By this time, your work and mission have settled into your bones. If you’re lucky, you’ve picked a problem that’s hard enough to solve (education) — but if solved, could improve the lives of billions.

And by solved, I do not mean a ‘pretty’ metric. Solved as in gone for good. All children in Pakistan are learning. No one’s out of school. Education is meaningful. The sort of end-state whose attainment you could gut-check with a passerby on the street.

By the time you arrive at the middle innings, you’ve discovered the mirage: the goal seems more and more unattainable the more you work on it. You’ve become feverish, and have toiled away all your energy; the kind that only youthful exuberance can afford, and discovered that trying harder doesn’t always help either.

By the middle innings, the crowd has thinned, too. After all, why do more of this madness? Even your family and friends are annoyed: this obsession should end already. People emigrate, find normal jobs, begin to build houses — the لوازمات (trappings) of life must be served.

But…. you decide to trudge on nonetheless.

The first thing the middle innings does to you is that you stop treating yourself as the central character. You have tried and realized that no amount of technical, individual, or intellectual brilliance can get you to solve this problem alone.

You need a crew. And so an organisation is born.

But the second, more interesting effect is that you stop treating your organisation as the central character too.

This is harder. You love your organisation: it’s the vehicle of your dreams. Centering it doesn’t feel narcissistic. But at some point, the organisation must lose its centrality for the Mission to move forward.

This is because a Mission is an end-state. A complete resolution of the problem.

If any single firm could achieve that alone, we’d see monopolies on every facet of life. We don’t, because a firm is both insufficient and, beyond a certain size, increasingly inefficient. It can only optimize for one function at a time.

And so if you want to actually solve the problem, you start to treat your organisation as one piece of the puzzle. And you begin to cultivate a garden of organisations.

But what garden of organisations does one cultivate in Pakistan?

Pakistan has a death rate per capita of startups that is astonishingly high. To a certain extent, startups dying is fairly normal…but having spent more than a decade building, I can confidently say these are not the ones that we can write off as evolutionary/growing pains.

The founders are close to the problems they're solving, but either because the positioning is off, or more cynically, because they don't have the credentials of a western college education, they never get into the right room. And as a result, they never find the mentor or partner who could tell them: the unit economics don't work, or your scale strategy doesn't hold up to intense scrutiny and logic.

I had the good fortune of learning from those who’d been through the middle innings before me. Riaz Kamlani at TCF, which runs perhaps the largest network of independently run schools in the world, with over 2,200 schools across Pakistan. Ahson Rabbani at ChildLife Foundation, which treats 1.7 million children every year and saves countless lives in their earliest, most fragile days. Roshaneh Zafar, who built Kashf Foundation’s microfinance enterprise in the ‘90s with steely determination through recessions and political crises, and has now issued over 5.5 million loans to women. David Hylden, who helped lead One Acre Fund’s expansion as it grew to serve millions of smallholder farmers and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional income across sub-Saharan Africa.

These were the people who asked the tough questions, but ultimately enabled us to keep moving in the right direction, right through the middle innings.

We don’t want to be the exception. We’d rather open the doors for younger entrepreneurs. Because the difference between social impact that dies in its infancy and impact that grows into a TCF or a Kashf or a ChildLife Foundation is often… just access to the right people at the right time.

Passing the ball at a global conference was a start. But the harder question was this: how do you build the room in Pakistan itself? Over time, many of us started having the same conversation. Eventually, we stopped bumping into each other like strangers in foreign rooms in foreign countries and started asking: what if we built the room ourselves?

One of the paradoxical consequences of the middle innings is that once you accept a hard problem, you begin to look for other hard things too. At some point, I got into mountaineering.

Pakistan is home to some of the tallest mountains on Earth. Gilgit-Baltistan in the north is called the ‘third pole‘ for the sheer amount of ice and glaciers it holds. I had spent my 30th birthday staring at Tirich Mir, spellbound. A few years later, I sat in front of K2 after a seven-day trek across one of the most remote terrains on the planet. Every new visit pulled me in further.

I went to the mountains because I yearned for the company of absurdists. I found them on every expedition.

What mountaineering and entrepreneurship share in common is a love for excruciatingly hard things: the audacity of chasing a painful goal knowing what’s at stake, while relishing the journey of getting there.

This is about continuing that tradition. Gathering a group of misfits and absurdists and heading to the mountains again... but this time, to build something together.

This summer, in Skardu, we’re running the Summit Fellowship: a 7-day residential intensive for 10–12 Pakistani founders.

The Pakistan Collective is a group of us. Pakistani social entrepreneurs who’ve either grown our organisations to serious scale or have crossed the existential early phases into the middle innings. We’ve come to realize, painfully, that the number of such organisations needs to be drastically bigger if we want to see Pakistan’s problems in health, education, and livelihoods solved (as in, Mission accomplished). The same people who asked us the tough questions are now in the room to ask them of the next generation.

The intellectual backbone of the fellowship is built on what Kevin Starr at Mulago calls the Scale Screen, four tests every intervention must pass: Good enough? Big enough? Cheap enough? Simple enough? It sounds simple, but it is not. Most organisations have never been asked these questions this directly. Kevin and the Mulago team are partners in putting this together, bringing a curriculum refined over twenty years of funding solutions that have reached tens of millions of people, and in some cases, eliminated the problems they set out to solve entirely.

Founders arrive with working models and real evidence. Over seven days, they stress-test every assumption, with the well-versed faculty pushing back (and hard). In an era of bite-sizedness, we’re choosing to go deep.

By the end of the week, each founder emerges with a Scale Blueprint, a concrete, defensible plan for reaching millions, which will be presented to a small room of funders who have funded/supported Taleemabad and have an established intent to fund in Pakistan. Eventually, this blueprint travels the world and brings crucial attention to Pakistan.

We chose Skardu because what better way to introduce this giant of a country than at the foot of the most imposing structures on the planet? Four of the world’s five highest peaks are in this district: K2, Broad Peak, Gasherbrum I and II.

And what better place to talk about absurd goals than sitting at the base of these mountains?

If you’ve read this far and felt something familiar about the middle innings, then you might belong in this room.

If you’re a founder: You have a working model. You have initial evidence that it works. You’ve gotten past the first act, and you know, with some clarity, that the next step is to think seriously about scale for the first time. You’re building in Pakistan, working on a problem that matters, and you’re looking for the kind of rigour and challenge that your current environment probably can’t provide.

If you’re a funder: You’re genuinely interested in deploying capital in Pakistan. Not curious in the abstract, but ready to act. You want to spend real time with founders. You want to understand their models at the level of detail that lets you make real decisions.

If you’re neither, but you know someone who fits: Forward this to them, or send me a message on LinkedIn with an introduction. That might matter more than anything else on this page, because discoverability seems like a genuine problem for Pakistan’s pipeline.

We’re keeping the numbers small. Roughly 10–12 founders, matched with a curated group of funders. The founder cohort is selected through an application process.

Applications are open and close on the 25th →

I’ve probably taken a long-winded route to get here. But the middle innings teaches you that the most important work is not the work you do yourself. It’s the rooms you build for others.

If you know someone who should be in this room, send this to them.

— Haroon, on behalf of the Pakistan Collective

Haroon Yasin is the co-founder and CEO of Taleemabad, which works to improve learning outcomes in public schools in Pakistan. He is a 2025 Skoll Fellow, a Queen’s Young Leaders Award recipient, and a WISE Award winner. His body lives in Islamabad and his heart in the Karakoram.

Part of my learning process — the inducement of fascination with engineering — has been around paying attention to nature. We’re asked to submit to this new and wonderful era of engineering being at the heart of solution-finding, and I’ve found myself constantly returning to nature to make sense of it all. You’d be surprised at what one learns. How bees organize themselves lends itself perfectly to how server capacity must be allocated. How bats hunt despite being blind maps onto how algorithms must go wide before they tune their parameters for a narrow subset.

On and on.

For those interested, this is the product currently of my endless rabbit hole — a love for nature transmuting to a love for engineering solutions. I presented this recently to a group of non-technical colleagues, and the reaction was interesting enough to warrant writing it down.

What follows is not exhaustive, and I am not an authority. But the central thesis is simple: the best engineering solutions are ones that nature arrived at first. Engineers just formalized what evolution had already perfected.

