in the past few days -- especially on Thursday night while India’s media was putting up its own show of ‘delulu no solulu’ [look this up in your meme dictionary!]

First of all, for the uninitiated, a ‘meme’ is typically an image, video, or text—often humorous—that is copied and shared or that goes viral. Memes are usually used to respond to current events in real time.

The past days have seen probably the richest use of memes by Pakistani social media users -- old and new ‘memers’.

From mocking the sensationalism and lack of credibility of Indian news channels to linking it all to Pakistani politics, this digital resistance has become an art form in the country. Mostly on X (Twitter), Facebook and Instagram, as one meme put it: Pakistani memes are today’s Noor Jehan (hashtag: iykyk!).

The speed of Pakistani memes is remarkable. But some of the more remarkable ones -- based on personal preference would be: the missing captain Janabuddin as mentioned earlier; the ‘Meanwhile Karachi’ series, which pokes fun both at India and the Karachi administration at the same time; the memes mocking India for thinking Pakistan had been destroyed: “Indian media ke mutabiq hum sabb marr chuke hain...yeh meri rooh hai...mein jannat se tweet kar raha hoon” [According to India, we’re all dead. This is my soul. I’m tweeting from Heaven]; or the very viral: “When the siren goes off, are we supposed run in or out”....”Sorry Bhai, this is my first jang too”.

Then there were ‘serious’ memes with people changing the names of cities to a frustrated Indian social media. Where Indian channels celebrated ‘destroying the Karachi Port’, Pakistanis posted ‘news’ regarding the Toba Tek Singh ‘port’ being destroyed.

Perhaps one of the most viral memes was the juxtaposition of Indian captain Abhinandan on a still from a PTV mushaira with the tagline: “Humesha gir jaata hun mein’.

Or the ‘movie still’ with the caption: Tayyaray Zameen Par.

A special mention must be made of a non-Pakistani meme that has gone viral -- the very infectious Chinese tunak-tunak meme mocking India’s Rafale fiasco.

To understand Pakistan’s almost insatiable and relentless meme culture, The News talked to political commentator and meme connoisseur Fasi Zaka and political satirist Ali Aftab Saeed.

Zaka calls Pakistan’s memes “our only soft power source outside of Coke Studio”. Memes, he says, “humanise us in a world that has been intent on painting us as dour, rabid extremists, and always as presumed guilty. But I won’t suggest that we are only capable of comedy, Indian cable news channels have been doing a great job as well”.

According to Ali Aftab, who is no stranger to using comedy to point to political absurdity, “Pakistanis, having a long history of political helplessness, have developed a remarkable arsenal of memes as a coping mechanism. Today, when someone challenges Pakistan, they must contend with an additional frontline: the meme culture...earlier, you could say, ‘jugat’ would be a good form of this catharsis”.

Zaka says that Pakistan has had humour every generation: “You become this way when you have greatness in your grasp and you always slip on the banana you littered yourself – that’s our history. And maybe – I admit this is a stretch – but with so much increasing domestic censorship over the past decade, humour has become a lifeline for otherwise controlled commentary”.

What makes Pakistani meme culture so quick and sharp in responding to events like these? Ali Aftab feels that “after 70-odd years, most people have concluded that the state will never align with their wishes. There’s also a pervasive sense of unhappiness and the feeling that life isn’t a walk in the park for them. So they’re like: you want be serious, please go ahead. We will go on with our memes”.

Zaka has an incident he feels explains this best: “Sher Afzal Marwat was being interviewed, and a reporter asked him if he thought Modi should have done more to calm things down, and Marwat answers, ‘Is Modi my mamoo that he will care what I think?’....on the face of seemingly insurmountable odds they can do little about, Pakistanis have learned you can crumble or live the day by making light of the situation”.

Finally, we ask Fasi Zaka about his personal favourite meme. “I loved the ‘Meanwhile…Pakistanis…’ series in the build-up of war tensions as Indian commentators became more bellicose. This meme format would show Indian verbal aggression and lead to the anticlimax of Pakistanis chilling – or even worse, not listening. And I most enjoyed was the reaction of RSS-type Indian trolls who were offended and perplexed that the talk of destruction was being met with derision”.