I do not follow many people on the internet. The feed mostly just makes me tired. But there is one man I have watched for a while now, from here in Spain, with something close to quiet pride, and his name is Azad Chaiwala.
If you do not know him, the short version is this: a Pakistani who has spent years building things online, mostly on his own terms, and who has lately put his weight behind something he calls ChaiCon. I will not pretend to be neutral about him. I am not. He is, to my mind, one of the better answers to a question I think about often out here — what does the best version of a Pakistani actually look like?
What drew me in was not the success. There is no shortage of loud success online, and most of it bores me. What drew me in was the patience. He did not arrive fully formed. You can watch, across years of him talking plainly into a camera, a man slowly getting wiser — making the mistakes, sitting with them, and only reaching for the bigger idea once he was ready to carry its weight. ChaiCon did not come early. It came after a long apprenticeship to his own ambition, and I suspect that is exactly why it has a chance of meaning something. He trusted the process while the process was still slow and unglamorous and had no crowd watching.
Then there is the part I respect most, the part nobody prints on a poster. At some point, the way I understand it, he walked away from a forex brokerage that was paying perfectly well — because it sat wrong with his values. He did not have to. It would have been far easier not to. But he closed the door on the money and kept the line he had drawn for himself, and built the next thing on cleaner ground.
That is rarer than any amount of talent. Plenty of people have ambition. Plenty have values. The hard thing — the thing almost nobody manages — is keeping both in the same hand, refusing to let the ambition quietly eat the values on the way up. So far, he has refused. From a distance, that is the part that makes me sit up.
I do not know whether ChaiCon will do everything its admirers, me among them, are hoping it will. Maybe it nudges the whole country; maybe it changes a few thousand lives, which would already be plenty. Predictions are cheap, and I have no special view of the future. But I know the shape of the person behind it, and it is a good shape — patient, stubborn about the right things, unwilling to sell off the parts of himself that were never for sale.
Those of us who left tend to export a lot of complaints about Pakistan. It is easy to. So I wanted, for once, to point at something going right, and at a person who is trying to build rather than only survive. If you asked me to show you the best of what we can be, I would not hand you a politician or a cricketer. I would, a little to my own surprise, point at the chaiwala.