The honeybee colony is 60,000 individuals allocating themselves across dozens of flower patches — perfectly matching supply to demand — with no central controller.

Here’s how. A forager finds a good patch and returns to the hive. She performs a waggle dance — a figure-8 movement that encodes distance and direction. The richer the patch, the more vigorous the dance. Other bees watch. Each independently decides whether to follow based on the dance’s energy. No committee. No dispatcher. Just signal and response.

Sunil Nakrani and Craig Tovey saw this and built the Honeybee Algorithm for web server load balancing. Servers advertise their capacity through ‘dances’ (status signals). Requests route to servers the way bees route to flowers — decentralized, self-organizing, no single point of failure.

I find this one particularly instructive because it demolishes a bias I used to carry: that complex systems need complex coordination. They don’t. They need good signals and agents with the freedom to respond to them. Every auto-scaling architecture in the cloud today runs on a version of this insight — and a bee colony figured it out long before AWS existed.

Ants searching for food leave pheromone trails. An ant that finds a short path returns quickly, laying fresh pheromone. That trail stays strong — many ants reinforce it. Longer paths take more time; the pheromone evaporates before reinforcement. Over time, the colony converges on the shortest route. No ant knows the full map.

This is remarkable if you sit with it. The system has a built-in forgetting mechanism. Bad information doesn’t just get deprioritized — it literally disappears. Time itself is the filter.

Marco Dorigo formalized this as Ant Colony Optimization in 1992. Virtual ‘ants’ explore network paths, leaving digital pheromones on good routes. Dutch Railways used it to schedule 7,000+ daily trains with 99% punctuality. It also powers internet packet routing and logistics optimization.

The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons connected by 100 trillion synapses. Learning occurs through Hebbian plasticity — connections that are used frequently grow stronger; unused ones weaken and prune. Information flows through layers: sensory input, pattern recognition, abstraction, decision.

McCulloch and Pitts modeled the first artificial neuron in 1943. Modern neural networks — including the transformer architectures powering tools like Claude — use the same structure: weighted connections between nodes arranged in layers. Backpropagation is the engineering equivalent of Hebbian learning: strengthening connections that contribute to correct outputs.

This is the one most people know. I include it because the lineage matters — it started with someone watching a brain and asking, “what if we could build that?”

This one is my favorite.

Physarum polycephalum is a single-celled slime mold. No brain, no nervous system, no central intelligence. Atsushi Tero at Hokkaido University placed oat flakes on a wet surface at positions matching cities around Tokyo. In 28 hours, the slime mold grew a network connecting them.

It closely matched Tokyo’s actual railway system.

In some areas, the slime mold’s network was more efficient — with strategic cross-links that improved resilience to disruptions. A brainless organism outperformed human infrastructure planners in less than two days.

I keep returning to this example because of what it implies about intelligence. We tend to equate intelligence with centralization — a brain, a planner, a CEO. But the slime mold has none of these. It just follows local chemical gradients, and the optimal network emerges. The lesson isn’t “slime molds are smart.” The lesson is that optimization doesn’t require a central optimizer. The substrate can be enough.

Strangler figs begin life as epiphytes — seeds deposited by birds in a host tree’s canopy. The fig grows roots downward, wrapping around the host trunk, while its canopy grows upward, competing for light. Over decades, the fig’s lattice thickens. The host tree, deprived of light and nutrients, dies and decomposes — leaving the fig standing as a hollow, self-supporting structure.

Martin Fowler named the Strangler Fig pattern after seeing these trees in Queensland rainforests. The engineering translation: instead of a risky ‘big bang’ rewrite of legacy software, you grow new microservices around the old monolith. Route traffic to new services piece by piece. Eventually the monolith handles nothing and can be safely decommissioned. AWS recommends this for every major cloud migration.

Seed. Wrap. Replace.

I love this one because it applies well beyond software. It’s how we approach institutional change at Taleemabad — you don’t tear down the existing system and hope to build a better one in the void. You grow the new thing around the old thing, let it take over gradually, and one day the old structure is gone and nobody noticed the transition. That’s how change sticks.

In metallurgy, annealing involves heating metal to high temperature — atoms jump around chaotically, breaking out of defective structures — then cooling it very slowly. As temperature drops, atoms gradually find their lowest-energy configuration: a perfect crystal lattice.

The key insight: you must accept disorder first to reach order. Cooling too fast freezes in defects. Cooling slowly produces perfection.

Kirkpatrick, Gelatt, and Vecchi mapped this to optimization in 1983. At high ‘temperature,’ the algorithm accepts worse solutions — big random jumps that prevent getting stuck in local optima. As temperature decreases, it becomes increasingly selective, making smaller, more precise moves. Eventually it settles into the global optimum.

There is something philosophically satisfying about this. The algorithm that insists on always moving toward “better” gets stuck on mediocre hills. The one willing to accept temporary regression — to get worse on purpose — finds the mountain. I think about this often in the context of organizational strategy. The willingness to accept short-term chaos in exchange for long-term order is a kind of discipline most organizations lack, because they mistake turbulence for failure.

These are the ones I think about the most. The rest are in this slide deck. Do you have any to add? Do you find this topic interesting? If so, reach out and I’d love to share this rabbit hole and have a conversation around it!

Part 1-5 here. This is the conclusion.

After the fall heavy day yesterday, I had trouble sleeping. I was so exhausted that I got into bed at 8 pm. But despite doing that, I would wake up every hour with a gasp and a jolt because all my dreams were about having a fumble on a cliff and then falling in a deep ravine.

So it was no surprise that I woke up groggy and grumpy. I was annoyed at myself. Today was rock climbing day, and I’d spent most of the last night in a state of terror.

The day was off to a bad start. I tried correcting it with the usual recipe: a cup of coffee and 3 sets of jumping jacks and push ups.

That helped somewhat. But then we discovered that the rock climbing shoes Ali Jaan had brought for me were small. I had to wear my trekking shoes, and as we trudged through the snow, my feet got soaked.

So here I was, underslept, grumpy, and with wet feet on a -15 day.

Ali Jaan walked me towards the edge of a cliff. I looked down and got dizzy. It was a multi-storey fall. On rock.

Since as long as I can remember, I’ve got a phobia of heights. It terrifies me. I don’t know where or why I got it, just that I remember having it as a child. (Perhaps it was Mom telling us the horror story of her half brother dying after falling off the roof of their house in Narowal…while we were still kids).

The wind picked up. My hands and legs began to shake and my throat became dry.

And then suddenly….I got tired. Of just worrying incessantly and accumulating hiccup after hiccup since I woke up.

I asked Ali Jaan for five minutes, went off to the side and began a breathing exercise. Somewhere in the middle of the breathing exercise, the sun came out. I felt it on my face and suddenly felt a whole lot better.

Today the worst that could happen was that I could fall of the cliff. I thought if I was intended to die here, nothing could alter that. And so on I went to the edge of the cliff. The first 2 minutes were terrifying as I lowered myself without a safety carabiner.

The task: rappel down the entire cliff, using your hand to brake as you went down.

After the safety was in, I just felt so……free.

Ali Jaan was not even done with instructions, and I was ready to go.

I let go of the rope. Then braked gently. Hit the cliff with my feet. Bounced. Pushed back again, braked, hit the cliff with my feet. Bounced again.

Ali Jaan and Zahid’s voices grew distant. The sun felt great on my neck. Even Diran looked less menacing. Big Country played in my brain.

I was flowing.

It felt so great that I landed at the base of the cliff, and then ran up again with feet that were frozen and numb by now. Five minutes later I was at the cliff’s edge again.

The non-safety bit at the top of the cliff felt even less terrifying.

Lower. Bounce off the cliff. Brake. Lower again. Bounce again.

Pause to take in the view.

Then bounce again.

The same cliff that had been terrifying now seemed too small - the rappel ended so soon!

We got back to the camp and out of the blue, my graduation ceremony was announced. I was surprised! Ali Jaan said I was ready.

The cook and camp staff came out. The custom is that you do a little dance. So we put on an obscure Balti song and then went around dancing in a circle.

Zahid got a pen and my CNIC, and soon enough there was a certificate with my name on it. I had completed level 1 and 2!

I asked Ali Jaan what happened next. He thought for a while and then told me I was his second best student.

“What was the best student like?”, I asked.

