The left side of decimal.
Safia khala’s in KDA. My first memory of meeting him. Tall, dark skinned, white teeth, hunched back. A mess of salt pepper hair that started to thin in later years. A clear gaze, carefree laugh. He was Shehla baji’s friend. At home in the living room with sunlit windows at Safia Khala’s home.
When we went over to spend the day with Ammi at Safia khala’s you could count on seeing him there. Altamash Kamal. The friendly giant, part of the adult huddle in the corner. Radiating intensity.
Not sure who told me that he had gone to MIT. Or when I found out that he had a Doctorate in Nuclear Engineering. 9th grade BVS Parsi High School, perhaps. I was interning at Next Hardware Shop. The place Sarwar, Naveed and Shehla ran together as a team off Sunset Boulevard. An engineer mentioned it in passing in the workshop. They were debating if Altamash was a rock star before he got to MIT.
That day in my mind Altamash became an unapproachable icon that you only sneaked a peak of as you passed him by. MIT became the place where smart engineers headed to become smarter.
How could someone who had gone to a school in Saddar (me) speak to someone who had gone to MIT (him). Someone who could build a reactor in his backyard blindfolded. He was building solid state satellite receivers in his living room. I was struggling with the chapter on permutations. What would I say to him? Would it be a waste of his time? What if he found out how stupid I was?
MetCalfe’s law is my favorite law in computer science. The value of a network is the square of the nodes in the network. The easiest way of creating value? Connect and bring together networks. Once two networks are connected they create combined value at network squared.
The same holds true for organic networks. Human connections done right survive generations. Learnings gets passed on. Bring divergent diverse networks together and you create a riot of colors and lights.
This was the intent of what we did last night. Connecting networks. When Sheba Najmi (Stanford), Madiha Shaftquat (MIT), Nida Farid (MIT, ETH) and Sophia Hasnain (NED, University of Michigan) with Jehan Ara (Katalyst Labs) agreed to come together on a panel for students at IBA Karachi, it was MetCalfe’s law at work.
Cycles. Nida Rizwan Farid.
Nida dreamt of being a pilot. Her parents said before you get your commercial license, get yourself an undergrad degree. She felt if she wanted to fly, an aerospace or aeronautical degree may help her fly faster. The only place that you get an aeronautical degree in Pakistan at that time didn’t accept women applicants. Someone mentioned MIT and she asked if they had an aeronautical program. They did. She applied. She was accepted. She was also offered a place at Harvard, Caltech and Cornell.
Aeronautical became Aero Astro and Nida became a rocket scientist. The first shock to her system was figuring out she was no longer the smartest person in the room. The second, not stellar grades. The third, MIT’s pressure cooker environment. The fourth, cultural shift and switch from being a morning person to becoming a night owl. The fifth, the struggle with instructors who made you want to give up on a subject. She switched to computer science because but couldn’t accept the decision of giving up on a dream. When she switched back to Aero she promised she will stick to it all the way to the end. That was just the start of her journey.
5 years later she graduated as a young Pakistani aero space engineer, it was the year after 9/11. The world economy was in a deep recession. The socio-political scene was polarized. Her country of birth and religion were red flags for roles she applied for. Her job search led nowhere.
Fast forward 8 years. It is 2009. Nida graduates with a Master of Science in Turbine design and Aircraft Engines from ETH Zurich (the MIT of Europe). Once again the world is in recession. She gets interview calls for roles but projects for the which roles are being staffed for get cancelled. Nida now has two degrees from two of the best schools in the world in her specific domain. But she still can’t find a job.
When the world sees MIT, ETH, Aero Astro, Turbine design, Boston, Zurich and Abu Dhabi on a profile it assumes a life that mostly goes right. It assumes a series of wins, one after another. It isn’t always so. Graduating from top ranked engineering schools and not being able to find a paid role post graduation craters your self esteem and self image. Once is bad enough. Twice in ten years makes you wonder. Even more so when your peers, classmates and friends are doing well. Is it me? Or is it the world?
