In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

his past July marked 15 years since my young family and I moved back to Pakistan from the US, and what an exhilarating, tumultuous ride it has been. In 2010, a few weeks before we moved back to Lahore, masked terrorists stormed an Ahmadiyya worship place very close to our home in Model Town and massacred almost a hundred worshippers in cold blood. At that time, not having lived full time in Lahore for close to 16 years and with three young children, I was shaken and questioned my decision to return to Pakistan. Our friends in the US were also very worried. Some even asked me to consult a good psychiatrist. But my wife and I were determined to be closer to home, to family and to our roots and we took the plunge. Today, my grown children are about to start college in the US. They moan and complain about the same things we all complain about: the frequent electric breakdowns, the heat, the mosquitoes in the summer, the traffic etc. But importantly, they are also staunch Pakistanis who, while having a nuanced view of the shortcomings of our still young country, have a strong sense of their Pakistani, Muslim identity. This was what my wife and I wanted to inculcate in them when we moved here and it would not have been possible if they had grown up in the US or, at least, not in the way we had........

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