“He would fall even more than you do. But then he would not go back to camp until he had figured it out. He repeated every lesson twice, so much so that he deliberately slowed down the course and did every module in double the time. Others would look at him and talk about his incompetence. But he had the highest bar for himself. And he would also be more forgiving of himself when it didn’t work. That made him a fantastic climber.”

“You’ve got to be okay looking like a fool. That’s Junoon”, he continued, as he handed me a tiny piece of rope

“When I got started, I would carry this rope everywhere with me. I would be tying mountaineering knots all the time. My family thought I’d gone crazy”

“My best students are okay looking like fools.”

I let this linger between us for five minutes. Ali Jaan stayed with the silence, and then said:

“But my best student never came back. I never saw him again. Most of them don’t come back to climb. They do it once, and they’re gone. The difference between the best and the rest is keeping at it”

“How many years?”, I asked.

“At least a decade”, he said.

The clouds grumbled over Diran in the background. I let this sink in too.

I have come to love Ali Jaan, and I’m going to miss his company. The majority of our time together was spent in silence. He’s one of the rare subset of people who say more with silence than they do with words.

After what seems like years, I found a teacher that made me marvel at what an art it is to be a good teacher.

No wonder the Italians call him ‘Professor Aaaleee’

It is close to sunset now as we drive out of Hopar. My heart sinks as Hopar Glacier first goes out of view, and then soon Diran disappears as well.

I feel the same tug I felt when after seven long, hard days of walking towards K2, we turned back towards home for the first time.

I don’t know if I will be a good mountaineer.

But I do know that I have a profound love for these giants. For their utility in making me examine the unexamined parts of my personhood; more specifically, my relationship with fear.

And this will keep pulling me towards them again and again.

Postscript: My fat, fluffy, and unlikely mountain friend.

Part 1, 2, 3, and 4 came before. This is Part 5.

I realized today that one can spent years at the gym, and months preparing for a climb, track every metric there is to track, eat all the right things — and yet still come up short and be humbled by the mountain.

Today I slipped, fell, crashed, and ran out of steam enough times that I eventually lost count. There is not a muscle in my body that is not screaming. I’ve got new bruises, including one on my head from my own ice axe.

Ali Jaan (the guide) is a wonderful coach. Ali is 65, and has the kind of face that crinkles when he smiles. He’s a deep introvert — so doesn’t say much, but when he does, it feels like he’s giving me the outcome of hours of processing that he’s been doing. He has the kind of patience that only comes after training a generation of mountaineers from all over the world. I love having him around.

Midway into the climbing session today, I was spent. Ali pulled me aside and told me I was a) trying too hard and b) letting doubt creep in. He told me I looked like I was ‘attacking’ the mountain. And when I did that, I spent more energy than was necessary.

It was true. I’ve generally considered myself a fit person, but this is a different world. I was abusing my capacity and brute forcing the mountain.

The second thing Ali Jaan pointed out had to do with my fear. I would be doing well, humming along an ice wall, and then suddenly I would drop a carabiner or miss a grip. Ali asked me to watch myself when this happened. It was less that the slip was exhausting - it had more to do with how my mind punished my body after perceived failure. My heart rate would shoot up, more fumbles would follow the first one, and soon I would come crashing to the ground.

Ali Jaan told me to stop worrying.

I went at it again. My crampon slipped — and sure enough, there it was — a doom spiral. Within seconds, I was on the ground on my back again.

I realized that soothing your mind out of a doom spiral is easier said than done. Even if you notice it, it’s hard to not be scared.

When Ali Jaan found me on the ground again and hastily hurried over to pick me up, I told him I was done and that perhaps this wasn’t for me. My bruises at this point were stinging, my arms and legs were stiff, and I just wanted all of it to be over.

Ali Jaan kept postponing it. Got me busy in some stories about Japanese climbers as I ate some fresh snow. And then gently, he began to ask me why I was so scared. What is the worst that could happen? He told me to rest as long as I wanted and then go again.

Reluctantly I did. And as I went, Ali Jaan kept looking from down below and saying ‘what’s the worst that will happen?’

And so that’s where my falling became a feature instead of a bug. I fell so much that I began to stop treating it as the end of the world, and started treating it like another attempt.

And then soon enough, I got better, and climbed the whole route across multiple ice walls. I loved how happy Ali Jaan was.

He was so happy in fact, that he recommended that I lead a whole route — which involved fixing screws and going up on a wall to build the rope route that others would follow. And this time, no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t succeed. I was surprised to see that this time It was Ali Jaan who said we should pause and go back to camp. There was something about my mistakes that signalled to him that it was less to do with what I was thinking and more to do with the state of my exhaustion.

I found myself realising: this is why they categorize mountaineering as an endurance sport. Our camp was nearby today, but had I been halfway up a mountain, this exhaustion would have been fatal.

On the way back, Ali told me that the best mountaineers are elegant. And by this he meant that these people are never in a hurry. They pace themselves, and never ‘attack’ the mountain. They also spend their energy wisely, so much so that you would look at them and think all of this was very easy. And finally, they treat failure as failure, and move on pretty fast.

That kind of elegance, Ali Jaan said, was my goal.

I realized today that controlling ones mind — in mountaineering and in real life — is hard.

And once one learns how to do this, everything automatically follows.

You can climb both literal and figurative mountains elegantly.

Part 1, 2, 3 came before. This is Part 4.

Today was one of the toughest days so far. The kind that makes you doubt why you got into all of this in the first place.

This stray thought first barged into my mind while I was in the middle of climbing an ice wall. My heart rate was in the 160s. Ice climbing activates a ton of muscles in the body. Altitude makes it worse. And then finally, your fingers ram repeatedly into the ice as you axe your way up.

Midway into the climb, I was done. My fingers were white and hurt like they were burning. My shoulders and calves were exhausted. My face was covered in ice shards that my axe had broken free.

But what can you really do halfway up a wall? I looked down and got even more worried.

Fortunately, everyone experiences this in mountaineering. And the trick is to glue yourself to the wall so you can hang and rest. I drove an ice-screw (what a miracle invention it is), put in my safety carabiner and then just….hung on the wall.

There’s something quite satisfying about hanging halfway on a ice wall. I could have opened a bag of chips and had it!

In five minutes, my mind had either calmed down or understood that we had no choice. And so on I went. Left ice axe in, right crampon out, then left crampon. Right ice axe in, then right crampon and left crampon. Rinse and repeat.

Tomorrow, I have to ‘mock’ lead the whole route. Which means I’m responsible for ropes/ice screws and fixing everything as I go up. It seems scary so far.

I’ve got bruises on my knees and sore spots on my arm because of all the falls.

Climbing out of the glacier was the last hard part of the day. My body by this point had completely spent all its reserves in 6 hours of climbing. And trudging up a cliff at the end of it all was torture. But as always, some hidden reserve showed up.

By the time we got back to camp, one interesting piece of advice was to completely change all of our clothes. Jackets, shirts, socks, all of it. Which seemed like a chore to do in -20.

But the prevailing wisdom is that your body is in fight or flight mode on the mountain. Your clothes, consequently, are part of it’s memory of the fight it just endured.

You get back, and as hard as it seems, you put on a fresh set of clothes.

Immediately, your heart rate begins to go down.

It’s a way to trick your brain! It no longer looks at the scuffs on the orange jacket and remembers the fall it experienced.

Instead, it looks at the green fleece and remembers that warmth of the sleeping bag from last night.

I never quite understood that you had to have a clean separation between fight/flight and rest. Knowing that it was conscious and actionable made a world of a difference.

I had been brooding on the bruises, and in five minutes I was talking politics and having a cup of tea. In ten minutes, the pain became invisible too.

So — is mountaineering for me?

I looked at the menacing Diran, the howling Hopar, and the incoming storm headed from the pointed Lady Finger peak, and concluded that I wanted to keep doing more of it. There’s nothing that tells you anything is possible than miniscule men standing at the base of a giant and saying ‘this is worth our time, and should be done’

Like Mallory once said to a journalist who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest:

‘Because it’s there!’

Postscript: Today is Shaberaat. The whole valley is lit up with tiny candles. It looks majestic!

I was out enjoying the view in the dark, and commented to Ali that the ‘patakhas’ sounded fun.

‘Its celebratory gunfire!’, he said.