But then nothing that is meant for you will pass you by. If it is written, so it will be. The lows are part of the cycle. As are the highs.
Nida found the roles meant for her. The ones written. A wind farm management analyst in New Jersey. A project manager for an aeronautical parts manufactures in Switzerland. A project manager for a precision engineering firm in Abu Dhabi. The founder of an energy efficiency firm (Save Joules) and the author of Pakistan’s energy flow diagram. As one of the two women board members for a large energy firm in her own country.
The challenge she faced now was a different one. When it came to efficiency, Europe was efficient. So was the US. Within Europe, Switzerland and Germany, two markets she worked with, more efficient than the world combined. Anything that Nida did was good for marginal impact. The work she did moved the needle by fractions of a decimal point. She was solving first world problems. To chase real impact she had to look elsewhere. Cities and countries where minor changes and tweaks lead to significant changes and impact. A country where every major problem and challenge that had been solved in the first world was waiting to be soled. Double digit savings on the left side of the decimal point.
Nida came home to change her small part of the world.
Purpose. Sheba Najmi.
Sheba wanted to explore, see the world, grow, her heart set on the US for her undergrad.
Sheba’s parents wanted her to be a doctor. Top of her class, she started at AKU while her father was unwell. A semester later she followed up on her dream and enrolled at Hamilton College as a Math major. As long as math meant calculus, she loved it. Then advanced math led to abstract theorems, proofs and exotic dimensions and it wasn’t fun anymore. She then felt computer science was the way since it was applied math. Math that paid money, math that would lead to a living wage back home. She transferred to Stanford and chose Mathematical and Computational Sciences as her major.
It wasn’t what she was looking for. It was indeed more math. But it was dry and boring. A semester later she ran headfirst into Symbolic Systems at the intersection of computer science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and more. Symbolic Systems and Stanford became Sheba’s new home.
When Sheba tells it, the story that led to getting into the most selective med school in her country, to switching to math at Hamilton in NY, convincing Hamilton to increase her aid, transferring out to Stanford, and then switching again to Symbolic Systems, it sounds like a game of hop, skip and jump. It isn’t for ordinary mortals. We don’t chase increasingly harder selection rates every alternate year. Sheba made it so.
And yet when Sheba came back home to Karachi after her undergrad, like Nida, she couldn’t find a job that was relevant to her field of expertise. Back home it wasn’t the passport or religion. It was her field. She was ahead of her time. About twenty years too early. She became a TV news anchor. Ran a daily show. Chased stories on the road. Sat down with senior editors to figure out the news stories for the day. Got stalked.
Till the point where the primary reason for staying and living in Karachi no longer lived in Karachi. Sheba’s father passed away.
Sheba found her self back at Stanford. Familiar, comfortable and competitive. In the Master of Science program in Symbolic systems. A new program with only 5 students.
Symbolic systems led to Yahoo mail and the latitude to experiment with what the world would one day know as web 2.0. After 6 years at Yahoo!, she yearned for greater social impact and joined a year long fellowship with Code for America. A non profit startup using technology to improve user experience, service quality, availability and service levels in the public sector in the US.
Sheba always wanted to change lives. As a school girl dressed in Meadow Primary School’s uniform she had tried to raise unsanctioned funding for drought relief in Thar in ’88. The next day she had gotten in trouble at school because she hadn’t gotten approval from the school to use its name. Seventeen years later at Yahoo!, she raised funding for earthquake relief. Also for Pakistan. This time she had sorted the process and approval challenges first but felt frustrated by her inability to bring about change on the ground.
Code for America showed her the way to Code for Pakistan. A new not for profit group using technology for public good. Sheba kicked it off initially as a civic hackathon at T2F (The Second Floor) with late Sabeen Mahmud in Karachi in 2013. And then with the World Bank in Peshawar in early 2014.
