“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 reached out to Jalal and asked him the one thing his post leaves out: why did he come back?
His answer was less a homecoming than a bet. He arrived in 2015 with a global firm in private equity, wanting to experience an emerging economy. He worked alongside graduates of Ivy League universities and of schools run by The Citizens Foundation, a charity that educates low-income children, and saw how much the country stood to gain by investing in its people. When his assignment ended in 2019, he stayed. “I was seeing a positive trajectory and I thought I could move the needle more here,” he said.
What does he tell the candidates who ask? That in Pakistan you sail a small boat but get to experience the whole sea. In a large economy like Britain’s, you are one of a crew on an ocean liner, and your contribution is limited. Here, whatever you do has more impact.
Then I asked whether he would make the same choice today. He did not say yes.
Pakistan, he said, is moving slowly and quickly at once, mostly downward, with spurts of growth. The system work has not been done: cutting red tape, opening markets, strengthening civil liberties and the rule of law, the kind of reforms India undertook in the 1990s. “If I make money, my money will be protected from the state or powerful people. If somebody goes against me, I should have recourse,” he said, describing what is missing. He believes Pakistan is three or four years of hard reform away from a trajectory like Turkiye’s, South Korea’s or Chile’s. Until he sees it, his verdict is blunt: for anyone coming from outside, Pakistan is “a much riskier option than any time in its history.”
“Jalal is an investor. He knows what due diligence looks like. So does the young man who asked him that question. His question was not cynical. It was a fair reading of the evidence."
-Muna Khan
So, the man who asked why the young doubt the wisdom of coming home has, in the end, given them the same answer they gave him.
The numbers are on their side too.
In 2025, 762,499 Pakistanis registered with the Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment to work abroad. Remittances reached a record $41.6 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year, according to the State Bank of Pakistan. Officials celebrate that money as a lifeline while lamenting the people who send it as a loss. A country that depends on the salaries of its departed has, in effect, made leaving its economic policy.
Investors know what due diligence looks like. So does the young man who asked that question. He has likely watched inflation eat his parents’ savings, lived through Internet shutdowns and political upheaval, and seen who gets ahead and why. His question was not cynical. It was a fair reading of the evidence.
But look again at where the young man was sitting. He was in Pakistan, in a job interview. He had not left. He was doing what any investor does before committing, and he was still in the room.
Jalal’s verdict holds something too. He did not say Pakistan was finished. He said it was three or four years of hard reform away. That is a distance, not a destiny. Other countries have crossed it.
In 2023, I wrote that I no longer sell hope to students who ask me how to leave. I still don’t. Hope is not mine to sell. It has to be built, and the people who owe it are not the ones who came back. It is owed by those who have run this country for the 25 years since I first answered that question.
The young are still asking. That means they are still waiting for an answer.
What will we build for them to stay?
The writer is a journalist and writing instructor.
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