All of a sudden, it didn’t seem like such a good idea to stand at a high point in the open to look at the lights.

This is Part 3. Part 1 can be read here, and Part 2 here.

It’s interesting how fast one’s body adapts. Yesterday, I was numb, and my blood oxygen had begun to fall. The advice was to focus on the next thing you had to do, and to maintain your routine to whichever extent possible.

I did that - woke up to a frozen set of eyeglasses and water, and continued to go warm up some ice water for a semi cold cup of morning coffee. Once that mental barrier had been crossed, my brain settled into business as usual.

Today was anything but that though. We kicked off with a review of all our gear.

Months ago, I had spent money on a pair of mountaineering shoes and a jacket. Today I saw that investment bear fruit.

I had been miserable yesterday, feeling like my toes would fall of any moment. Today, the monster mountaineering shoes hugged my feet, and it felt like I’d put them inside a sauna. What a joy to have the right equipment!

Towards the middle of the day, the conversations and lessons turned serious: what to do when you slip and fall off the side of a mountain, how to react when you fall inside a crevasse, etc.

One of the most striking things about mountaineering is that the default mode is every man for himself.

If you’re leading a course and there are 15 people roped up behind you, you’re expected to cut the rope when the whole row falls.

When you’re the one falling, you’re responsible for ‘self arrest’ — digging in your ice axe and being your own anchor.

Today we also practiced what I would do if I fell into a crevasse. The defacto option is to not ask for help; that would put someone else in danger too. You have to do what is called a prusik cord, and lift yourself out of danger.

This part of mountaineering makes me uneasy. I began to ask Ali Bhai (the guide) a ton of questions. We went into a deep rabbit hole of mountaineering philosophy — where there are sides that balance self preservation, and those that prioritize camaraderie and sacrifice for the benefit of others.

I told Ali Bhai my heroes were Messner, and Charles Houston and Art Gilkey from that famed K2 expedition.

Charlie was the group leader for an American expedition to K2. They were close to the summit in 1953 after months of painstaking climbing. Had they gotten there, they would have been the first ones on the planet to do so.

But at the last camp, Art Gilkey developed a blood clot in his leg. Back then it took ages to get up to the last camp. Charlie called a vote in the soup bowl, and within seconds the decision was out — they decided to unanimously abandon the summit, and attempt to lower a now immobile Art Gilkey down the mountain. Lowering an immobile mountaineer from 8000+ meters was unheard of. They were not only abandoning the summit, but also signing up for near suicide.

But the decision had been made. Art was wrapped in a tent, the tent was connected to six ropes, and everyone held a corner and began to descend.

They must have only come down a few hundred meters, and then disaster struck. One team member slipped, and they all barreled down the mountain.

Pete was the anchor that day. Training mandated that he should have attempted a self arrest with his ice axe. He attempted a self arrest for six men at the same time….and succeeded. His ice axe is now memorialized in a museum.

But there’s another mystery to the story. They never found Art Gilkey once they recovered from this miracle. He was on the same rope, and so should have been there. One hypothesis is that Art knew that Pete’s belay won’t hold all of them for long. And so Art — who had loved his friends deeply — took his knife and cut himself loose. It took forty years for them to find his body at the base of K2.

That’s mountaineering to me. To be human when you have every reason not to be.

This doesn’t mean one is reckless.

But it’s far from the hero worshipping, self-centering, glory hunting sport that it’s become more recently.

You come to the mountain to have every force in the world convince you to be inhuman. And the victory is not the summit.

It is in triumphing over our runaway instincts.

A self arrest, but a more internal one.

This is Part 2. Part 1 is here.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Balti way of mountaineering is how the preparation is set up.

I wondered why they chose the Hopar Glacier, in early February. I now understand why.

The temperature here is regularly -20. Sometimes, it goes down to -30.

If one hasn’t experienced these temperatures before, it is debilitating. Even moving becomes hard. The joints start to get stiff. Your water bottle freezes as it rests beside you.

The challenge then is: how will you show up? If one allows their mind to worry, there are a ton of things to get you into a spiral. Why are my toes numb? Why is my breathing odd and shallow? Why are my feet swelling so that they have a hard time fitting in my shoes? Why is there ice on my eyelashes?

The Balti way is to experience the mountain before you really experience it. This is the temperature at the summit. Worrying is pointless. So what do you do? You begin to channel all your energy into maintaining business as usual.

Walking to the open toilet for wuzu and back to pray feels like a death march. You still do it. If you feel like taking a walk on the snow, you do it. Even getting out of the sleeping bag seems like a marathon. You do it nevertheless.

The frozen water bottle has to be shaken, then put beside your sleeping bag, then shaken again to create a slush that satisfies your thirst.

In the mountains, the ordinary begins to seem extraordinary. To do all of this seems like an act of rebellion itself.

That’s the first Balti test. A simulation of high-altitude mountaineering — built and done first, before anything else, so your mind knows what it's signed up for. The technical, the physical, all can be learnt, they say.

But what your mind tells you in the dead of the night when you’re stiff — that only you can teach yourself.

This is Part 1.

It’s been one day since I’ve arrived here in Gilgit.

Already, it seems as the whole world has slowed down. The change is immediate and drastic.

Beyond the challenge of it, I’ve come to love the mountains for their utility in teaching me something that does not come naturally to me: waiting.

Last year, I trained for six hard months to go up on Khosergang, only to see the whole plan being swept away due to a freak avalanche. The guide had casually said ‘InshAllah next year’ — as if this were the most normal thing in the world, to wait and maintain position for a year for the same goal.

On this trip, I’m in the mountains to prepare. But even preparation must involve patience. On day 1, you just….. look at the mountain.

At first I didn’t understand. What is it that I will achieve by looking blankly at the mountain? Why aren’t we on it?

But the longer one holds their gaze, the longer one begins to see possibility. This is very unintuitive, but still true. After a few hours, bored out of its wits, your brain starts doing something extraordinary: creating routes. Even then, tracing a route means your brain has to keep several variables at play: gradient, avalanche risk, snow vs rock ratios. Without exquisite focus, it really can’t be done. So your brain has to first calm down, and become patient.

Then, the second day is spent away from the mountain too. This time to learn the tools needed to climb the mountain. Ice axes, crampons, belaying equipment. There’s another deeper module to get to know your teammates on the mountain: to set intentions — because these are the people who you bank on when things go south.

The majority of the prep work for climbing a mountain then, is away from the mountain. That’s the way the Baltis do it. This is their way of respecting the mountain: of giving it attention/care rather than jumping into climbing it.

My mind has this habit of saying thinking ≠ action. But it is very much action. A slower, more deliberate kind.

Once on the mountain, one has to be very much on their toes. Every decision has seconds between it. That’s the zone where everything becomes a blur.

The thinking zone is the yin to the yang of the brutality of actual climbing.

And as with other things in life, there’s a place for both.

Postscript: I’m the only one on this course! This was originally meant to be for 15 people. One night before most of them saw the temperature forecast and cancelled! So it’s just the instructor….and me.

It's probably not intentional. It never is. But as we've grown, layers have formed between us and our users - layers of processes, assumptions, and comfortable office routines. This distance becomes even more concerning as we expand to serve new customers like PSRP schools and government schools in Punjab. The responsibility to truly understand our users' needs has never been greater.

So we decided to do something radical: stop imagining their challenges and start living them.

Day One: From Leadership Team to Field Helpers

At 9:30 AM, after a two-hour drive from Islamabad, Mashhood and I arrived at the Moawin field office in Jhand. The office was barebones, with two rooms and three people — yet the weight it carried was substantial: it was responsible for the oversight of over 126 privatized government schools in a ~100km radius.

The field office had been told they were getting "helpers", nothing more. No titles, no special treatment. Within minutes of arrival, we were thrown into the deep end of their daily chaos.

The Punjab government had sent out a form requiring teachers and cluster coordinators to report flood damage to their schools. Simple enough, right? Wrong.

When Good Intentions Meet Poor Design

The government form had a fundamental flaw: it only allowed schools to confirm flood damage and specify reopening dates. But what if your school hadn't been flooded? Most schools in Jhand hadn't been affected, yet teachers were forced to fill out reopening dates for schools that never closed.

