I'm not very good at staying in touch. As a result, I haven't communicated (let alone met!) with a lot of people in a number of years. So, kind of like a blog, here's a not-so-quick "summary" of what's been happening in my life over the last few years. If you want to go back to the real summarized version, click here.

I graduated from LUMS -- where I'd been doing an accelerated three-year BSc (Honours) in Computer Sciences -- in the summer of 1999. I was interested in networks and communication technologies and was hoping to do a PhD in that general area from a university in North America.

Two things are a problem when applying abroad for further studies: getting in and getting aid. I've never been a "great" student (I missed the Dean's Honor List at LUMS by .07 GPA points! [1]) but I was pretty sure I'd get into at least one good university. I wasn't sure about getting a scholarship, though. To improve my chances of getting aid, or at least getting a job to support myself while I was there, I applied for a Teaching/Research Assistant (TA/RA) position at LUMS. That would help me get in to a PhD programme in two ways: it would give me a bit of teaching/TA'ing experience which would help me get a TA-ship or RA-ship (Research Assistantship) while I was there (which is cool since getting one of those jobs often waives half, if not all, of your tuition fee); and it would give me time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do, look for universities, talk to professors, find scholarships, apply abroad, etc -- all without having to do a regular, time-sucking, 9-to-5 job.

I got the job. In fact, I became a TA in my last quarter at LUMS. I then spent the next year there, halfway between the student-teacher division. To make my extra year at LUMS more interesting, I got to TA the freshman class. That's not an easy job when you have to grade over three hundred quizzes per week! While there, I managed to go trekking to the Northern Areas three times, I learnt how to play the drums, and I made plenty of new friends and acquaintances. Overall, I had a pretty awesome time.

On the applying-abroad front, however, things didn't go so well. I didn't do too well in my GRE test so I got rejected from three of the four places I'd applied to (I was egotistical enough to apply to only top-ranked universities). I did, however, get into Syracuse which was most cool because, not only was it highly ranked, it was my first choice as well. Unfortunately, I didn't get any aid...so that ended that chapter of my life.

Fortunately, my year at LUMS taught me two things: (1) I didn't want to do a PhD after all and (2) in CS (i.e. computer sciences), you don't need to study further to start making a decent amount of money very quickly! So, while I was thinking about what to do, I got the chance to apply for a position at SoftWeb Corporation. SoftWeb is an IT consulting company based in Silicon Valley that is run by one of my favourite teachers, Salman Azhar. Even more fortunately, I got the job! So, before I knew it, I was working in Lahore for the newly-founded SoftWeb Pakistan while my work visa was being processed in the US of A.

Life at SoftWeb was good. I learnt how to work in a technology firm (specifically, a Silicon Valley startup), I learnt about people (including how to and how not to manage them), I learnt plenty of new technologies and, most importantly, I made lots of good friends and colleagues.

The plan was to work at SoftWeb Pakistan (getting trained for work life in San Jose) till about February-March 2001, by which time my H-1 visa would have gotten approved by the INS. I would then spend a month or two at home (in Islamabad) before heading out to the wild west. Things went relatively according to plan and I left for Islamabad in April 2001. That, however, was about a month before things in the Silicon Valley wonderland started to turn sour. By May the IT bubble had burst completely (winning Alan Greenspan and Warret Buffett some bets, I'm sure) and suddenly, going to the US wasn't an option.

While waiting for things to settle down so that I could get a clearer picture of what to do next, I did a couple of consulting projects (websites/databases/training) for my mother's NGO (Aurat Foundation) in Islamabad. It was around then that I ran into Yasir Khokhar. Yasir used to work for SoftWeb in Lahore and was originally supposed to go abroad with us. He, however, quit the job, opting instead to take a Project Lead position at an up-and-coming technology company in Islamabad. Around the time it became clear that we wouldn't be going to the States that year, Yasir's company, InterActive Communications (IAC), started hiring. I applied for a job there and got in. September onwards, I started full-time work at IAC.

IAC provided me with one of the best working environments I've ever been in. Shahid Mahmud (our CEO) and Yasir both knew what they wanted from us and what we would want from them. They gave us what we wanted, so we gave them what they wanted. Specifically, we were making two products -- a Content Management System (Salsa) and a Digital Asset Management System (Tango) -- and were doing lots of projects (mostly making websites; some as testbeds for Salsa and Tango). I did a lot of good work there and made plenty of good friends, too. It was also while working at IAC (at a new year's eve party thrown by Hagler Bailly Pakistan) that I met Nadia Niaz...but we'll get to that later.

