Writing 'The Khan' & Struggles Through Life, Author, Saima Mir

0:00Saima MirIn the universe told me that this is where you need to be. And I wanted to change the world. I wanted to tell stories about women who looked like me and who sounded like me. And by the time I was 25, I'd been married and divorced twice. I got married. I met somebody who was mad enough to say, "This woman's a runaway bride." Very proud of my heritage. I'm very proud of being of a Pakistani background. I'm very proud that I was raised as a Muslim woman.

0:32Jawad MirWelcome back everyone, yet another episode of Kingdom of Dreams podcast, the making of stories. I'm your host Jawwad Mir. Today my guest is Saima Mir, an author and journalist, for publications like BBC, Times, The Guardian, The Independent. We talked about her book, The Khan, as well as the sequel, Vengeance, as well as an upcoming book next year, which is a part of the trilogy, and bunch of things about life and society in general. Very different conversation from the previous conversation that we had, which had been mainly about films. And, yeah, great chat. So without further ado, here is my conversation with author, journalist Saima Mir. Before we go to your book, and your books actually, I just wanna know how your life kinda came into be, into journalism, as well as writing. Like, what was that catalyst and that moment that brought you into this world, into the world of storytelling, essentially? That's what you do.

1:27Saima MirSo that, there's two ways I can tell you this story. One of them is that my mother's father, my nana, was a journalist in Iran. So he was a missionary, and the mosque at the time that he belonged to, was sending people to different countries, and he went to live in Iran. And so he died when he was young. He was in his 40s. My grandmother was widowed, and as happens with people who die young, it became this kind of legend of folklore of the fact that we come from this family of writers, and that my nana, my mother's father, was a storyteller. He wrote for a newspaper called the Tehran Times, and he was this wonderful wom… man, that, you know, all the stories that come with people who die young. And so I came from this background of being told that we're writers, this is what we do, we write stories. My grandmother used to edit a lot of, books for the mosque. She was heavily involved in the local masjid. And so it was this thing of this is who we are.

2:31Saima MirBut no one did it as a career. You know, when you, when you're British Pakistani, no one tells you the path, and my parents, because they were immigrants, they didn't have a network of being, writers. So I never thought this was a thing I could do. I always read. I loved stories. My dada, my dad's dad, taught me to read newspaper headlines at my local paper. My mother took me to library, the local library in Bradford, where I grew up, in Yorkshire. And so this was a thing that was in my kind of bloodline, but I didn't know how to do it. And I had a very traditional life. I did science at university, 'cause I thought, "How do I do anything else?" I was kinda nudged towards that. And, I got married. I was 21, and that ended in three months. And I moved to the States, and it ended. And then by the time I was 25, I'd been married and divorced twice, which for a woman in the '90s, which is 1990s, it was very... It was not the kinda time it is now.

3:32Saima MirAnd so culturally, pretty much I was a pariah. I was a nice girl from a nice family who'd left two husbands who had not hit her, kind of, you know. And so my life was pretty much, it was like social suicide. And I always wanted to write, and I didn't know how to do it. And by then, I just didn't care anymore about what anyone said or did. So I wrote to my local paper. In fact, I called the features editor and said, "I really wanna write for you. How do I do it?" And I got lucky, and he would kind of took me under his wing and he said, "You can write some columns." And I did, I did that stuff. And a job came up, and he called me and he said, "Do you wanna apply for this job?" And I was like, "Yeah, sure, I'll have a go." I was so bolshy by then, and I'd kind of got rid of all of the cultural garb that nice women from my nice background came from, and I had nothing to lose. So I stepped into this newsroom for the first time, and I felt like I'd come home.

4:35Saima MirI belonged there. Something in the universe told me that this is where you need to be. And I wanted to change the world. I wanted to tell stories about women who looked like me and who sounded like me, and I didn't want to do it in a perspective of, shunning my culture. I'm very proud of my heritage. I'm very proud of being of a Pakistani background. I'm very proud that I was raised as a Muslim woman. I see the issues with it, and I say the, see the patriarchal contradictions that come through the interpretation of, certain lenses, but that doesn't mean I'm ashamed of it. And so I wanted to tell stories about people like me. So I became a journalist, and I worked for the local paper. Then I, always wanted to write for The Guardian, 'cause that was the paper I read when I was doing my A-levels. So I sent them my CV, and at the bottom I put awards, and I future dated it. So I put like Oscar, Pul… Pulitzer Prize, BAFTA, this kind of thing.