When Covid-19 hit, Sheba was leading the LinkedIn Profile and LinkedIn Search design teams, running meetings over Zoom out of her apartment in San Francisco, 15 hours a day. Boxes of talking heads on her laptop screen and not a single soul to talk to. Face to face conversations, human interaction, engagement, contact, stuff that Sheba lived for, slowly disappeared from her life.
One morning Sheba woke up and decided that her legacy would be more than talking heads on a screen. She knew where she belonged. On the left side of the decimal point. The right side just wasn’t right for her.
She quit her job, moved to San Diego to be closer to her family: Ammi and siblings. To figure out what really mattered to her. On the other side of the world, Code for Pakistan was the first technical team of volunteers to camp out at the Ministry of Health to build Pakistan’s first Covid-19 dashboard. In 2022, when the floods hit, Code for Pakistan launched FloodLight, a crowdsourced data map to help coordinate relief efforts.
This April, Code for Pakistan celebrates 10 years of quantifiable impact. Using technology to change how citizens and residents engage and interact with partners, organizations and stakeholders in government.
Identity. Madiha Shafquat.
Madiha stands in front of three generations of physicians. Her great grandfather was a general practitioner for Indian Railways before partition. Post partition he ran his practice from a clinic near Jamia cloth market in Karachi. Her maternal grandparents are doctors. So are her parents.
Public health, service and impact are programmed in her DNA and upbringing. It wasn’t a surprise when Madiha enrolled with biology as a major at MIT. She was sharp, bright, hard working, committed, driven. The valedictorian at her school.
She took economics on the side, then added literature. Then faced the same challenge Sheba had run into at Stanford and Nida at MIT.
She was no longer the star, the sharpest cookie, the smartest person in the room. She could be if she wanted to. It would take work. It was within her reach but did she want it. And then she asked herself a very different question. What comes after?
What comes after I become the smartest person in the room? Is there an end? Or will I always be playing catch up with this group of committed, driven and hyper competitive individuals. Is this what I want to do for the rest of my life? Chase coat tails.
The answer that made sense for her, was no. Which opened a new Pandora's box. If not this, then what? I know what I want but where and how do I get it? The key for her was figuring who she was. More importantly what was she good at.
I can code. I am diligent and responsible. I can stay with a problem till I solve it. I stay up nights if that is what it takes to crack the code. That takes drive and commitment. But that also describes every other person at MIT.
Where can I put this to work?
Madiha found herself a small niche. A niche at the intersection of her interests, skill sets and spaces that focused on public health. A space that required knowledge of data science, infectious diseases, biology, statistical models and code.
Epidemiology. The study of spread of diseases and disease vectors. Unlike aerospace, energy efficiency and symbolic systems, public health research directly impacted global health. She could still change lives while working on the cutting edge of life sciences in Boston. While drug molecules were commercialized to recover cost of research and development and incentivize private capital, public health research was within public domain.
Will. Sophia Hasnain.
The easiest way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t do this. “You are a woman and you can’t ride bicycles in Karachi” marked my start as a cyclist. “You should go to med school and not study math” is how I ended up as an Engineer.
Sophia grew up in a family of teachers. Her father was a biochemist. Dr. Hasnain taught at Karachi University. Her mother had a Masters of science in Physics from Michigan State taught at APWA college for 47 years. Intellect often goes hand in hand with activism and Sophia’s family was no exception. Protesting for civic causes at Karachi Press Club was a favorite family outing. It still is.
Sophia’s parents went out of their way to ensure their children did not fall in the privilege trap. Starting off by sending their daughters to an Urdu medium school. Sophia received her secondary school education from Khatoon-e-Pakistan. An all girls Urdu medium government school in Karachi. You would think otherwise, but it was great education, she says. It was the first year of the switch to Urdu medium in government schools. Great teachers, very prominent alumni. Since Ammi and Abba were both professors, it wasn’t enough to just read the Sindh Text Book board books. They also studied the O and A level curriculum in parallel.
Sophia’s father wanted her to go to med school. Together with a friend he arranged for a daily lecture on the importance of biology and medicine in the world over math.