By the time we discovered this design disaster, countless teachers had already submitted confused, inaccurate responses. We watched as frustration rippled through the network, from field coordinators to cluster coordinators to teachers. This wasn't just bad UX; it was hours of wasted time multiplied across hundreds of schools.

The Photo Request Avalanche

Then came request number two: Someone higher up the chain wanted photographic proof of student attendance. Not just any photos—specific ones showing students in front of their schools holding their EMIS codes.

First, we had to create a sample image showing exactly what the Punjab government wanted. Then build a form. Then distribute it via WhatsApp to all teachers. The deadline? Two hours.

Many cluster coordinators were away or overwhelmed with other tasks. WhatsApp messages got buried under the daily flood of communication. So we built a quick automation—reminders every five minutes to those who hadn't submitted. The pressure was palpable, but the clock was ticking.

In the middle of all of this, another issue arose.

Three schools had developed technical flaws, either with solar panels or with water coolers.

The problem? The nearest electrician was hours away and would charge money to come and check. But the system would only approve requests when the total cost of the repair was estimated. I tried to reason on the phone with the electrician. Could we get pictures of the damage to him so he could estimate the costs?

He refused.

All this while, Mashhood had to get facility data (walls/washrooms/chairs/tables) from 28 schools, but several schools were off-grid and were unreachable.

Just when we thought we'd seen it all, another request arrived. To comply with Dengue prevention protocols, teachers had to:

1. Take a photo of a dirty area in their school

2. Upload it to the Punjab SIS platform

3. Wait five minutes

4. Clean the area

5. Take another photo of the now-clean space

6. Upload again

This wasn't just about cleanliness; it was a convoluted way to verify teacher presence and compliance. The absurdity wasn't lost on us, but we weren't there to judge. We were there to experience.

As requests multiplied and chaos mounted, we realised even we (two presumably ‘tech-savvy’ individuals) couldn't keep track of all the sequential tasks. Mashhood started building a CRM system on the spot, showing the field coordinator each iteration as he coded. I worked on a WhatsApp bot to automate reminders and track task completion.

We weren't building in a conference room based on user interviews. We were building while drowning in the same floods of requests our users face daily.

Watching the flow of these data requests revealed the true pain architecture of the system:

Punjab Government → Moawin Headquarters → Field Team → Cluster Coordinators → Teachers

Each layer amplifies the pressure. Each layer adds confusion. And at the bottom, teachers who are already overwhelmed with actual teaching bear the accumulated weight of every poorly designed form and arbitrary request from above.

Living someone else's life means you can't cherry-pick which parts to experience. When that Moawin coordinator couldn't question why a data request seemed pointless, neither could we. When they had to comply with strange requirements, so did we. We couldn't retreat to our comfortable assumptions about what users "really need."

We learned that even while moving fast, we can't solve every pain point simultaneously. We'll start with the field team's challenges, then tackle cluster coordinators' problems, and eventually address teachers' burdens. It's sequential — sometimes frustratingly slow, but it's real.

One day, if done long enough, all of these tiny builds will become an OS that can solve the pain of running one of the world’s largest network of schools.

Over the coming weeks, we'll return to the field repeatedly. We'll work with cluster coordinators, then teachers, experiencing each layer of this complex system. We're not observing from the outside anymore - we're living it from the inside.

This approach has already changed how we think about product development. The gap between our assumptions and reality was wider than we'd imagined. But now we know. Not because someone told us in a focus group, but because we spent a day chasing down WhatsApp messages, building hacky solutions, and feeling the genuine frustration of serving multiple masters with conflicting demands.

The only way to solve real problems is to experience them, day in and day out.

We can't truly serve our users from the comfort of our offices. We need to stand where they stand, struggle with what they struggle with, and feel the weight of the systems they navigate daily. Only then can we build solutions that actually matter.

This is just day one of our journey into our users' reality. The road ahead is long, but if we’re building in this way, I’m confident that we’ll never veer off track.

Our world is flawed. People are corrupt, institutions are inefficient, and rationality does not always prevail. Divides get exacerbated; the rich get richer, and the more powerful keep accumulating power. This is probably more true when you live and build in a country like Pakistan.

And if we’re in the business of change, outrage threatens deeper inquiry and, consequently, deeper problem-solving.

The peril of outrage

If we look around ourselves, outrage has become the de facto norm.

Twitter, LinkedIn, and in-person conversations all feature some kind of outrage, directed mainly from those without power/position to those with both leverages.

The problem is when outrage becomes an end in and of itself. You say your piece; you exit left. You pass a moral judgment, vindicate yourself, and your part is done. That’s why the left continues to cede space: because outrage (or canceling or patronizing or woke-ism) is the defining and only characteristic. There’s nothing beyond it.

The trouble is that this does nothing to dislodge existing structures.

Whatever form of organization one works for, whether it is a group of activists or leaders of social enterprises or corporations, you’ve got to start treating dysfunction with curiosity rather than outrage.

Beautiful Equilibrium

It is inevitable that once you begin working on social change and have the audacity and ambition to make a dent in the problem, you’ll encounter items that invite moral outrage.

For example, in our work with Taleemabad, we come into contact with the government on a daily basis. Once you look at the whole enterprise up close, you understand why it’s one of the most dysfunctional organizations on the planet1.

People are ‘corrupt,’ want bribes, and are apathetic. Most are appointed as a favor to someone else. Fifty people are assigned one simple task. The real ‘decision makers’ aren’t even visible and apparent, so accountability is non-existent.

It is very easy to look at that and, like most young people these days, huff and puff, sigh, express outrage, engage in some ‘us vs. them’ patronization, feel good about oneself but terrible about the situation, and spiral into negativity. There’s no way out of this manner of thinking.

It is harder to ‘fall in love’ with the problem.

And by ‘falling in love,’ I mean that you treat the problem as a case study in beautiful equilibrium:

1. It is beautiful because it is a work of art involving coordination and incentivization to get a large group of people to exhibit similar behavioral patterns. It’s complex, and it has happened, even if by accident.

2. It is equilibrium because it persists and it has settled. Getting people to behave a certain way is hard already, but getting them to stick to it, despite a clear strategic push to be ‘corrupt,’ for example, proves that some incentives have worked, and there’s a silent force that keeps people behaving this way. This silent force is incredibly potent -- even if it is in the service of the wrong things.

The work of social change, then, is to first treat the problem as a case study of beautiful equilibrium -- and once you’ve done that, to leverage the ‘silent force’ in your favor. I argue that the ‘silent force’ — which is at its core just plain incentives — is powerful enough to do the work of a thousand people. It is your invisible workforce2 and your most effective changemaker.

I thought deeply about listing specific examples of our work with the government of Pakistan.

Despite clear warnings not to enter this minefield, we went all in on working with the government and took along our entire organization. Contrary to expectations, two years later, we’ve achieved scale and continue to grow. We have deployed our solution in multiple theatres/districts and, without paying a penny in bribes, have earned multi-million dollar contracts. We've stayed the course despite three governments changing since we started, and I believe it boils down to this mental model of noticing beautiful equilibrium everywhere and then influencing it.

However, I’m aware that I cannot share specific examples because of the sensitivity of the institutions involved and because I fear someone will take the sword of moral outrage and stab the institutions and people we have worked with.

I will attempt an alternative where we can still dive into the concept applied to the seemingly random world of heavy-duty machinery and its taxation system.

Lasbela’s Golden Goose:

The next time you drive on a highway in Pakistan, note the number plates on heavy-duty machinery— 16-wheelers, buses, and trucks. Once you begin noticing it, you will realize that a lot of them are registered in Lasbela (a district in Balochistan -- as written on the plates) and look like this:

So far, so good. Most people would leave it here.

But I want you to remain curious -- this is the most underrated mechanism for diagnosing equilibrium.

You will set up a raw mental mechanism by which you count the ratio of heavy-duty vehicles that bear this number plate. Nothing exact, no mathematics, just raw observation.

Eventually, this rabbit hole begins to yield dividends. You start to notice that the ones with this number plate are the majority. Even Daewoo has their new fleet of Volvos on Lasbela number plates.

The next step is to avoid the urge to google it. Our minds are muscles, and GPT-ing and googling get in the way of curiosity.

Instead, do a mental google search. Ask yourself, “This is very interesting; why are they all going to Lasbela to get registered?”