5:40Saima MirAnd they liked me, and, they commissioned me, so I secretly wrote for them, because you weren't allowed to write for anyone else when you worked for this local paper. And then I wanted to work for the BBC, so I applied for every single BBC job going. The stuff that I was not qualified for, you know, stuff that was not in my kind of skill set, I just applied. And I landed a job, at my local BBC network, and I was on TV. So I did... I was a reporter on TV, I was a broadcast journalist, I was a video journalist, which culturally was problematic, again, because women from my family weren't on screen. You were not supposed to be on TV. So it was, it was difficult. And, I did that for a long time. I'm gonna pause now and let you jump in, 'cause there's more to tell you about the second half of my life, but I'm sure you've got questions before I come to the critical element.

6:39Jawad MirNo, please conti… I want you to continue. The flow is there. Wrap it up, I, and I'll come…

6:44Saima MirI'll, I'll keep on going. Wrap it up, Saimma.

6:47Jawad MirYeah. No. That's not what I meant. I meant just keep going, and once you wrap it up, then I will ask you the questions.

6:53Saima MirBrilliant. So, I did that for a while, and I, landed a prize from the Commonwealth Broadcast Association. They gave me... I landed an award from them called the World View Award, because I speak quite a few languages, and I…

7:11Jawad MirWhich ones? Sorry to interrupt.

7:13Saima MirI sp… I'm fluent in Urdu. My Punjabi is much better than it used to be. Hindi, obviously, because I speak Urdu and I... So I understand High Hindi as well, 'cause I've, spent time learning that. So those languages give me access to Pakistan. I understand the culture. I scr… spent a lot of time there as a kid in the summers. So I wanted to report from Pakistan. I wanted to be, a journalist out there. So I went there. And in the meantime, actually, I got married. I met somebody who was mad enough to say, "This woman's a runaway bride, but, she... I, you know, I like her," and we got married. So my husband came with me. And so I quit my job at the BBC to do this. I reported from Pakistan. And then I came back and I couldn't get... I wanted to freelance, and I just couldn't get that career going. And in the meantime, I was pregnant and I wrote a novel.

8:16Saima MirSo I wrote a novel called The Khan. And The Khan was based on what it's like to be a British Pakistani woman, a second-generation woman who is the daughter of a criminal kingpin. And it was based on my experiences of reporting whilst living in the north of England. So covering court, going to see people who had committed crimes and been accused of crimes, going to crime scenes, and seeing people from my ethnic background there, and how they ended up there. So I reported on things, and I covered things like the 7/7 bombings. I covered the shooting of a policewoman here in England. And I'd been there as sometimes the only non-white storyteller journalist. And so I fed all of that into this book. I was so sick of seeing, women like me being talked about as oppressed and, needing rescuing, and I thought, "Nah, I'm gonna write this story about this woman."

9:25Saima MirAll the women I know are smart, strong, clever women. And so I wrote The Khan. And it's the story of Jia Khan, who's this daughter of a criminal kingpin. She's a London barrister, and she gets sucked back into the underworld when her dad is killed and her brother's kidnapped. So it's sort of described as if Michael Corleone was a British Pakistani woman.

9:51Jawad MirYeah.

9:51Saima MirThe book sat there for years. It just sat there for seven years, and nobody wanted it, couldn't sell it. Long story short, it did sell, and it became a Times bestseller. It did really well. Widely reviewed. The sequel came out last year, called Vengeance.

10:11Saima MirIt's Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. And the third one comes out, inshallah, next year.

10:19Jawad MirAnd what is that called, if it has a title?

10:22Saima MirIt doesn't have a title yet. I have a title in mind.

10:24Jawad MirFair enough.

10:24Saima MirBut

10:25Jawad MirI don't need to know.

