Ladies & gentlemen, we’ve been having a very successful unplugged series with Ehsan Bhai, TLK, Ali Syed previously.
Now this time we’ve a guest on hot seat, by far the most popular and most friendly guppy of this community, our director SHAK! 
Shak had been a very active poster even before becoming director or CM or even a mod. Very few people know guppies that well as he does and that also I think because he keeps in touch with pretty much everyone.
So here we go. I used a lil privilege to ask my set of questions first with Shak and he was kind to answer them in detail as below.
Please feel free to ask your question(s) and I’m sure Shak will be happy to answer that as well. :hat:
**1) What is your full name?
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Shak. 
**2) Where were you born and raised? Any other personal detail you want to share with guppies.
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I was born in Pakistan and half raised in Pakistan and half in the West. Even with the security and a better standard of life in the West there is nothing like Pakistan. The food, the culture, the atmosphere, never worrying about being abused for your skin or your religion…I still go back yearly and love it. For me my culture is very important, without knowing how to read or write our language for instance will mean our future generations in the West will slowly but surely forget their roots.
**3) Share with us some of your background/experience on GS, before and after becoming director?
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As a general experience Moderating is very difficult. Though not common by any means and rare, a few times moderators have had their mothers sisters family members insulted and abused and for what? A moved post or a warning. There was a member a few years back too who would make new accounts just to make death threats to a team member. Normal members ofcourse would not see that but it happens. People forget this is a voluntary thing, noone is getting paid. Ofcourse moderators make mistakes too, no point denying this, but because of their position every mistake is magnified more than it would be otherwise. These are ofcourse rare instances, normally everything is usually calm. Sometimes months will go by before any type of incident will happen. 95% of the members on GS have been here since for a long time, looong time..so they know how to do stuff and because of them there is mostly very little moderating required from our end. And like everything else good behavior illicits leniency. If someone consistently behaves rudely and obnoxiously then he can hardly expect smoothies in return.
As for me personally I joined GS to cause trouble, the truth. I saw a thread and a couple of peoples’ posts rubbed me the wrong way so I joined up with an intent to bash them and fully anticipated a quick ban. However a year later I was still posting and had calmed down. I still would get a lot of PMs from Mods, esp in Life1, to behave and not derail every thread or take pangas with fellow posters. @Sara516 being the main irritated party. :hehe:
I was made Moderator originally in Life1 and Cafe around 2010 and CM a year after. I stayed on for two odd years but after that I did leave the latter position two or three times as I had no time to give it any justice. Although intermittently I was happy to fill in cm spots when someone took a break or if anyone needed another cm or help in their channel. After Huma left last year @TLK Bhai kindly asked me if I would want to step in as Director. After giving it some thought I said yes. TLK Bhai and Huma had done a very good job before me so its not been easy to live upto that and my stint so far has had its moments. I have made some new awesome friends within and outside the team and like all my previous predecessors some equally awesome enemies too. :hehe:However there are no personal hard feelings towards anyone, moderating and personal friendships are two different matters. I would shake hands with anyone off GS gladly without a second thought and for me bygones be bygones. My job is made easier by the team who works with me and without them my job would be impossible. Them along with the general GS public have made me feel very welcome and a lot of members who I had never interacted with before have been great to me (a few from PA too) which pleasantly took me aback and that is even if I made any mistakes. My thanks to them from the bottom of my heart for that. 
Most of my friends that I originally made were from chat around 2009 which in those days was amazing and then Cafe when I joined the team. We would have dozens of people for hours on end on chat every single day. Some of them have been my friends since and are as dear to me to me as anyone I have known. Throughout the difficult periods of our lives we have been there for each other, a few I have even met and hopefully plan to meet more this year.
**4) As a director, how important you think is PA forum for the community?
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I think all forums on GS are important in their own special way and each one has its own distinct membership. Even moderating them requires very different skills for each one which is why usually a moderator is mostly chosen from the forum in which they mostly post in. Saying that out of all the forums I was Mod of, PA was the hardest I found, this was due to increasing amount of traffic and making sure on my end that neutrality is kept regardless of political affiliation. I support PTI but never once has a member here literally not once, and plenty of them will be reading this, ever labelled my moderating actions due to my political affiliation. They know I have had to do whatever I have had to. My source of news and its analysis is not TV but PA. Every party is adequately represented amongst the membership and it makes for some intriguing reading. The election threads and the dharna threads were for instance superb and better than any talk show. :hehe: @Anwer_Pasha @TheRealDeal @Sachaydino for PPP, @Captain1 @Jolie @Sheeda_Pistol @waleedhbk for PTI, @desert_bird for Noon. @Zafra and @hanibal for noone (:p), shout out to these guys esp for making the forum what it is today and it is always a pleasure to debate with them.
**5 Before jumping to political questions, which non-political Pakistani are you mostly impressed with, and why?
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My answer would be the same as millions of Pakistanis. Edhi saheb without a doubt. The man has selflessly given all his life for the betterment of his people, forgone the riches he could have had and still struggles so that millions can get the help they crave. And what’s rare is he has never sought the limelight or jumped on any political bandwagon or had a lust for power.
**6) Which form of govt is most beneficial and suited for Pakistan? Presidential form, PM form, Army rule, techno govt etc?
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I still think PM form is the best, though for us even the military has been mixed but still better than the sham democracy we have had. Which says it all really.