There are inevitably hypotheses that begin to emerge:

1. “Maybe because Lasbela is cheap. But why is it cheap?”

2. “It could be geography. But where would Lasbela need to be for geography to play a role?3”

3. “But if Lasbela is from Balochistan, and if corruption increases the farther you go from centers such as Islamabad/Karachi/Lahore, won’t corruption and bribery kill this natural market movement?”

You’ll notice that each hypothesis is essentially a rabbit hole -- a question with more questions embedded in it. This is critical; you do not want uninteresting dead-end hypotheses because you want to trick your brain into remaining curious.

We’ll pick geography as a hypothesis and unpack it further. Your brain is now having an internal conversation with itself:

“Who needs these heavy vehicles?”

“Probably trucking/logistics/transportation carriers.”

“Where would Pakistan’s most dense logistics activity be concentrated? Probably Karachi —it’s the dominant port city.”

“Okay, why not register in Karachi?”

“Probably because of lower taxation?”

“Why do you need lower taxation on a heavy-duty vehicle?”

“Probably because it is linked to the horsepower of a car, and taxation must be pretty steep for heavier horsepower cars.”

“Okay, fair enough, but then is Lasbela a port city? It would need to be”.

“Why so?”

“Because….most trucking routes may operate from the port/sea routes AND because most new vehicles arrive by shipping containers?”

“Yeah, they’re definitely being imported because we don’t make them in Pakistan.”

“So it's not Karachi, it’s not Gwadar, but it IS in Balochistan, so somewhere close to Karachi but on the coastline?”

Bingo -- and with that, you’ve guessed Lasbela’s location.

A quick Google check to verify, and then back to hypotheses.

So there are some geographical reasons why it works: Lasbela is close to the sea and the port. We switch from geography to economics.

• “Is it actually cheaper to register? If so, it is quite a great business strategy to increase a district’s revenue.”

A quick check to verify on Google if it is indeed cheaper — and you stumble upon a group of nerds on PakWheels discussing this exact case in 2013.

Back to hypotheses:

“But there’s always corruption…why isn’t corruption killing this natural market movement?”

“What would happen if a greedy excise and taxation officer decided to demand an unnaturally large bribe?”

“I think everyone would be furious…because there might be other districts that are cheaper AND on the coast, and registrations may move to that district?”

“So there might be corruption, but there might be an upper cap on that corruption, adjusted to undercut the listed price + the bribery premium in the next adjacent contending district?”

“That would need to happen…otherwise, the business would just move away, and you end up killing the golden goose.”

“Interesting. A way to gauge bribery rates is to think of them as taxes4; you can’t overdo them; Lasbela is in beautiful equilibrium.”

“Okay, but it can’t be a one-off. If officials in Lasbela have discovered this golden goose, they may have found other such opportunities, too”.

A quick return to Google. And you discover that Lasbela is home to the third-biggest shipbreaking yard in the world.

It is on the shore, and it is called Gadani. In the early 2000s, Gadani came to a standstill. The government had overdone taxation and duties.

To revive it, the ship-breaking duty was reduced from 15% to 10%. Activity promptly resumed. Thirty thousand people were once directly employed in Gadani. However, many have died in horrific accidents in the years since the subsidy was reduced. Gadani seems like….an entrepreneurial hub. The accidents are an equilibrium because most shipbreaking activity is carried out by private companies, who would naturally want to squeeze profit at any cost—even if it is dangerous. 

On a separate note, there’s a whole world of controlled bribery in Gadani, where customs officials tax only a tiny portion of the millions of liters of fuel left in ships when they arrive at the yard and ‘ignore’ the rest5. Sometimes, it leads to tragic disasters when the collectors of the ignored fuel don't show up for collection fast enough before the fuel catches fire.

You return to the economic hypotheses for heavy-duty vehicles:

“But isn’t the registration of a car tied to its value? Isn’t that why people register in Islamabad — to increase resale value?”

“That’s true. But what incentive do freight/logistics/transport companies have not to want better resale value?”

“The positive delta in registration tax savings must be higher than the negative delta of the hit on resale value?”

“That AND who would want to resell a 16-wheeler? It would do million+ miles in a short period, and with little in the way of serious emissions/road safety standards, you’d hang on to it for a really long period of time.”

“And by the time you sell, even if there is a negative delta in resale price, it will be offset by a) the positive delta on tax savings + b) the profit you earn from the vehicle.”6

Beautiful Equilibrium.

The above is an example of a case study that runs in your head. While you shower, drive, cook, work out — or engage in cognitively light tasks. In that way, it’s almost…invisible.

Why put in this labor?

Because of this logic, we've evaded tight corners in several cases in our work with the government. We also carry on when others throw their hands in the air, label it a ‘lost cause,’ and move on.

You see — once you notice beautiful equilibrium, you also begin to notice how to influence it.

If there is bribery, you know what its upper limits are. This is not to say that you pay the bribe, but making this knowledge known to others has been a foolproof way of not having to pay a bribe.

And once you don’t pay it, you set a new equilibrium. Every subsequent case then has the power of precedent and the new equilibrium baked in.

People settle on the new equilibrium faster than you think.

You’ve harnessed the silent force.

The theory:

1. You treat every problem as a beautiful equilibrium.

2. You remain curious enough to understand why the equilibrium is the way it is.

3. You then attempt to influence the equilibrium.

You spend 95% of the time on 1 & 2. That will always remain the hard part.

The applications of this approach are endless. It can be used for everything, from changing the behaviors of entire government departments to achieving stability amidst governmental chaos to more effectively influencing and advocating within large bureaucratic structures.

We probably need to do more as an organization to adopt this ethos, but there are early signs that it is catching on. Taleemabad teams spend an inordinate amount of time studying the ‘system,’ — mapping stakeholders, and ‘stalking’ everyone from parliament to bureaucracy to the military to understand cues and identify beautiful equilibriums.

As an example, see below a map of all stakeholders in the education system in Pakistan, with sublinks to their attitudes/behaviors/positions. This is inherently unbridled curiosity at play.

It is, however, just a starting point.

That should help you understand the level of depth investigations into equilibrium must have.

Ultimately, I understand this may seem 'weird’ to most people. It borders on the obsessive.

But if you’ve arrived at this point of the blog, you’re probably part of the rare sliver of people who:

1. Believe that it is worthwhile as a life’s mission to attempt to turn around a whole oil tanker of a country (a quarter of a billion residents in Pakistan);

2. Recognize that most beauty is to be found in places where there is the most dysfunction.

3. Are audaciously optimistic to believe that it is possible to influence and change dysfunction for the better — at scale— as long as we can stop being outraged.

If we don’t already do so — we should talk :)

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This is a story I wrote many years back — part of a range of local storybooks that Taleemabad produced for young children. You can find the complete catalog illustrated and designed here. Thank you to all the brilliant authors and illustrators who were part of this movement.

This story remained my favorite for a very long time — because it helped contrast the innocence children naturally possess. When this innocence is coupled with curiosity and imagination, magic happens.

But, as always — the adults must always play along too.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Reading: Medium Length (500 word) passage, with new words, e.g. granite, sank, corridor, neighbourhood.

2. Grammar: Countable nouns (chocolate, car), and Uncountable (milk, juice, happiness) nouns.

3. Pronunciation: Words with a soft c sound (cycle, race), hard c sound (cat, castle, car), soft g sound (giant, huge), and hard g sound (granite, gate).

4. Listening: Listen and understand a conversation between a customer -- who is placing an order -- and a cashier who is receiving it, all the way to the exchange of payment and the return of change.

5. Speaking: Practice conversing with a shopkeeper to place an order for a list of items.

The Richest Boy in the World.

On a sunny afternoon, when the crows had gone for a nap, and the worms were back in their holes, Jojo discovered a diamond.

It was there alright, wedged between the sand and granite.

“Who could it belong to?” he thought.

Jojo searched in vain for the owner, but they were nowhere to be found.

“I suppose that makes it mine,” he said.

That night, Jojo knew he had become the richest boy in the world.

“Imagine all the cars I’ll buy and the chocolates I’ll eat”, he mused.

“Oh and all the movies I’ll watch at the cinema and all the juice I’ll be able to drink.”

“I’ll build a castle out of candy and towers out of toffees!” he thought in excitement.

Jojo was a happy boy that night.