10:26Saima MirWe'll see.

10:26Jawad MirIt's fine.

10:26Saima MirI'm, I'm arguing with my publisher about that.

10:29Jawad MirYeah, no, I get that. Well, thank you so much, first of all, for sharing your story. And what I, what I really admired about certain parts in your story more than the others, because a lot of people sometimes embellish, or hide the, you know, the not so the best parts of their life, which, in fact, in storytelling as well as talking to people at one on one, is something that connects you more to others than anything else. So to be, to be able to have that part of your story, not necessarily proud of it, but acce… obviously accepting it as part of your story, to, for you, for you to mention that is not something that a lot of people do. It doesn't matter about culture, it isn't about gender. But so I just wanna commend you on that you did that. And…

11:25Saima MirYou know…

11:26Jawad MirGo on.

11:26Saima MirSorry.

11:27Jawad MirNo, please, go on.

11:27Saima MirI was just gonna say, the... So I'm a storyteller because I believe stories are powerful things.

11:32Jawad Mir100%.

11:33Saima MirThey're the most powerful things on the planet. And I say this as a journalist who's reported hard news. Hard news doesn't change people the way it used to do. Stories change people, because they whisper to us, and we get to spend time with characters who we may not spend time with in our day-to-day. And part of that is being honest. Like, I didn't have those stories to turn to. There was no path for me. There was no woman who'd Done these things…

12:07Jawad MirRight

12:08Saima Mir... And then said to me, "You know, it's tricky, but you can do it." There was, like, no one. There was, like, these iconized characters, and then there was the failures. But actually, the path is the middle path, right? And so if I don't speak the truth and say, "This is hard, but you can do it, but it's gonna be hard," then people, we lose people along the way.

12:31Jawad MirI couldn't agree, especially in today's polarized world. I mean, I personally have been, you know, telling stories, but one of the things that really changed my point of view about storytelling... I mean, it was there, but it was sort of on the fence, but it just really brought me to the other side. I was working on this film called, Citizen Moria right here, and, it's... You're probably familiar with this place, in, on Lesbos Island. It's very popular in the UK, where the refugees were coming in from all parts of different worlds, from Africa, from Asia. So the story essentially of the film is, I'll give you a premise and I'll tell you where I'm going with this, is about an Afghan refuge… filmmaker who fled Afghanistan because the Taliban put him on a hit list, and he leaves his pregnant wife and his kids behind, and he ends up in Europe's worst refugee detention center. This is a documentary, so it's a real thing that happened, and we followed him in real time, in the detention center. I was there and all that stuff.

13:34Jawad MirSo the way I became familiar with this whole Moria story, Mor… the refugee detention center, was somebody introduced me to this guy, Ahmed, and I went online and I did some research. Okay, what is this Moria? And I saw articles from Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC, you name it, that how there's these group of refugees and they're being mistreated by these white supremacists, blah. And I went with it. And I went to Greece and I spent a week and a half there, my first trip. And I realized that there was more to the story than what I was being fed in the news, and I started finding out that the people who are living there, the locals, they, not all of them, but they did turn against the refugees, especially near the refugee detention center, after five years of being nominated for Nobel Peace Prize. So there was this arc that went…

14:30Saima MirRight

14:30Jawad Mir... With them. And I realized how, like, it just had an awakening, like a wide awakening for me, it was there, that how important it is to understand the other side. As crazy as it is, nobody's born with hate. Nobody comes out in this world to try to, like, hate people or a group of people. Either they're ignorant or they're misled, and it's our job to find out why that is and try to fix that.

14:56Jawad MirAnd that's storytelling in my view.

15:00Saima MirYeah, absolutely. If we don't... We have to sit with each other, don't we? And it's difficult to sit with each other, so stories make that easier. They're the gateway.

15:11Jawad MirI couldn't agree more. No, thank you for sharing that. So let me ask you something, and if it's too personal, please, you know, tell me to back off. Y… you went through some troubles in your early 20s. You talked about your marriage, marriages. Would you be the same person that you are today had you not gone through those two situations?

