Somewhere between prime-time hysteria and saffron-tinted headlines, the Indian public has been carefully, almost artfully, led into a fever dream—where Pakistan is a perpetual villain, a ticking time bomb, a country foaming at the mouth, ready to declare war over a cricket match or a sneeze across the Line of Control.
The tragedy? They believe it.
Not because it’s true, but because their media said it with just enough drumrolls, just enough hashtags, and just enough CGI explosions to make it feel real.
Meanwhile, here in Pakistan, we’re sipping chai in our living rooms, watching clips of Indian news anchors yell into split screens like Bollywood generals, and laughing. Not the nervous kind of laughter—the kind that comes when someone takes themselves a little too seriously.
No one—no one—here believes there’s going to be a war. Not our children. Not our soldiers. Not our tailors, barbers, or baristas. Not even the old uncles who watch the news religiously while reading Jang. There is no panic. No fear. Not even a shred of preparation. Because frankly, we don’t live inside that echo chamber. We’ve outgrown those scare tactics.
It’s easier to keep the TRPs up with Pakistan as the villain than to face the silence of one’s misgovernance
The irony is rich: a country of nearly 1.4 billion being collectively gaslit by its own media machine. While across the border, a country of 240 million watches in amused disbelief, wondering how to explain that the boogeyman they fear is too busy fixing its economy, managing load-shedding, and getting kids to school.
How do we even begin to explain this absurdity to them? That war, for us, is not a cinematic climax—it’s a devastating memory. That we don’t cheer for conflict, we survive it. That we don’t want their land, their resources, or their chaos—we just want to be left out of their overproduced narrative arcs.
But maybe that’s too much nuance for prime-time. Maybe it’s easier to keep the TRPs up with Pakistan as the villain than to face the silence of one’s misgovernance.
So let them build bunkers in their minds. We’ll stay here, laughing in our drawing rooms.
Not because we don’t take war seriously—but because we know when someone else is faking it.