IAC has three divisions: telecommunications, IT, and media. By the end of my first year there, I realized that two things: (a) I didn't want to work in software and (b) I really wanted to work in media. IAC, by then, had acquired two FM community radio licenses; one for Sialkot and one for Peshawar. I went to Shahid to ask him about working part-time for the media division when he offered me a full-time job there instead! He needed someone to be in charge of the station's technology (we'd be using our own DAMS to run the stations) and once there I could help out in the programming and management, too. The job was exactly what I'd dreamed of, so in October 2002 I moved over to work at Radio Buraq.

Shahid's ideas for Radio Buraq were brilliant. FM radio in Pakistan (in those days) was pretty bad. FM100 and FM101 (Radio Pakistan's FM service) were (...well, still are) both pretty crappy: bad programming, too much useless chattering, and a terrible selection of music. They had no interesting shows and didn't provide any service to the community. Shahid wanted a hip/funky/cool, youth-oriented radio station. Something with lots of music and lots of pizzazz, good presenters, and useful, informative & interesting programmes. He even wanted us to rebroadcast interesting BBC and VOA programmes; something which I thought was brilliant because I've been into shortwave radio since the summer of 1989 and am a huge fan of the BBC, VOA, and other international broadcasters.

So, with all that in mind, we started work. The first couple of months were great. After that, things didn't go to well. For one, none of us really knew how to run a large-scale radio station -- especially one that would be based in one city but would be broadcast in another. There was also an acute lack of decent (let alone good) on-air talent in Pakistan. To add to our worries -- since Shahid is a brilliant, motivated and outspoken visionary who was stepping on toes to get Pakistan's thoroughly outdated media policy re-done (amongst many other things) -- it was in a lot of people's interest to not let our station get on the air. Worst of all, just as work on RB started, Shahid started his Masters at the National Defense College (the first civilian to do so, by the way). As a result, he wasn't the driving force (steering force, at least) behind the station any more.

Without getting into the details, let me just say that I ended up disagreeing with many of the station's decisions and policies. I will give one example, though. Having started off as a youth-oriented radio station, by the time I left, "youth programming" was relegated to a half-hour slot, three days in the week. These days, however, it's two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They've also moved completely to Sialkot, though, having closed their Islamabad offices, and I hear they're doing really well.

While I understand that it is important to have a station that caters to everyone (especially people who'll give you money), that isn't what I signed up for. Anyway, while I was debating leaving Radio Buraq, a very fortunate thing happened [2]: I got a call from Mustafa Rakla.

Before I go there, let me tell you about some of the fun things happened on the personal front that year. For one, I joined a band! Corduroy is an English rock-music playing underground band whose concert I'd attended in the winter of 2002. In early 2003 their drummer left for the UK and, through mutual friends, they learnt that I was a drummer and that I was looking for a band. They then asked me to audition for them. We met up, hit it off, and after just one jam session I signed on. (Drummers are few and far between in Islamabad, by the way).

This was also the year I started teaching at Thames Business School; first a course on E-Security and then a course on Information Technology Management.

On a much more important (and much more interesting) front, I met up again with Nadia Niaz -- the dancer, author, poet and an all-round fascinating person I mentioned earlier (though I may not have used those words!). We'd been meeting intermittently over the last year or so [3] but it was always in a large group of friends. Anyway, in a few short months we fell madly in love with each other. By the time Mustafa called, things were getting serious and our parents were soon about to find out about what we had planned. But more on that later (same bat time, same bat channel...and if you don't get what that is, you're not old enough to know).

Let's now come back to how I wanted to leave Radio Buraq and how I had received a phone call from Mustafa Rakla.

Mustafa is a classmate from LUMS. About a year and a half earlier, Mustafa and some friends (namely Shakir, Atif, and Saima) had launched a franchise of The Princeton Review (TPR) in Pakistan. Shakir had taken a TPR course before and was interested in starting a franchise for it. He got in touch with the folks in New York, assembled the team in Pakistan, and thus TPR Pakistan (TPRP) was born. The franchise was started in Karachi in 2002 and they had opened a branch in Lahore in early 2003. It was now August 2003 -- the start of the crucial winter application-sending and test-taking cycle -- and he wanted to start one in Islamabad immediately.