15:34Saima MirDo you know, I don't know. I think about that, this a lot. I think who I was is inside me, and the older I get, the more woo-woo I become. You know, m… the older I get, the more I think this is my bloodline, and the, when I learn, think about my own grandmother and her grandmother, who I'm told used to take horses from one village to another. She used to ride a horse and just on her own travels. If you think, you know, 150 years ago, what woman did that in Pakistan, it's a big deal. So there's a bit of me that thinks that. I think what happened to me, it gave me the courage to break free of the kind of ideas of who I was supposed to be that were put on me. I don't think I would've escaped those ideas of who I was s… who I should be, who Saima Mir, should be, who a girl who's from this nice Pakistani family should be.

16:39Saima MirYou know what? If things go along, you don't question, right? And so much went wrong that I questioned everything, and I started to question the adults around me. And they were young. I think when, you know, my mother was 24 when she had me, so if you think she was younger than me by the time I was married and divorced, and so... And she'd had a nice, quite stable life. So she was just telling me what she had been told, and sh… what her mother told her was what she had been told, and we were just passing on this baton, and I think I just refused to take it. So I don't know what would've happened. I'd like... It's not that I think this happened to me and it's great, and I wouldn't change it for the world, because I'd be someone else and I'd do something else. Definitely made me dark and twisty and not as, like, Pollyanna as I used to be.

17:35Jawad MirAnd what part of your life, which I'm sure it's in the two published books as well as the one that's upcoming, without talking the upcoming one, what part of your life went in there in the most obvious way? I'm sure there's su… things that are there subtly, but character-wise…

17:57Jawad Mir... Or i… incident-wise.

17:59Saima MirSo a lot of the crimes that happened in, The Khan happened in real life, not to me, but I reported on them.

18:06Jawad MirRight.

18:06Saima MirSo a lot of that is in. There's a scene in The Khan where Jiya Khan, who's our protagonist, she merges her wardrobe. And so she has these two wardrobes. She has this Pakistani wardrobe of shalwar kameez, and then she has this, like, jeans that she wears. And what she does is she just merges it. So she starts, she gets rid of the division, and she starts wearing kurta with jeans, and that's a real episode. I did that, you know, and it feels, it doesn't feel radical or rebellious now to think that someone's wearing jeans to the mosque, but when I was growing up, you didn't do that. And so that was something I did, and I think it really defined... It was a defining moment for me, 'cause I decided I was gonna be the same person in both spheres of my life. So somebody said to me once, he said, "You're very different on the phone when you're speaking Urdu." He said, "Your body language changes.

19:06Saima MirEverything changes." And I thought, that's fascinating. Why is that? Does that mean that how I... The things I say, if they're both truths and I'm being honest, why am I different in one room, and not the other? So I think that was something I definitely changed.

19:27Jawad MirBut don't you think that's because not n… I, and I get it. There's sometimes some people who have this complete, you know, not you or me in general, but just in specifically, they have this fake thing that they're being somewhere, different than somewhere else. But then there's also situations where you have to be real, but at the same time cater to that person in a little bit different way, so anchor away a little bit. Is that the same thing that you…

19:55Saima MirYeah. So it's a journey, right?

19:57Jawad MirYeah.

19:57Saima MirSo people talk about being authentic, and then we think, is being authentic everywhere? Is that the same? But actually, it's not. You can be authentic and true to who you are. You'll be different. So for... There's a whole report on it. I read a political report. Like Obama…

20:14Saima Mir... He's not gonna be the same on the street when he's greeting people as he is with his wife, Michelle, in their house.

20:21Jawad MirThat's the whole world. Everybody's different at the home than outside.

20:24Saima MirYeah. But I think what this thing that's talked about in terms of code switching, which we used to do to survive, right? I'm 50, so, you know, 25 years ago it was a different landscape, and people code switched because, people didn't understand our culture or they didn't understand why we did certain things. Actually, though, after 25 years of doing it becomes a shackle, and I'm grounded enough, successful enough in my career, you know, Alhamdulillah, all of that stuff, to not need to do that. And I go into rooms now sometimes and I'm like... And you know, as a woman, you do that, and as a woman of color, you do that. As a... Y… it's really, it's awful. You know, I don't wanna do that. Like, as a man, a white man can walk into a room and say what he likes, and everybody understood, understands it. I walk into a room, and depending on which room I'm in, I'm angry, or I'm opinionated, or I've got no shame, depending on which room I'm in. You know? Or I'm too modest if I'm in another opposing room to that.

