Blaze News - Pakistan

Twenty-two years ago, in 2004, I met Syed Babar Ali for the first time. I was a post-doc at MIT, and through colleagues and friends, had heard about a new initiative in Pakistan to start a school of science and engineering. This was a topic dear to me, and the idea to create an institution in Pakistan that prioritised basic science at the undergraduate level was as exciting as it was unbelievable. I was not sure I belonged in those conversations, but those who had been thinking about it for a while were exceptionally generous to let me in those early meetings in Boston. Though I had not met Babar sahib personally, I had heard about him. In the mid-1990s, when a friend went to LUMS in their new undergraduate programme in CS, I was intrigued by what was being created. I saw Babar sahib's smiling picture in the brochure and somehow that image stayed with me. A few years later when I was at MIT, I got to meet two of his granddaughters who were undergraduates there, and I was so t...

Unlike many other places I have been to, my taxi driver in Belgrade knew where Pakistan was. So did the bookseller and the coffee shop owner. It is not because there are great bilateral ties between Pakistan and Serbia, or some active hostility between the two nations, or regular tourism. It was because every few months, there would be a discussion about migrants in Serbia with strong feelings on all sides of the political debate, and Pakistan’s name would come up over and over again. Pakistanis are among the biggest cohort of people trying to reach EU through the Balkans. The numbers are so significant that in 2020 Pakistan and Bosnia signed a deal to send migrants back from Bosnia to Pakistan. While the recent tragedy off the coast of Greece has gotten attention, the discussion has largely been about migration along with the Mediterranean route. A lot less has been mentioned in our newspapers and TV shows about the longer land route. The land route goes from Pakistan through Iran, Tu...