**8) Which politician have you liked most in your life?
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Even though he was a dictator and maybe not the classical example of a ‘politician’ its Musharraf, till he spectacularly cocked it all up in the end. After him for me it is Imran Khan without a doubt. He might have done some foolish stunts but his heart is in the right place and his past is empty of corruption or any other rubbish which all other politicians are guilty off. In Pakistani politics that’s very rare. A non-Pakistani would be Vladmir Putin. Whether his decision to involve Russia into the mess it is in right now is right or wrong is debatable and another topic; one thing which can’t be denied is that everything he does is to further the interests of his country. Russia was weeks away from TOTAL collapse when he took over and he has made amazing progress since.
**9) Which political party you think has the most potential to fix country’s problems?
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For me I look at it two ways. We either vote for the certified failures, 100% tried and test failures or we vote for someone new who might or might not be a failure. For me it is PTI. Whether or not they can fix the problems remains to be seen, one party cannot fix everything. We as a nation have to change too, everyone is too used to corruption. An example would be my last journey to Pakistan via PIA where a PIA employee on the sly was pocketing cash in UK in exchange for places in first class. Who does that? Its becomes a norm now unfortunately.
**10) Most Pakistanis living abroad have a lot of hopes from Imran Khan, the politician. Do you believe IK’s politics is going in the right direction?
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Pakistanis in Pakistan have a lot of hope from Imran too. For me the danger is that fellow Insafians become the very so called jiyalas or hardcore Noon League people that they seem to hate; I am ashamed esp on twitter that whenever a PTI/non-PTI follower criticises Imran he is attacked mercilessly and everything that Imran says is treated as gospel. My fear is that people are voting for Imran and not PTI or the party ideals. For me the biggest legacy of Imran will be when after he is gone whether his party has the same following as it does now. Our nation loves hero worship and it has got to stop.
As for IK’s politics I agreed with the dharnas but not the way they happened. For them to work he should have taken other parties into confidence too and the reason he can’t is because of his previous announcements of not working with PPP or MQM etc which is foolish. This is politics, PTI isolated itself and in the end ended up facing the rest on its own. He has also got to have guts to openly criticise the terrorists instead of playing word games. Sending stupid petitions to France about free speech while in our country not actually saying the word ‘TTP’ is pathetic. But then again PTI are hardly alone in this, the sitting gov actively supports such groups, MQM is proven to support killers in Karachi while PPP’s hands aren’t clean either. So in that sense if this is the worst accusation thrown at the them then they still come off looking better than the rest and which is my point when it comes to voting them in. Its either them or the proven failures.
**11) Do you think NS’s govt will be removed in near future before completing its 5 years term?
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No. The time for him to be removed was during dharnas and he survived that. Somehow. I don’t see him facing that kind of chaos again during this term, whether he does something extraordinarily stupid to piss off the army remains to be seen but I think he has realised his limitations.
**12) Are you in favor of more provinces?
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Yes definitely. That way funds can be actually be handled better and maybe it might improve the lives of the average joe but we all know why the ruling elite is not in favor of this. Imagine if Punjab was broken into more provinces, for punjab centric parties like PLMN it might end being a massive blow. Sadly I don’t see it happening not until someone new comes in.
**13) If you become the head of state, what will be your first order of the day?
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Removing Misbah as Captain. I kid. :hehe:
With so many problems besieging Pakistan I am not sure where to start. Ensuring taxes are collected from the most notorious tax dodgers or having the usual runners publishing their assets so that the corrupt can start to be rooted out or bringing the prices for essentials down to the manageable levels has to be up there.
**14) How do you think Pakistan should keep its relations with India?
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In whichever way it benefits us most. In whichever way it improves a Pakistani’s life the most. If it means improving trade and normalising relations with India then so be it. But this beggar attitude has to stop. The biggest example is PCB holding its hands wide and running after BCCI like a bhikari without any shame or Nawaz running off to India wagging his tail when Modi called. The Indianisation of our culture has to stop too, its cringing when I listen to any news channel and the way stories are narrated in a cringeworthy OTT way like Zee News is appalling (did I mention cringing?).
Make peace with whoever wants peace, otherwise respond in kind whether its India or Mongolia.
**15) What should we do to lessen religous extremism in country?
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Regulate madrassas and make supporting any terror group a criminal offence, by this I mean what Burka Molvi from Lal Masjid is doing or Siraj Haq’s absurd statements. Remove this ridiculous blasphemy law, remove the ridiculous law stating that only Musims can be PM or President. For a start. Make people realise being a Pakistani is not just about being a Muslim. It pains me to read that our land has an amazing history from Mohenjadaro to Harrapa (two of the oldest cities in history) Taxila (earliest education centre in the world) yet our official chronology states that ‘the foundation of Pakistan was laid after Muhmmad Bin Qasim’s invasions’. Really?
When we saw lawyers, seemingly educated people, snogging the killer Qadri in their hundreds why are we sitting here wondering what’s gone wrong? The extremist thinking disease is now spreading to uncontrollable levels.
16) Do you think Pakistan will come out of its current problems one day, Inshallah, and how long do you think it’ll take to reach that stage?
Hamza Sharif or Bilawal will not have the support their family had so after Nawaz leaves I do not think we will see Noon League in power. I see the parties fragmenting which would leave space open for PTI or some other newcomers. If they turn out to be just like the others then I don’t know if we will see problems end soon. If however they improve even 30% than the previous rulers then there is always hope inshallah.
We have an abundance of talent in every field, it just has to be nurtured. If India or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh can make progress then there is no reason we cannot.
I wanted to ask some pakistani adliyah questions 
At home sometimes its shalwar kameez sometimes peejaama and tee shart.