21:26Saima MirYou know, I've had that. I've had people say to me, "You should be more forthright." I've had people say to me, "You should be less forthright." And, so all of that happens, and some of it, the mix of being authentic and being true, and isn't that the mark of success when you can be yourself in a measured way, in all the rooms that you go into? So I know that sounds really messy, and it's not a clean, clear answer.

21:55Jawad MirNo. It is. And I wonder sometimes, and I'm glad you mentioned that. So this is a question. This is not in any way an analysis or a judgment, is that you said that, you know, when you walk into a room, are you this or are you that? Is that being done by men only, or is it also being done by women? And not…

22:17Saima MirOh, it's being done by women too. It's totally being done.

22:20Jawad MirOkay.

22:20Saima MirYou know. So one of the themes that I write a lot about is patriarchy and the pushes of the patriarchy, and, the double agents of the patriarchy, which features quite heavily in Vengeance, the second book. Who does push this? Who makes sure that women, recei… remain in the situation that we're in? And, I don't wanna do a spoiler of the second book, but…

22:45Jawad MirIt's fine

22:45Saima Mir... It is very much that, which is what would we do, what would women do, what would the world do if we rose up in our beds one morning, all the women, and said, "I'm not gonna take this anymore. I'm gonna put a knife to your throat. You're just gonna do what I say"? Like, the world would stop. We are the invisible carriers of the work. We bring people into the world. We raise children. We look after men. We go earn money. We do all these things. We are infinitely powerful if we join together and understand that we are sisters to each other, and that men are our brothers and our sons and our... We do not have to be under their control. But, you know, it's a, it's a, it's challenging, right? And I say this as a privileged woman who has her own income and her own family and is free from the shackles of it after, you know, 30 years of fighting it.

23:38Jawad MirYeah. Yeah. I was gonna... I had a question. I just kinda lost me here. So let me, let me just…

23:48Saima MirThat happens when people speak to me. They, like…

23:50Jawad MirNo. I'm, I'm listening to you. And it happens to me some, most of the time when I'm doing a podcast, because I'm, I'm really so engaged and I'm listening that question disappears, and it'll come back to me. But continuing on from this, right? So I'm glad you have that in the book because... And when I say this, it doesn't mean in any remote way that responsibility needs to be taken off men, right? If… It's like i… i… if a group of people, forget the whole gender thing, any group of people, excuse me, are united, then the outside forces, when they see that unification, they will be less likely to tamper in, right? And but when there's people from that group trying to sort of side with the other group, then they're like, "Oh, okay, let's just go in there." I'm not... And that's wrong as it is, but I'm just saying that unification, not just in gender, but also in our, in our culture, in our s… you know, the upbringing, everything matters.

24:51Saima MirI completely agree with you, and I'll, I'll give you an example. So one of the things I draw from a lot in my storytelling is this Islamic upbringing that I had, and this great text that I was given as a kid, whether it's the Quran or the Hadiths, these wonderful texts. And when Muslims pray, we stand shoulder to shoulder, and one of the things we're told is, "Stand shoulder to shoulder so that, Shaitan, the devil, doesn't come in between you." And, you know, you don't have to believe that as an actual real thing, that the devil is gonna come and stand between you, but it is a s… you know, it's a story that, symbolizes something, which is stand shoulder to shoulder so that nothing can come and tear you apart, and it's very much what you've said, which is,.. And I completely agree with you. I do not think, and I think part of the problem we have at the minute with the rise of, this kind of radicalization of men to b… by Andrew Tate, is because we've done men a disservice, which is we have, on one side we've got this rise of white feminism, which is, you know, we should be able to do this, we should be able...