Though I am an IT guy, Mustafa, Nabeeha (another classfellow), and I had helped organize tonnes of (mostly extra-curricular) things at LUMS, so Mustafa trusted me and knew that, if nothing else, I could at least help get TPR up and running ASAP. I also wanted management experience (and I love teaching) so this was something I was looking forward to doing as well. Long story short: he offered me the job of General Manager and I accepted, telling him that I'd be leaving in six to nine months to go back to IT. I gave a week's notice to Radio Buraq -- we'd been working for them for a year and they still hadn't given us a formal offer letter/contract to sign; I took that to mean that we were still on probation, so I treated it that way -- and then quit. Saima Irtiza (one of the Directors) flew in for a month to get the ball rolling and so I started working for TPR.

My time at TPR was really good. It was hard -- this was nothing, nothing like the work I'd done before! -- but I learnt a lot. I learnt about managing myself and others; running an office; some basic accounting practices; and many, many other things (check out my resume, if you're really interested). I also got trained as an SAT I teacher and taught a couple of courses, too.

On the personal front, Corduroy was recording it's debut album, The Morning After, and things were progressing in leaps and bounds with Nadia. Within two weeks of her parents getting back from aborad, we were engaged. Our wedding ceremony was fixed for 1st February, 2004 and we started working towards that immediately. Six months later we got married as planned (with more ups than downs, thank God) and moved in with my parents. In fact, my whole family moved to a larger house to accommodate the two of us. Anyone remember Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals? :) And if you don't, you should. Really.

As my time at TPR came to a close we started looking for a replacement and I started thinking about looking for another job. Fortunately, that was about the time I got a phone call from Mosharraf Zaidi (yes, I get lots of very good phone calls!), who told me about an opening at the Pakistan Development Gateway Foundation (PDGF). It was time to move on to the next phase of my life. So I did.

The Pakistan Development Gateway Foundation (PDGF) is a not-for-profit organization that aims to link all development-related activities in Pakistan. It hopes to do primarily this through its Country Gateway Portal. Additionally, it wants technology to do for the development sector now what it did for the business sector in the 80's and 90's: i.e. make it more efficient, effective, and much more transparent. This, it hopes to do in a number of ways, such as by introducing technology (most of it Open Source) directly into the development sector; by getting more of Pakistan online (these days, you don't get much if you're researching for anything about Pakistan on the Internet); or by doing things like bringing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to Pakistan (allowing businesses to receive credit card payments and create PayPal accounts, for example). At the PDGF, I worked the Manager Technology and Portal Services. That is, I got to handle a lot of the technical aspects of this effort. And while we didn't manage to get too much done in the time that I was there (a whopping two years!), things will eventually improve in the development sector. There were two really cool things that we did while I was there, though: (1) create and maintain a comprehensive earthquake relief information page in the aftermath of the massive earthquake that hit the northern parts of Pakistan in October 2005 and (2) help out Risepak with its earthquake relief efforts. All this time I continued to teach at Thames and for The Princeton Review, by the way. In fact, I got qualified and started to teach GRE, GMAT, and SAT II courses as well :)

During this time my personal life was great too. Married life is wonderful and I quit the band. How is the latter "wonderful", you ask? Well, I quit because of "artistic reasons" (yes, in quotation marks) and with those differences gone, life was a lot better. I did miss doing music regularly, but since I did get to do it off and on -- like with the F-10 1/2 Acoustic Project or with Haniya Aslam and Arooj Aftab during CityFM's 1st birthday celebrations in Islamabad -- so things weren't so bad. Other cool things happened too: Nadia and I bought (well, leased) our first car. It's was black coloured Santro Club in which we installed red seat covers :) All in all, things were good.

Well, not everything was good.

Things were good till some time in December 2004 when the tumour was discovered on my mother's kidney. A rollercoaster ride later, Ami died on the 10th of March. Details are on the (attempted) tribute page I made for her. We're still recovering from the shock and probably will be for a long time yet.