When the time came to fill in the high school admissions form for enrollment at PECSH girls college, Sophia knew her father won’t sign the form if she picked any thing other than pre-medical.
She picked pre-Engineering and signed on behalf of her father and submitted the form without bringing it home. When she received the offer of admission, she told him and that was the end of that debate.
Pre-Engineering was followed by a semester in the Math department at Karachi University (KU). Sophia loved the subject and this is all that she wanted to do. But the math department at KU wasn’t the math department Sophia had dreamt of through school. Six months was all it took to clear any remaining doubts in her mind.
Her next stop was NED University, Karachi. Computer Engineering department. NED in the 90’s was not a fun place to be a woman. Especially the Computer Engineering department. 26 women in a class of 71 students. They weren’t welcome. Women students were viewed by their male counterparts as a waste of a good engineering seat. This was the prescribed, semi-official, accepted, established narrative. “You will get married and stay at home. You wasted a seat. You kept someone who wouldn’t, from taking it.” and “What do you know about hardware?”
NED years were hard years for Sophia. Not many pleasant memories. The one bright light in her life at that time was Samir Hoodbhoy and Data Communications and Controls (DCC). Samir Sahib was a family friend and Sophia started working as an intern for him at DCC her second year at NED. Unlike NED, at DCC, the emphasis was on thinking first, followed by problem solving. She traces her love for hardware, for all things digital, for civic-tech and data networks back to the days she spent working for Samir. Using technology for public good, for solving public sector challenges was less of a technology question and more of a design and alignment equation. She feels indebted to Samir for all the training she received during her time at DCC.
In her final year as an undergraduate student at NED Sophia met another group of change makers and system thinkers. Zaheer Alam Kidwai (ZAK), Nuzhat, Jehan and Sabeen at Enabling Technologies. Sophia interned with them in her final year for some time. Like Samir, ZAK and Jehan focused more on how technology would be used and worked. Once you figured the bigger questions, deployment and implementation were an easier challenge to solve. Thinking came first. Code came later.
It was clear there was more to do on the education front post NED. Sophia applied and received admission to the Electrical Engineering program at University of Michigan. She chose Digital Signal Processing (DSP) as her major. More data and math. Biomedical engineering as her minor. It was engineering that brought her back to biology.
The admission was easy. Figuring out financing was harder. She sat down and went back and forth with her admission advisor at University of Michigan and negotiated a conditional informal offer. Contingent on her arrival on campus.
Once she landed in Michigan she camped down in the admissions and student affairs office till they agreed to give her a full ride for the next two years.
She had left home with just a few hundred dollars in her hand and a check drawn on a US bank. Enough to cover two weeks rent in Michigan and the will to make it work.
Will. Sometimes all we have rooting for us in our corner. Then and now. Now and in the future. Find will and it will lead you to your path.
Threads.
What are some common threads across these four lives? Families that believed in education first. A value system that emphasized civic responsibility and ownership of public domain problems. A search for purpose and meaning. A desire to create impact and leave a legacy. An unwillingness to settle; especially for less. A quest to improve self. And hope. Don’t forget hope.
Nida, Sheba, Madiha, Sophia. Young middle class women with limited resources but big dreams. Grew into individuals who made the dreams work despite the odds. Not just for them but also for others around them. Changemakers and engineers first, anything else later.
Destiny writes some checks. Some checks we write, ourselves.
There is obviously more to these stories. You could spend a day with each of them, takes notes and still run out of paper and time. More threads, more lessons. More takeaways for other dreamers.
Ordinary individuals. Ordinary individuals go through extraordinary journeys to do extraordinary work. Extraordinary is a function of commitment, work ethic and a desire to change the status quo.
Sense making. Work with meaning often doesn’t make any sense to the world. But makes a world of sense to you.
Purpose. You don’t chase purpose or hunt it down. Purpose finds you. Purpose is simple but never easy. But it always fills your heart.