25:55Saima MirOn the other side, we've got patriarchal women who are enmeshed in the system of giving men their due. But actually, what we need is a middle ground somewhere, which is where men and women can be equal to each other. And by equal, I mean have equal rights, but the understandings that we have different physicalities, we have different needs. Women give birth, men do not. That does not mean that one is of more value. I think this is something we really in society need to explore at the minute. So yes, very much, women need to come together and form a sisterhood, and also, with the support of men. So one of the moments I remember in my life very clearly was after I'd got divorced and I lived on my own and I had my own house and I worked in the BBC and I was in television, and so I had a small amount of success in that world. And I remember...

26:56Saima MirSo I'd become hyper independent. One of my challenges is that I'm hyper independent, because I was so alone for such a long time that I learnt to do everything myself. I didn't need anybody else. I was gonna do it myself. And I remember having this cle… clear moment, which was, hang on, I cannot do this myself. This is a myth. I have been told this lie that women can have it all, and it's told by women who have had men support them throughout. Because men have never done anything on their own. They have had the support of women at home, in the workplace. So why is it that women think we can do it all without the aid of men? We can't. We didn't even get the vote until men voted to say, "Yes, you can have it." And so that's not disrespect on men or women. It's a fact of the system that we live in, which is we have genders in this world, you know, whether you believe in, you know, male, female, non-binary gender, whatever, we are people.

27:59Saima MirAnd again, I'm gonna come back to that Islamic thing. You know, God says, "I made you in groups to keep each other in check." We have to be there. We all have to be there. In order for this system to work to its best ability, everybody has to play their part, and one of the issues we've got is that we're not playing our part. We're not being allies to each other. We're not supporting each other.

28:20Jawad MirI agree. I can't... I couldn't agree, and I think our roles have been mixed up in a lot of ways too, because we try to be who we are not by natural instinct. And o… I just saw this clip a couple of days ago somebody sent me, was Obama saying the exact same thing. And he, you know how Obama explains things in a very articulate way, that how we expect men to be in a certain way, but we have pushed them to a point where they're going after other men who are saying that, "Well, those women are like this and this and this," and then they go and that. So, and it f… goes the other way too, right? So it's not just men and women. I just think that... A… and this is a, this is a bigger problem in my view than just gender. It's even like you're looking at Middle East, what's going on, e… everything. We are always so quick to not listen to the other person when they're talking, while in the meantime we're preparing an answer of a first part of the explanation they're making, and we don't listen to the other person, and then it just goes back and forth.

29:29Jawad MirIt's always about me, and that's where it needs to end. The, this, there's just so much me and selfishness, I think, that has happened in our society, I don't know if it's because of social media or whatever it is, that needs to go away, and it needs to be, have a balance of you, us, and me, all three of it.

29:48Saima MirYeah, completely. Absolutely. I have three sons, so in my house, it, you know, there is this thing about how do we balance talk of women and women's rights and equality without damaging the confidence and self-esteem of men, young boys. They're boys at the minute. But how do I raise them to be allies to women and also true to themselves? Conversations this morning with friends about how do you raise them to be men who are comfortable in who they are and different aspects of themselves and… we have lost that. No, I come from a family where I remember the last generation, they were gentlemen. You know, my father was a real gentleman. And my grandfather. You know, how you treat women and how women were treated, it was, you know, with great respect, and they were listened to, and our opinions were listened to. And, just in a generation it seems to have drip… dripped away.

30:54Saima MirSo, yeah.

30:55Jawad MirYeah. We'll come back. We'll come back.

30:57Saima MirWe'll bring it back.

30:58Jawad MirI think…

30:58Saima MirWe're doing the work.

30:59Jawad MirI think the... Yeah, I think things will... And I think in the last couple of years things are sort of shifting a little bit back. Hopefully they keep going back to the center. But that's just life. The pendulum swings back and forth. As long as it's swinging close to the center part, that's, that's good.

31:15Saima MirYeah

31:15Jawad Mir... I would love to sort of go to your book again. So I read on your, website it's... And again, if this is too confidential, I don't... We don't need to talk about it. It's optioned for television, series?

31:28Saima MirIt's optioned for television. The information on the website is wrong.

