Storytelling: Ali Gul Pir launches new podcast

Lahore : Ali Gul Pir is expanding his digital presence with an all-new podcast, a weekly endeavour in which the multi-hyphenate entertainer hopes to share experiences and tell stories.

The versatile performer says he started the digital series for two reasons. The first is his penchant for conversation, combined with the wide variety of people he has encountered. “I’ve been through a lot of stuff, good and bad, in life,” he tells Instep, “I have met [a wide] range of people – presidents, former presidents, and world leaders, and then also like a rikshay wala in Malir who carries around a hand grenade in his pocket, to a range of weird and funny and interesting individuals. So, I feel like I have a lot of stories and experiences to share. I can’t depict these experiences go in depth via short videos or songs that I do, while in a podcast I can.”

The other reason for launching the podcast was to create regular content for YouTube, where an episode will be uploaded every week. “I feel like I have content – small videos and occasional songs – for other platforms, like Instagram and Facebook, but for YouTube I didn’t have consistent content so I wanted to do that [in order to] get more traffic on YouTube.”

The theme of the podcast is storytelling. “Basically whomever comes [as a guest on the podcast] has a story to tell.”

In the first episode, lawyer Jibran Nasir relays the tale of Nazim Jokhio, a 27-year-old from Malir who was tortured to death after uploading a video of some foreigners hunting the houbara bustard in Karachi. Jibran provides a summary of events based on the police statement given by the deceased’s brother and the eyewitness account of his widow. It’s a story Ali feels deserves more attention than it got, and one that he feels very passionately about. “I believe what happened to Nazim Jokhio is a terrorist act, because when these vadairas kill defiant outspoken citizens of their town, they mean it as a message, so that no one in their town or any adjacent town has the courage to raise a voice against them again,” he says. “These cases happen in the city, and because he didn’t wear a pant shirt, or he wasn’t a student of CBM or Iqra or Mehran University and he just posted on social media when these wrong things happened, nobody spoke about him as much [as they should have] and I feel like I have to.”

But not all episodes of the podcast are going to be serious. The second episode finds the host speaking to his friend Azfar Ali – someone who helped him out a lot when he started his career – about a funny bachelor party that took a wrong turn. So, there will be a variety – from funny and adventurous to dramatic and horror stories – on offer. “Some [instalments] are dramatic; some are just interesting, weird stories that have happened. And not all have to be things that have happened to me. They could be stories that people I know have experienced or are involved in somehow. So yeah, the theme is to come and share a story. But obviously it’s weekly so I don’t know where it’s going to go.”

Ali hopes it’s the storytelling aspect that will attract listeners to his show and make his project stand out in the very crowded podcast arena. “I also used to think that there are so many podcasts already and there are very good podcasts in Pakistan so why would people listen to me,” he says. “I feel like what is me is my experiences. If I’m just asking questions and the podcast goes on for two hours, then [other] people are [already] doing that much better. I felt like I needed to bring in my own experiences and my identity into the podcast and that would make it unique. So, my identity is the experiences you’re going to hear. Either they’re my experiences, shared experiences, or experiences that really moved me, so I’m sharing them with you through someone else. So yeah, that’s what you’re going to get in my podcast.”