Saad Khalid

Early life and background

Khalid has said he grew up in Islamabad. He describes himself as an army brat and says his father served in the army and has retired. He has said he intended to join the army from the beginning. The army rejected him on medical grounds, by his account. [1]

Education

Khalid has said he took a gap year after FSc. He was admitted to programs in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science at three different universities. He took admission at FAST and has said he chose its computer science program because people told him it was good. [1]

Khalid has said he failed his first semester of the program. He felt early on that he was not good at programming, and for about the first year and a half he considered leaving FAST because it was not working out for him. He has described programming as his actual field and said he knew he was not good at it. [1]

Teradata

Khalid has said he has worked as a data engineer at Teradata for the past five years. He describes Teradata as a data management company. He has said his work involves writing computer code that processes client data, and that his team is currently providing consultancy to Volvo Cars. [1]

Khalid has said he enjoys his job now. He has said he feared he might not be good professionally and might remain a failure in life. He has also said he decided he had to reprioritize his life and could not live in constant fear of failure. [1]

Views on marriage and social expectations

Khalid has said the first question people ask about a man is how much he earns. He has said many men feel unaccomplished until they have a good salary and a settled life, and that the benchmarks keep rising. He has also said his generation was the first to get high-speed internet. [1]

On marriage, Khalid has said love marriage and arranged marriage cannot be generalised and that it depends on the situation. He has said arranged marriages work in many cases and that love marriages also work. He has suggested analysing how many dead marriages there are in Pakistan. [1]

Khalid has said that in Pakistan a person cannot easily tell their parents about someone they like. He has said dating between a man and a woman is considered bad in most of Pakistani society, and that a divorced person is effectively marked for life. He has said it is very hard for a divorced woman to find a good partner in a smaller city, and that romance films set expectations that most people do not see in real life. [1]

Views on financial pressure

Khalid has said financial pressure has unfortunately built up on men. He has said in-laws look down on a wife who earns more than her husband, and that society expects men to be the man of the house. [1]

He has said a single income is becoming increasingly difficult to live on. In Pakistan, he has said, even a very good job often only covers the bare minimum. He has said women in Pakistan will be compelled to come into the workplace, and that Pakistan cannot have good productivity if half its workforce sits outside work. [1]

Khalid has said there should be awareness that men's feelings are also valid. He has also said there needs to be cross-gender discourse on these problems. [1]

Views on the Pakistani state

Khalid has said Pakistan has freedom of speech and is not fascist. He has said he does not think Pakistan has ever had an authoritarian government. He has said authoritarianism and law and order maintenance are different things, and that authoritarian and fascist are words that should not be used lightly. [1]

Khalid agrees that the state's writ is weak in Pakistan. He has said the state's lack of writ is a major hindrance to development in Pakistan. He has also said Pakistan has not yet been able to end feudalism. [1]

Khalid has said Pakistan could become an economic power in 2050 if it fixes certain problems. He has said the system needs to change evolutionarily, because people's mindsets need to change. In his view, a new system would only change the leaders, because people below keep working within the same system. [1]

Personal life

Khalid has said he is 29 and will turn 30 next year. He has said he is not married yet and first felt no concern about being unmarried, because there was still plenty of time. He has said that when he meets older relatives, their first question to his parents is why they have not married him. [1]

Khalid has said his first international trip made him really happy. He has said he first went to the United States in 2008 and again in 2011. [1]

Reading and interests

Khalid has said he started reading as a child with The Secret Seven, Famous Five and Enid Blyton. He has said he has read all of Sidney Sheldon's books. He has also read historical novels and classics, including Great Expectations and Wuthering Heights. [1]

Khalid has said he became interested in military history and watched many documentaries. He has said he would read his father's staff course books. He has said the French Revolution intrigued him and that he read a lot about it. [1]

Timeline

2008

First visit to the United States, by his own account[1]

2011

Second visit to the United States, by his own account[1]

Appearances

Frequently asked questions

References

1. The financial burden on Pakistani men nobody wants to discuss . Thought Behind Things , 2022-01-26.