Campaignistan

We have built @ISBScienceFest to a nationwide platform showcasing Pakistan’s STEAM talent. These government school students have enormous talent and potential - @Campaignistan only provides that platform for them to rise and shine. Super proud of each one of them 💚💚🇵🇰

In some tehsils across Pakistan, more than 8 in 10 girls aged 5–16 have never set foot in a classroom. Not dropped out, they were never enrolled. I wrote about what the census found, and why the gap follows girls straight into the workforce and out of STEM. @LetsBuildPK @ISBScienceFest @Campaignistan thenews.pk/print/1439967-the…

A genuinely productive evening, hosted by the Royal Danish Embassy and Novo Nordisk, on a health crisis Pakistan doesn't talk about enough: obesity, its medical burden, and the policy partnerships needed to actually address it. Grateful to @ridaqz for the invitation, and to Ambassador @DKInPK for the hospitality. In the room: Senator @AnushaRehman, Senator @SenatorMumtaz, former caretaker Health Minister, Dr. Shabana Haider from the Population Planning Commission, and the Novo Nordisk and Danish Embassy teams. One number worth sitting with: nearly 40% of people with obesity say they don't feel comfortable raising it with their own doctor unless the doctor brings it up first. That's not a medical gap. That's a stigma gap, and it costs real lives. Novo Nordisk supplies roughly half of Pakistan's insulin and serves close to a million patients here. Their "Live Lighter" message is simple: you don't have to manage this alone, and medical options exist. Conversations like this are exactly why partnerships between health innovators and policymakers matter. Looking forward to exploring more around the topic with sustained deliberations and action.

“If a day passes without fooling a foreigner, it was wasted.” That’s what Russians say about India, according to one who’s actually lived there. He never said that about Pakistan. Some reputations are built by policy. Others are built one guest at a time.

A Russian diplomat just admitted on camera what most countries won’t say out loud: for decades, Pakistan simply wasn’t worth the investment to them. That calculation is changing. Free Russian scholarships, every level, BA to PhD. Relationships don’t shift because of sentiment. They shift when the geopolitical math changes - and that’s exactly what’s happening to Pakistan’s position right now, with more than one country doing this same recalculation simultaneously.

He’s interpreted for Putin. He’s fluent in Urdu. And he just told Pakistani youth something uncomfortable: you don’t know your own history, and the world judges your country by how carelessly you talk about it abroad. He’s not wrong. Ask ten people on Islamabad’s own streets about pre-partition history, Gandhara, the Indus Valley, even the founding of the capital itself - most will struggle. Soft power starts at home. You can’t export pride in a story you haven’t bothered to learn.

Azadi. Never taking this for granted Allah has been kind to us, giving us this beautiful country. It isn’t “picture perfect,” as they say - but it has the potential, and everything it needs, to become one افراد کے ہاتھوں میں ہے اقوامِ جہاں کی تقدیر ہر فرد ہے ملت کے مقدر کا ستارا پاکستان ہمیشہ زندہ باد 💚