31:31Jawad MirOkay

31:32Saima Mir... It's very exciting. I'm not allowed to tell you on the…

31:35Jawad MirGot it

31:35Saima Mir... On air what it is. I've signed an NDA. But it's very exciting.

31:41Jawad MirI get that. Don't worry about it. I completely respect that. But I'm glad that there's something happening because, I haven't read the books. Normally I do, but I just haven't had a chance, but I will take a read at them 'cause they do sound very fascinating. And then there's more context to it now than I, you know, ta… talking to you about it, than how, where you're coming from and who you are as an author. What's ahead for you in life? What are some of the things that you want to achieve, besides this third book, besides this NDA thing that you talked about, that is a big goal for you?

32:20Saima MirI am working on a screenplay that I am very excited about. It's set here in London. It's the mayor of London as, a British Muslim woman.

32:33Jawad MirOkay.

32:33Saima MirSo I'm very excited about that. Yeah, that's my big thing. I work in AI as well. I'm a consultant, and I'm very interested in the marriage between creatives and AI. I feel at the minute we're very much at each other's throats. Artists are worried about their income, quite rightly. Technologists don't understand the language of artists because we live in the gray, right? We live in the absolute chaos.

33:03Saima MirSo one of the projects I'm working on is bringing together, successful artists from all backgrounds and, putting them with very successful technologists and having conversations to see what the future will look like for us.

33:22Jawad MirThat's incredible. I was actually just reading the other day, Netflix has been using a lot of AI, in some of their film for visual effects. You know, which is, which is daunting. But at the same time, I know I use AI every freaking day, like, so many times. You know, not just for general stuff, but even for research. This couple of scripts that I wrote, a lot of the, you know, the research part and just maybe tweaking a dialogue here and there. "What do you suggest? What do yous both think about this?" And then taking that and either changing it completely or manipulating it a little bit. So it does help because it just kinda clears... And the thing is, I know it's not the... It might, we might be heading into a direction where we might, will not be using our brain's capacity as much as we should. But the problem is if we don't use it, somebody else will, and then you'll be sitting here doing nothing.

34:19Saima MirWell, and this is the thing. I think we're in a situation where we are, again, like everything else, at loggerheads with each other. And this thing is here, and these people are gonna make money. And if we don't get involved in the conversation in an intelligent, as you said, way where we listen rather than answer straight away before we think we know what's being said, we're gonna lose everything. And actually, art is so powerful in terms of our mental wellbeing, our health, whether that's music or filmmaking or storytelling, that if we lose it, we will lose society. So we've gotta find a way to work with these technologists, and the only way we're gonna find a way is by making them understand the value of what we're doing.

35:09Jawad MirAgreed. What kind of music do you like?

35:12Saima MirI used to be an indie chick, so I used to, like, listen to a lot of stuff like that, but I listen to anything. But I'm a mix, so I like rock music, but I also equally like ghazals and Avalli and, yeah. Yeah, totally.

35:26Saima MirI started playing drums too late.

35:29Jawad MirOh, you play drums?

35:31Saima MirVery newbie drums. Yeah. Do you play something?

35:35Jawad MirNo. My son plays piano. I don't know anything about an instrument, but I have... And I don't really listen to a lot of songs from the West.

35:44Saima MirRight.

35:45Jawad MirI've grown up with songs from the East.

35:48Saima MirWhat do you…

35:48Jawad MirPakistan. Pakistan, India. You know, just Coke Studio is one of my favorites. But the thing…

35:54Saima MirI'm a Pakistani generation.

35:55Jawad MirYeah. But the thing that I listen to the most, that I've been listening to the most for the last, since the, like, 1990s, is movie scores.

36:02Saima MirOkay.

36:03Jawad MirLike, I listen to them, like, almost like a religion. Like, it's just very important to me.

36:09Saima MirThey are... I think this is part of the thing of, like, the connection to the divine is through music. And one of the challenges for people who are of Pakistani heritage is we were stripped of that. And actually, that is such a straight connection up.

36:23Jawad MirWell, Sufism, right? I mean, if you look at that too.