Paths. There is no path, there is no plan to purpose or ambition. There is no one grand design that works for everyone. We think there is and we try and build one. But life doesn’t work like that. Life is not linear. We don’t always get to where we want to be. Life is messy, awkward, difficult and hard to read or predict.
Doors. Every time a door that we want to open closes, a new one opens. Some of these new doors are better than the ones we originally planned on opening. Alternate doors and paths are worth exploring because sometimes what we need and want is seeking us behind one such door.
The moving finger. Nothing that is meant for you will pass you by.
Challenges. Struggles in our lives define us. They are meant to turn us into better, resilient versions. Kinder, gentler, stronger selves. They are not divine punishments.
Cycles. The world sees the highs. It sees MIT, ETH, Stanford, Michigan, Aerospace, EE, CS, GSMA, Airbus, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Pfizer. You see the lows.
Identity. You are an individual. Your upbringing, values, experiences, aspirations, and dreams define you. You are resilient, open, driven. Your cultural exposure despite its rough cuts is not a baggage but an edge. Your outlook, your reactions, your response are all different. Now find a niche where this matters and works better than everyone else in the world.
Roads less travelled. Fight group think and herd mentality. You don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. You can walk with your own beat. If that means you turn down that offer from Lockheed Martin, so be it.
Self image. Women sell themselves short. In professional interviews for senior positions a woman won’t apply because she may not have one of the nine requirements for a role. Men would apply with only one.
Privilege. The real privilege is education, access and love. Upbringing that allows you to keep an open mind. To accept mistakes and acknowledge that you are wrong. To change. That willingness, that security is often a function of love we receive from our parents, teachers and families.
Graduate school. A Master of Science requires you to build a relationship with professors and research that you want to work with. Look through the list of research labs of the schools you want to pursue. Check out the professors and their work and then write to them with what you have done and why you think you are a good fit for their lab. All this happens before you apply and are admitted. Once you are admitted you can negotiate a Teaching or Research assistantship. Make sure your profile has something on it that you can pitch.
To start a chain reaction in a radioactive pile you need to cross a threshold of mass. Once you cross that threshold you can start reactions that don’t stop. In nuclear physics that threshold is critical mass. The event? Going critical.
The real world? Change often requires us to go critical too. To convince, influence and persuade large group that something is possible you have to show them the different ways it could be done. Has been done.
One individual doing it may be luck. Two, coincidence. Three, interesting. Four middle class women across three different generations chasing dreams, finding purpose and changing the world implies there is a path that you may follow too. You may have to look for it but only you will know when you find it.
In the years we spent at Safia Khala growing up and later working at Next Hardware Shop, I don’t think I ever exchanged more than 4 lines with Altamash. Shehla baji had other friends we spoke to and became friends with, but not Altamash. On me, not him. Altamash was always approachable, gentle and kind. It was me who was scared witless. An unfortunate side effect of being star struck.
Much later in life I realized that Mushtaq Khalu with his Master of Arts from SIPA at Columbia in ‘47 on a scholarship was as big a deal as Altamash with his SM and ScD in ‘82. 35 years apart they were both bright stars in my universe. And that Altamash had also gone to another school in Saddar.
Mushtaq Khalu was someone we spoke with, who took us with him to the KMC sports complex on his walks, who arbitrated disputes in the family, who loved all four of us despite our many faults. Mushtaq Patel, Safia Khala’s husband, father to Sarwar, Naveed and Shehla.
In my mind, Columbia will always be Mushtaq Ahmed Patel on his type writer finalizing his weekly opinion column for Dawn. MIT, Dr. Altamash Kamal and his many adventures in the world of technology before there was a world of technology in his corner of the planet.
They were fire starters. Proof that sometimes even knowing someone in passing, being aware of their existence is sufficient inspiration. Knowing that they did the impossible, that it could be done. They got away with what we can only dream off, is enough to light that first spark. If they could do it, maybe one day, so will we.
Be fire starters.