-----------------

The next morning, Jojo was up before his usual time. He ran down to the kitchen and made himself some lemonde. When it was time to put in the sugar, he put in more than usual.

“What’s up with you, young man? You look like you’ve got a lot of energy!”, said Mom.

“I’m the richest boy in the world!” replied Jojo, and before his mother could reply, he was already running out.

He paused in the corridor and said, “I’ll buy you all the cutlery you need, all the dishes that I broke, all the saucepans and spoons and clothes and jewelry that you ever wished for!”

“But what if I just want happiness?” asked Mom.

“I’ll buy you that too!” squealed Jojo, and with that, he was gone.

-------------------------------

It was an unusually busy day at the grocery shop. There were all kinds of things going on; the butcher was selling his meat, Babu was serving food, and Sheeba and Gopi were taking all kinds of needles and threads back to their shop.

Jojo parked his cycle outside and chained it to the pole. He got a cart and found himself in the aisles.

That day, Jojo bought more than he ever had.

There were the ice creams that he bought, one for every person in his neighborhood. Then there was the candy, a box of them for all his friends.

He brought a huge coat for Dadi, who often felt cold, and a giant teddy bear for Pinky..

He got a carpet, two cups for his mother, and a pack of cream for her favorite dish.

Before long, Jojo’s cart was full. “That’s enough for today,” he thought to himself and moved towards the cashier’s desk.

“Hello,” he said to the old cashier, craning his neck above the counter. The cashier looked down and, seeing him there, said, “Oh, hello, Jojo! Quite a lot of shopping today, eh?”

“Yes sir”, Jojo replied. “I’m the richest boy in the world.”

-------------

Before long, the bill was done and the cashier announced, “Three thousand five hundred rupees, Jojo”.

“Thank you. I’d like to pay with a diamond”, replied Jojo.

Before the cashier could say anything, the diamond was out. It sat there on the table, shining under the lights.

The cashier picked it up and looked at it, and his heart sank. It wasn’t a diamond by any means.

It was simply a broken piece of glass.

Jojo put his arms on the counter and pulled himself up. “I know it’s very big”. He paused, “but if I can, I’d also like to buy some happiness, please. For my mother.”

The cashier looked at Jojo, and then at the glass, and then at Jojo again.

“But...happiness isn’t bought, Jojo. It is given!”, he said.

“Can you give me some, please?”, asked Jojo.

“Have as much as you want, Jojo”, said the cashier.

And with that, Jojo’s day was complete.

He ran across his neighborhood, with the old cashier struggling to keep up. That day, they gave the candy and ice cream to the children and the giant coat to Dadi. They even gave mithayi to Sheeba and Gopi, biscuits to the doodhwala at the dhaba., and put out some milk for the cats in the alley.

By the time Jojo and the cashier were done, it was already getting dark. The cashier walked Jojo to his door.

“Do you need to buy some more happiness?”, he asked Jojo.

Jojo paused and thought, and before he closed the gate and said goodbye, he had an answer:

“I think I have more than I need,” he said with a grin.

I, I think if I could get you to do one thing
I would say that when you get to the point that you
Really feel, highly motivated, to, just, towards keeping your virtue
Then you'll, you'll discover quite quickly how extraordinary a life was meant to be
Could be

And it's, it's just we get so messy, it's not that we are doing lots of wrong things
Our mind is so messy
We don't keep it simple
And we end up making the life that we are living, so in-ordinarily complicated
Completely unnecessarily, and it's such a shame to end up feeling, in a real muddle
When actually, you ought to be having the time of your lives

It doesn't actually take very much to make the deepest part of us incredibly happy
You know?
Just to be here, just to appreciate
Appreciate being here
To feel that you're alive
To be in touch with your heart
That's it
That's it

It takes mindfulness to come to a human life
And then above that, it takes mindfulness and virtue
To come to a fortunate human life

The chance to be part of this happens briefly
The invitation is not to show how inventive and imaginative you are
But how much you can notice what you're already part of
And appreciate it and share it
And care about those that are around who count for their welfare
While you are looking out for your own, that's it
And then you'll get to the end of it, having had an awesome time
Knowing, that, that is something you'd recommend to others

Ah
You all know
You already know this place inside, where it's alright
You all know that when you let the ego go, it's not this black hole that you jump into
You all know it
Why can't we do it?
And yet the world is creaking under the strain of this in-ordinarily complicated
Mass of humanity and actually you know, it's really simple

When you came here
You came here with a sense of awe and wonder, dying to just see what it's about
You know, it's like, what would it be like?
To be down there?
To be part of it?
And you came here with a sense of wonder
And somehow the wonder of it wasn't enough
And we stopped wondering and started to wonder about ourselves
And in your wondering about yourself
You forgot what you came here for, what you came to be a part of

When the space shuttle Columbia entered earth’s orbit on 1st of February 2003, everything seemed to be on track.

This wasn’t the first time a space shuttle was re-entering the planet. Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour, they’d all done it. Even Columbia had done it successfully before. There was no reason to worry.

And then, in the blink of an eye, Columbia was gone. The earth’s atmosphere obliterated it in seconds, and no one survived.

The postmortem revealed that the flaw had developed at launch; a tiny piece of foam had created an even tinier crack in the heat shield. And then, Columbia had carried this wound — to space. Over the next sixteen days, everything flowed seamlessly. The biology experiments worked, the frog embryos grew, the crew slept and joked around. All unaware that there was a hairline beneath them that would ultimately consume them.

My mind is a strange place, because this week it thought of Columbia quite a whole lot. And as Monday turned to Friday, I’d become Columbia myself.

I thought about all the hairline cracks I’ve carried without knowing over the years. I also thought about which one of them would ultimately become my achilles heel. All of this is quite a chicken and egg exercise — because you don’t see the cracks to begin with, let alone predict which ones are dangerous.

As I close out this week, I realise that this is perhaps what being humbled looks like.

I’ve always believed that I had a sturdy heat shield. I’ve loved intensity, and I’ve loved powering through obstacles — almost enjoying it. But the thing with heat shields is that you can get carried away with them sometimes. The thicker you make them, the more you abuse them.

And at some point, adding layer upon layer doesn’t work, because when a hairline crack opens up, no amount of layers help.

Heat shields are sensitive little things, for both people and space shuttles.

And the time to tend to them isn’t in the middle of a demanding battle with heat.

It’s on the ground, on the dock; on a cool night. Away from the action and the spotlight.

A prayer for a friend:

Dear God,

Thank you for showing me the value of friendship, and thank you for bringing him into my life all those years ago.

Over the next few days, help me communicate, and help me love him while making a decision that can help us heal. I’ve struggled to maintain friendships outside of work; help me tend to this one and nurture it through the wound I’ve put it through.

So much so that the whole province ends up being a figment of everyone’s shared imagination, borrowed from here and there, through other lenses, and through secondhand stories. Today - after many years of holding a second-hand opinion of Balochistan, I saw it up close.

I don’t think there’s any better way to get to know a society better than to visit its schools, because that’s one place where the present can stand at bay because everybody - in one way or the other - is thinking about the future.

There are no two ways about it: we’ve let Balochistan down, so much so that it is heartbreaking to even look at it.

I heard stories today from high school girls who’d forgotten to sing the national anthem because there would be grenade attacks in schools anytime they sang it together in the assembly. I heard from primary-grade Afghan students who’d been called terrorists and from their teachers who’d been dismissed for defending them. I saw the torture of ‘Islamabad’s SNC’ in a school where students speak four different languages: Bruhi, Pashto, Urdu, and Farsi. I heard the stories of coal miners’ children, who’d been left to fend for themselves in a building that seemed worse than the mine their fathers toiled in.

The coal miners’ school.

In Quetta - a few kilometers away from the provincial assembly, I saw a school where 60 girls studied in each class, many of them on floors - without any electricity for the entire school day. In the same school - as I crossed room after room spilling with students, we arrived in a building that looked odd for a school, with white tiles on the floors and walls.

Before I could ask, the teacher told me the new classrooms were in what used to be a clinic adjacent to the school. Forced into a corner, parents and teachers had to pick between health and education - a choice no one should ever have to make.

But it is in these choices that Balochistan shows up.

Pakistan has let Balochistan down. If we are to help, the best place to start is by doing what others haven’t done so far: recognizing their agency despite their challenges and doubling down with them on the choices they are making.

