With big screens in major cities being dominated by Bollywood item girls like Munni and Sheila, there is no place for Lollywood’s gandasa-waving hero and his buxom lady love. Ticket sales of Bollywood’s recent release Race 2 have broken previous box office records in Pakistan, an omen that bodes doom for our local film-makers, whose days of glory have become ghosts of the long-forgotten past.

In this environment, local film-makers, such as veteran director Hasan Askari feel stifled, to say the least. Askari blames the failure of his recent film, Dil Paraye Des Mein, on cinema ‘lobbies’, which, he claims, “purposely hinder” local films in their greed to promote Indian ones. “I will call on all mohib watan (patriotic) organisations to protest this conspiracy,” he said dejectedly, adding that he also would reach out to “anti-Indian” clubs to start a protest at the Lahore Press Club. “This is an industry I helped build – I cannot stand and watch while it dies.”

The prominent Urdu and Punjabi film director’s last major box office success to have a diamond jubilee run at the cinema was 2000’s Teray Pyar Mein, a cross-border love story. Like many of Pakistan’s old school film-makers, he blames the decay of our film industry on the influx of Indian films. “The government would never encourage Indian products if it was some other industry that was struggling,” he said. “India makes better bicycles than us. [Getting bicycles from there] is not a logical solution,” he pointed out.