Returning to Pakistan - A Guide - Closing

Sense of Purpose
The people, the primary audience of this article, typically think about a sense of purpose when life starts to settle down for them in America. I have found that stage to arrive somewhere mid to late 30s. You are happily married with a loving wife and healthy kids, you make a decent living and you live in a nice suburb in a nice house with 4 bedrooms and a 2 car garage. Life sometimes seems to come to a stand still and you look around for what to do next. For people who have entered a stage in their life where they have started pondering these questions, is that it? Am I done achieving things? Is it going to be the same business as usual from this point on? There is a tremendous sense of purpose in Pakistan. From earning honest money to teaching your kids proper manners and from taking up a cause of healthcare or distribution of justice, you can come back to Pakistan and feel alive. There are problems all over the place and hardly anyone seems to mind. From the poor quality of service at restaurants and upscale stores to a blatant abuse of power and status by the rich and powerful, all areas can use some help. The system of life in Pakistan is not easy and a sole family or individual cannot fight it on his own either. A group mentality and of like minded approach to basic lifestyle coming from people who have moved from abroad need to join hands and get together in this fight. Rest assured, I am not recommending everyone to take up social work but do whatever you want to do for a living in Pakistan with a sense that you need to help these people by setting an example. Things as simple as saying thank you to a peon or guard in an office building is enough once a day to make a difference even for those who are not crusaders fighting for their beliefs. Honesty, integrity, courtesy and respect for a human being regardless of his social status are simple things which this society is losing very fast. The good things we have learnt from the North American continent have to be instilled in the local populace slowly and gradually. My daughter, in grade 3, writing an essay on “what would I do if I had a million rupees” ended up suggesting building better schools and museums in Karachi as she found these 2 things wanting compared with Chicago. We were called up by the teacher and the principal to understand how we have taught this to our daughter especially since we have just moved from USA. I firmly believe that simple examples of things done right will make the people around us realize and open their eyes to alternative approaches in life. The youth need this more than the adults as they are losing a sense of ambition. Their focus is on securing financial freedom so they can get nicer cars, look prettier and wear designer clothes. Youth from all classes of society are falling for this probably due to the onslaught of media and uncontrolled internet access. Hard work, patience and perseverance is losing its charm and it needs to be inculcated by demonstrating first hand how it is done. I believe the expatriate community in North America has a very important role to fill this widening gap between what is being done and what should be done.

My Story
I will close this with my personal story in a brief paragraph just so you can use the right grain of salt in reading my observations, thoughts, opinions and suggestions to get the right flavoring. I come from the lower middle class educated society of Pakistan and by a stroke of luck ended up in computer science at the right time. I graduated in December 1994 and immediately started in offshore software development work. That led to an eventual move to US in 1997. Over the next 10 years, I had a phenomenal run professionally and financially. All along, I was looking for the right opportunity to go back to Pakistan and after a couple of false starts found the right business group investing in the right business and willing to take me on. I have recently moved back to Pakistan after spending exactly 10 years in USA. I had no legal, professional or financial urgency to leave United States and my siblings are well settled in USA & Canada. My parents were all by themselves in Karachi and were in deteriorating health which was the primary driver for keep looking back. I am now running a startup as the number 2 guy and working 8-10 hours to get the start-up off the ground, implement some of my ideas that I could never convince my upper management in USA, build and train a team of committed professionals and working to help my wife convert a couple of ideas into prototypes for which I never got the time while in USA.