Students on the floors and in corridors in a school in Quetta.

Balochistan’s Invisible Choices

Everywhere I went today, people told me Balochistan was Pakistan’s crown jewel. In various forms, it had been stolen, misplaced, sold, or forgotten.

I know you may find it hard to believe, considering what we’ve read in the news - but Balochistan is not a jewel because of its port, mines, or gas.

It’s a jewel because of its people.

I met teachers today with lesson plans and student profiles and immaculately maintained student data. There’s no state support for this—no Ministry of Education mandate. When I asked an aging teacher how she found time for this, she told me she stayed up till 2 a.m. with her husband, learning how to type it all on an equally aging computer.

A few days earlier - I met the Minister for Education, on whose invitation I’m visiting these schools. Politicians are hard to trust, but Raheela feels different. Her staffers tell me she’s shed tears at the enormity of the task at hand. Before I left for Quetta, she asked me to leave my assumptions at home - and come in the spirit of service. I’m glad I did.

I met another female teacher from Qila Saifullah who had to flee multiple places because of violence, yet somehow completed her Master's and chose to serve in public schools, fighting with parents to let their girls continue schooling beyond puberty. “I know what it means to forge a path,” she told me. “I’m the first in my village to make it this far.”

And perhaps — as if to decisively bury the thought that I’d met with rare outliers, I ended up in Nawab Zada Ismail Ganj in Marri Camp, just outside of Quetta. This is a settlement of the Marris displaced due to the violence in Balochistan. A lone teacher shows up despite almost no infrastructure — you can see for yourself. And that makes all the difference. If someone ever tells you that Pakistan doesn't have greatness in its teachers or that they are only in Islamabad or Lahore, tell them the story of Abdul Rashid Kakar - an oasis in the middle of a desert. Today, at the feet of Professor Kakar, I was schooled in Singaporean pedagogy and the ethical curriculum of Japanese schools, as well as a probable roadmap of decentralized teacher support centers across Balochistan.

No classrooms, no furniture, nor any water or electricity. Yet a great teacher achieving great learning.

One of Kakar’s students - a 6 year old girl reading a 3rd grade textbook.

A short conversation with the great Professor Kakar himself.

Across stuffy classrooms and with secondhand books, in corridors and halls, I saw students struggle to read. But I also saw them keeping at it, with their teachers struggling alongside them. A few years ago, the teachers created a study group, staying back in school, huddled around one tablet to find material online and learn. “That’s when we discovered phonics—and it changed how we saw language,” one of them told me.

Playing a word puzzle game the teachers picked up online.

I still couldn’t get rid of the thought of having no infrastructure, though. I suppose we all have some biases. Mine is around what we’ve built. How could we support teachers if there weren’t even enough classrooms and electricity?

But there are answers too if you look close enough. In the afternoon I was taken to meet the miraculous Irfan sb - an entrepreneur who’s spent 30 years and built 2000 schools across the entire province. He might have a chance now to secure some of the capital allocated after the education emergency we all saw firsthand. Irfan even has an estimate of what it will take to bring the 3 million OOSC students in Balochistan back to school. $207 million. This seems like a small ask from the $12B or so Pakistan spends on education.

On our choices.

Balochistan’s reminded me of our values; values that might help us as the journey gets harder and the critique louder.

First, there is simply no other way than to stand by teachers. There is no such thing as a permanently good or bad teacher. Only a teacher that we’ve got to serve.

This means that we continue to believe in their best potential—with love that is radical in its nature. We do not hit back when we get hit—we respond with love and understanding. We choose to believe in teachers, especially those who do not yet believe in us.

The second is that our work is much larger than that of technology. We must become the voice for Balochistan (and others) in Islamabad. Their infrastructure challenge is our challenge, their struggle with SNC and language is our struggle. We choose to fight for them even when they aren’t in the room - one for all and all for one.

Our mandate has become immense, but I’ve stopped worrying about how hard it will become. We named our work نیت for a reason—that’s where we’ll start. Eventually, others will walk with us.

And together, we’ll walk toward hard things. Not away from them.

For more information on our work with the government, visit www.niete.pk or find us on LinkedIn/Instagram.

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Maybe I've pulled a muscle, because today was only 24 kilometers, and we've done days like this before on the trek. Or maybe it's the nearing of the end of the trip that's bringing back all of this fatigue.

I took a glacial bath when we got to camp, because it seemed like all my muscles were going to burn, and then I crashed, almost missing dinner in the process.

I have a ton of complicated emotions as this trip draws to a close. I think there's a lot of grief — I don't get to do this often. I have new friends, Albert and Alberto may even come to the office on Friday. But saying goodbye to K2, to this camp life that I had gotten used to, to expecting wonder everyday, to late nights under the stars and the full moon, to deep conversations about purpose and conviction with Alberto, or lighter conversations about music with Albert — it's hard, to draw all of this to a close.

I got to live another life. I went and touched a God of a mountain. I walked till I felt I would collapse — and then I walked some more.

This odyssey has been new and unexpected and wonderful in so many ways.

Where do I go from here?

I'm going to take risks — this much I know.

I'm going to believe more so in what the voice inside me tells me to do.

I'm going to go to the top of mountains — where my lungs scream for air — and I'm going to cherish this freedom, because something tells me that freedom is a gift.

And like all gifts, like all great journeys, it is temporary.

And all that is temporary is wonderful.

And it must come to and end.

I'm in the airport of the departures lounge at Skardu airport. The clock ticks down to boarding, and I find myself wanting it to slow down. Autumn is descending on Skardu, it's a beautiful chilly morning, the kind you enjoy without any jackets — because the wind bites, enough to make you want a hot cup of chai — but not to go back inside. The clouds are rolling over the mountains, and the first snow has already happened at high altitude.

Top of my mind now is the battle for survival at Taleemabad. In many ways, this is the same challenge — perhaps greater than when I left it. What has changed is my belief in going out and playing my best innings. I'm optimistic, and I'm more confident in my own capabilities. That's what trekking to the remotest corner of the planet does to you, I suppose. You begin to believe in possibilities.

It's a privilege to be alive, and a privilege to have the freedom to do what I believe in.

I also realize what a balm vacations are, and how necessary it is to plug out. Life begins to look like a tunnel if you don't.

Simultaneously, plugging back in after something like K2 is so hard. How do you match that? What is the follow up act to such magic?

I know one thing for sure. This is my world. This crazed, maniacal pursuit of going to the ends of the earth, of doing things that seem pointless but in fact are the only worthwhile things to do. I'm drawn to risk, to spaces and places where the outcome is a toss-up, where it is very much possible to live or not, and where your heart, mind, lungs, legs and your entire body scream to survive.

Where life and living is a luxury, and where danger and risk are journeymen.

And if that means that life is shorter, or more uncomfortable, then so be it.

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2 years ago · 1328 likes · 76 comments · Henrik Karlsson

I know you feel the ‘tug’.

I hope you know that the tug does not have to mean that you submit to it.

The tug is not an invitation to be rash, but to be kind. Kinder still.

The tug is not a push to take a u-turn. It is an invitation to look critically at the path you walk on.

The tug isn’t saying “come here”, it’s saying “look here”; and both of those can mean very different things.

You know, deep down, that this moment would always come, where the clothes won’t fit anymore.

The ask is not to strip and run when this happens. It’s to acknowledge why the clothes won’t fit, and pay homage to the growth that is likely to have happened to get here.

Do not be guilty, because guilt somehow makes you rash, defensive, prone to doing everything in a hurry.

The tug is a rare visitor. Let it in, but when it leaves, do not leave with it.

It has come to show you another world.

And it will leave directions to it too.

Time is the biggest gift.

And time is the biggest sacrifice.

If love, purpose, life — anything of worth — had a common currency, it would be time.

Perhaps the biggest equalizer of all is time. The rich, the poor, the powerful and the powerless, all have the same amount of time.

Where we choose to allocate it says more about what we value compared to anything else.

No other objective, worldly measure of value: money, status, influence, comes close to time.

Because strangely enough, everything else is malleable and changeable and earnable, just not time. And whereas we consciously allocate other measures of value such as money, time just….keeps on slipping away.

I wonder how I'll look back at how I allocated time.

And whether it will accurately represent what I considered valuable in life.