Despite this apparent journalistic coup of getting Pakistan's powerbrokers past and present in one room, a blustering interior minister Rehman Malik gives the game away. His make-up looks worse for wear, and the tight wig of curls atop his doughy face appears on the verge of springing loose.
 
These are a team of lookalikes from Pakistan's most popular television satire show, and they appear more interested in grilling me then answering questions about how the Taliban insurgency affects culture.
 
"Tell me, have you ever had any trouble in a Pakistan market, have you ever been blown up?" fake Malik says in a booming thespian baritone. "No? Write about that then!"
 
I appear to have upset the gentleman playing parliamentary affairs minister Babar Awan by having no idea who he was meant to be, and he sets upon me in a similar vein: "People feel we are all terrorists... we are not all bombers."
 
Pakistanis are often at pains to show that they are not all suicide bombers, rabid mullahs and bearded men shouldering rocket launchers hidden in mountain caves -- as they feel they are often portrayed in international media.
 
In the sprawling port city Karachi last month, models sashayed down catwalks in backless gowns and with cleavage aplenty at Pakistan’s Fashion Week, sparking headlines such as "Fundamentalists can't take the fun out of fashion."
 
Artist Anwar Saeed has been sketching male nudes on a gay man's memoirs of World War II, edgy work on display in the first contemporary Pakistani art show at New York's Asia Society, which aims to challenge people's perceptions of the nuclear-armed Muslim state.
 
Pakistan is a nation of 167 million people -- the sixth most populous country on earth -- and while a minority of religious extremists are sowing fear with bloody attacks concentrated in the northwest, citizens balk at headlines branding Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world.
 
But despite people's indignation at Western reporters seemingly obsessed with the Taliban, fear does permeate their lives.
 
"It is having a very bad effect on our theatre, our cinema," says Younis Butt, chief writer of the politics satire show, the title of which roughly translates as 'We Are All Pregnant With Hope.'
 
"The people are so upset. They say we don't want dance, we want to talk about our issues, our problems. There are deaths, bomb blasts. Most the creative people, they are in depression."
 
Among his cast members, however, morale remains high, with actors busy filming a skit in a laundrette where Musharraf fails to wash away the stains of corruption, in a show which millions of Pakistanis will tune in to watch, laughing at the more mundane problems which blight their nation.