36:26Saima MirYeah. My... All of my children learn…... Piano because of that. But again, it's, you know, we, I don't know how it is for you, but for me it's very much that, breaking of ancestral things of we don't play music, we don't do this, you know, and it's like she's the crazy woman whose kids…... Play guitar and music, play music and go to dr…

36:50Jawad MirBut that's, but is that still out there? I thought things changed quite a bit. Like is there still that, not that it matters, but is there still that perception that you play music or you listen to music, there's something odd about that?

37:03Saima MirI don't think listening to music, but, spending money. You know, it's, we're privileged, right? We're privileged. We are paying for our children to go and sit around and learn to play piano, and in my generation you learnt maths. That's what you did.

37:20Saima MirAnd so I think, yeah, it is very much still... I'm not part of that world where it is a problem. But yeah, I think it is for a lot of kids, it is still a thing of like…

37:34Jawad MirAmazing.

37:36Saima MirYeah.

37:38Jawad MirWhat is one thing in life that if you think about right now in this very moment, the first thought that comes to mind from the past or even from the recent present that brings a smile on your face, that makes you happy?

37:49Saima MirMy father.

37:50Jawad MirYour father.

37:50Saima MirMy father. And…

37:53Jawad MirWell, what kind of relationship you had with your father, if you wanna share.

37:57Saima MirWell, I'm really lucky. My dad was a feminist before he knew what a feminist is, and he loves being a dad. He loves having daughters. And he... So I wrote, I wrote an article for The Guardian in 2019 that went viral, and it was the most read article in The Guardian that year, and it was about myself and marriage and divorce.

38:27Saima MirIt's raining here. Sorry, is that coming through into the…

38:30Jawad MirNo, I can't hear a thing. It's fine.

38:32Saima MirBut my dad, when I got divorced second time, my dad said to my mum, "You're not gonna stop my daughters doing anything they wanna do anymore." And that was a line. And he said things like that, and I, you know, when I bought my house he... So he put, so I moved out, I was 27, 28, and he saw this cottage. He drove past it and he saw it, and he knew that Saima wants to live on her own and have her own place, and he made the appointment and he called the mortgage advisor and he took me and, helped me. But culturally at that time, women didn't live on their own, and I remember people saying, "Oh, has she follow..." saying to them, "Have you, have you fallen out with your mum and dad?" And they didn't realize, you know, this was my dad. He was like so, he's so proud. He was, when my mother was embarrassed that I was on television, my dad was recording it and showing everybody. And so that's, that's also part of why I realize that women, every woman who does something has a strong man, whether it's a brother or a father or a husband or a grandfather, somewhere in the background holding back the patriarchy saying, you know, "Beta, you go do this.

39:48Saima MirYou do what you want. I here, I got this."

39:52Jawad MirThat's great to hear. I… is he, is that part of that you just told me, is it in any of your books or is it an upcoming book or a screenplay that you want to make? 'Cause we write, we write what we know, right? So.

40:07Saima MirI haven't written about him. The, I mean, in The Khan, Akbar Khan is a villain. My dad's not a villain. But he's a nice villain. Like he's

40:17Jawad MirYou empathize with him

40:18Saima Mir... He loves his daughter and he's trying to do the right thing.

40:20Jawad MirYeah.

40:20Saima MirHe sup… supported her and he stood by her, and he said to his wife, "Look, she's gonna go to Oxford and she's gonna study law, and she's gonna do this," and his wife's like, "You're gonna spoil her." And he's like, "No, I'm, she's gonna do what she wants." So that aspect of, with it. You know, I like characters who are gray. I like characters who are not black and white, and so I suppose my dad is in every man I ever write.

40:50Jawad MirBut you should, and I'm sure you will at some point maybe down the road, something about you and your dad specifically being the main pivot part of the story, the actual story about your relationship with your dad.

41:02Saima MirMake it fly.

41:02Jawad MirObviously you add some other fictional elements around it, but still. That's lovely.

41:07Saima MirYeah. It's funny.

41:08Jawad MirAmazing. Well, thank you so much for your time, for being open, for sharing your story. And yeah, it's, it's lovely. Thank you so much.

41:19Saima MirThank you so much. It's been, fascinating.