“Sir, why did you return to Pakistan from abroad?”

The question came from a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences, one of Pakistan’s leading private universities. He was sitting across from Malik Ahmad Jalal, a private equity investor at the end of a job interview. Invited to ask anything, he did not ask about the role, the salary or where the industry was headed. He asked Jalal to explain himself.

“Since 2020, I’ve been only asked this exact question. Every single time,” Jalal wrote on X last week. The post has since been viewed 140,000 times.

I know that question. In 2001, I answered it in print. Dawn magazine had run an essay called “Why I’m leaving,” and I wrote a reply the following week, “Why I came back.” I had returned from Dubai because I believed the country needed people who stayed to build it.

Twenty-five years later, the question has not changed. The tone has. “To them, coming home is not an achievement,” Jalal wrote. “It is a stupid mistake that needs explaining.”

His post struck a nerve. Absar Alam, a veteran journalist and former chairman of Pakistan’s media regulator, replied that the young people he meets seem to be “waiting in a transit lounge with their hand carry bags for the next connecting flight.”

I........

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