Reminiscences of Jugnu Mohsin

Karachi
The Karachi Literature Festival featured a very interesting session on Saturday. It was titled ‘In Conversation with Jugnu Mohsin’ and moderated by former diplomat Zafar Hilaly.
The session was quite lively in that Jugnu, wife of Najam Sethi and a journalist like her husband, punctuated her speech with pungent humour, including mimicking various people’s accents and describing their amusing idiosyncrasies.
In particular, she mimicked an important foreign-based Pakistani politician that really amused the gathering. She described her career as a journalist, the profession’s rewards, pitfalls and challenges.
She narrated how the US ambassador in Islamabad would simply refuse to take Benazir Bhutto’s calls.
As for Pervez Musharraf, she said he certainly was a dictator but a relatively soft one. Unlike other dictators, he could take criticism to a certain extent.
She narrated the instance of a call from the former president who was miffed over something she had written, something he had taken umbrage at.
She also narrated the case of a certain politician who had the reputation of being a turncoat and enjoyed a key position in the Asif Zardari government, who was Nawaz Sharif’s information secretary during the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad government and under a pseudonym used to write pieces terribly critical of the Sharif government.
“Politics should be the people’s concern,” she said, and lamented that the people were most callously overlooked in the political process and political decisions.
She attributed the woeful civic conditions and people’s travails, especially in Karachi and Lahore, to this apathy on the part of the politicians.
She sent peals of laughter through the large audience with a display of her mimicking talent and mimicked many politicians and other figures, their accents and the peculiarities of the way they conducted themselves.
Her speech was profusely punctuated with humour and witticisms. She also described her encounters with people who either didn’t approve of her coverage or didn’t have the power of comprehension to gauge the profundity of the pieces.
It was a very light-hearted session, a departure from the serious and profound sessions normally associated with such events.