Since then, however, things have gotten better. You do, after all, have to go on with your lives after a loved one dies. And that's just what we did. (1) My older sister, Asha, got married to a very good friend of hers, Khaqan, in April 2006. (2) My younger sister was awarded the 2006 Anne Marie Schimmel Scholarship for Women (for Pakistan) and so she is off to the University of London's SOAS to do her LLM. And (3) both Nadia and I got admitted to the University of Melbourne: she for an MA in Creative Writing and me for an MBA from the Melbourne Business School (MBS). Unfortunately, neither of us had enough funds to start either of our programs so neither of us commenced our courses in the January semester (which is the start of the school year in Australia). By March, however, I was awarded the Global Management Scholarship from MBS (which waives my entire tuition fee! [4]) and Nadia got an loan from her father so suddenly we found that we had to get to Melbourne before the 17th of July for Nadia to start her course on time!

In June 2006 I quit my job at PDGF and in early July Nadia and I moved to Melbourne, Australia to continue our studies. It was fun moving from the worst of the summer in Pakistan to the worst of the winter in Australia :) I really like winter and really dislike summer, by the way, so this was a good thing. So we're here now, having basically starting our lives anew.

What will happen next? Well, other than our going through our programs, we're not so sure. The programs themselves are straightforward enough -- hers is 12 months long (finishing at the end of June) while mine is 20 months long (finishing in May, 2008) -- but what we're going to do after that no one knows for sure. Tentatively, I'm hoping to stick around in Oz for a little longer to get some work experience while Nadia is seriously considering a PhD. Let's see how that goes. Meanwhile, here we are.

Wow! That was long, wasn't it? You'd have to really want to know what's been going on in my life to have read all that! Even if you read just he summarized version. And if you did read all that (well, either one really), I'm impressed! Now, if you have anything to say about all this (my life, my writing, whatever), e-mail me at ameel [at] insanityworks.org. One thing people tend to comment on is how I've changed jobs every year, for example. (Well, except for the PDGF one). That is an interesting things isn't it? It's not an intentional pattern, as such. Technically I've started and left all my jobs intentionally, but the one-job-a-year timing has been purely coincidental. Sometimes, though, I did wish that I had joined some big firm somewhere and had stuck with it for many years...but then I think how boring that would have been! My life's been plenty exciting and plenty fulfilling. Finances are not bad, my working life till now has been good (overly hectic sometimes, but such is life), and I'm really thrilled about doing my MBA from MBS. Ultimately, I like where I am, who I'm with, and what I'm doing. I have nothing to complain about so, all in all, things are good :)

How are things with you? Write and tell me!

[1] There was this one fateful quarter at LUMS in which they were offering five computer science (CS) courses that I was dying to take -- including a masters level course in Data Communications. I wanted to take all five, but wasn't sure if I'd be able to handle the workload. I went around asking people what they though. Most people advised against it -- including my faculty advisor, Arif Zaman, who told me that he'd tried something like this when he was in college and that he'd suffered as a result. I, on the other hand, threw caution to the wind, picked some great project partners (whom I could lean on), and registered for all five.

The normal workload in an accelerated quarter is 18 units: three 4-unit courses and two 3-unit courses. I was taking 20 units (five 4-unit courses) -- all of them CS courses -- including Data Communications, Compilers (people who've taken this course can start laughing already) and Advanced Networks. I got an A in Data Comm (I was ranked 2nd, too!) and a A- in one other course (I think)...but I got a B+ (Adv Net), a B, and a B- (Compilers) in the other three. My just-on-the-Dean's-List GPA took a nose dive and I, though I tried, I never managed to bring it back up to the Dean's List. Oh well.

Still, I had a great time, I worked myself to my limits and I learnt a valuable lesson. Funny thing is, if I got another chance -- knowing then what I know now -- I'd probably make the same decision again :)

[2] I've been very fortunate, job-wise. Every time I've wanted to leave a place or it's been time for me to move on, something new, better, and more exciting has come up. And each new place has taught me something important and something I needed to learn at that point in my life. All I can say in response to this good fortune is:"Thanks, God!" :)

[3] It turned out (once we'd declared our intentions to the world), that my sister, my cousin, and a close friend of Nadia's had been trying to set the two of us up because they thought we'd go well together! They tried for a year but failed. It was most fortunate that the two of us met on our own anyway :)

[4] Again, it was an all-important phone call that settled things. Melissa Sieradzki from the admissions office phoned me one morning to tell me that I'd been awarded the scholarship and to ask me if I was still interested in doing my MBA from MBS! Was I?! Woo hoo! I will always be infinitely grateful to MBS for giving me this opportunity. Let's just hope I live up to their expectations!

[Last updated: 3 June, 2007]