Let Us Build Pakistan #LUBP

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…

Four generations already lived through this. A fifth is being set up right now, not by an enemy, but by our own inability to stay consistent on anything: who's a friend, who's a threat, or whether a plan we already wrote gets implemented at all. That's not a security problem. That's a discipline problem. @salarzai_ on @LetsBuildPK

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.

This is the part of the conversation that shouldn’t stay inside a studio. A woman taking home twenty-two to twenty-five thousand rupees can’t clear an electricity bill. Dr. Musadik Malik asks the only follow-up that makes the rightsizing brief real: if the state won’t reduce itself, what exactly is it asking the public to give up? @DrMusadikMalik said it on LUBP, as convener of the rightsizing sub-committee, and the clip only matters if the committee treats that woman as the brief rather than as a talking point.

A federal minister, describing his own government from the inside: “You spin like a dog chasing its own tail. Full power sits with you. The file still stalls it.” Then he describes watching Saudi Arabia move at a completely different speed, under a culture that says: what’s the worst that happens, we’ll fix it. Same minister, same skillset, two systems that treat authority completely differently. I wish we didn’t just listen to people like @DrMusadikMalik, but actually executed what they put on paper.

Gilgit-Baltistan represents #Pakistan @ForeignOfficePk 🇵🇰💚

A young Russian diplomat just publicly asked our own Prime Minister to speak Urdu. Sergey Chekalin’s condition for joining PM Shehbaz’s next Russia trip as interpreter: “Bas Urdu mein baat karni hai, sir.” Sometimes it takes an outsider to say what we’ve stopped noticing ourselves. 🇵🇰🫱🏾‍🫲🏼🇷🇺

They moved a high-profile prisoner to hospital under court order. Within hours the information space collapsed into recycled footage, misleading claims, absurd posts from government advisors, and journalists running polls about who would lose sleep. The speed with which so many lost basic judgement was the real story.

A 25-year-old Russian diplomat, fluent in Urdu, interpreter for Putin - says his real life only started once he got to Pakistan. Moscow gave him a poker face. Islamabad gave him masti. Soft power isn’t built in press releases. It’s built the moment a foreigner stops performing politeness and starts genuinely living somewhere. Zinda dil qaum -💚💚🇵🇰

Seventy-nine years. I’ve spent this year writing about mediation and defence pacts and diplomatic wins, and I’m proud of every word of it. But today I just want to say the simple thing. This country gave my family a home when Jammu couldn’t. It gave me a language, a history, a reason to wake up every morning and try to make it better than I found it. Pakistan Zindabad. Not because it’s perfect. Because it’s ours, and it’s worth every bit of the work still ahead. Happy Independence Day 🇵🇰. @LetsBuildPK

Erdoğan personally received Field Marshal Munir at Ankara Airport. In the room: Turkey’s Vice President, the Chief of General Staff, and the head of MİT - Türkiye’s intelligence service. This wasn’t a courtesy visit. This was a working session between two states that keep showing up for each other, in war and in peace.

Recording this conversation, I sat through it feeling broken from the inside. 25 years. 950+ survivors. Only 40-50 perpetrators ever punished. @masarratmisbah didn’t just build a foundation. She built the only justice many of these women will ever see. @DSF_Smileagain

xAI’s Voice Agent Builder - no-code human-like voice agents with Grok Voice at just $0.05/min - is coming fast. This has the potential to significantly disrupt Pakistan’s traditional call center/BPO industry that employs tens of thousands. The solution lies in accelerating sovereign AI and inference compute. Watch my latest @letsbuildpk episode with @Huk06 on exactly this: youtu.be/zSaLSfP9GRQ

Gallup Pakistan’s own 2025 data: smartphones now outpace TV ownership, 54% to 46%. Young Pakistanis are leaving prime-time television - citing bias and lack of credibility as the reason. Every controversy, suspension and apology adds to that migration. Civil society depends on credible institutional media. When it fails - repeatedly - citizens don’t stop seeking information. They just stop trusting the institution providing it. That has consequences far beyond one channel’s 15 days off air.