A 19-year-old freelancer's case for skipping the government job

A guest from a district Thought Behind Things has never had before

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing a guest from a place no previous Thought Behind Things conversation has reached: Kharan, Balochistan. Sheryar Baloch is nineteen. Muzamil heard about him at the Connected Pakistan conference, where someone pointed him out as one of the top sellers from that part of the country and possibly the only full-time freelancer operating from the district.

Sheryar sets the geography himself. Kharan is one of Pakistan’s four deserts — the others, he notes, are Thar, Cholistan, and the Thal — and sits on the border with Chagai, near the mountain range where the country’s atomic tests were carried out. The main town is what he calls a kasba, with a population somewhere between one and a half and two lakhs, surrounded by roughly eight hundred to a thousand villages spread across what is, by area, Pakistan’s third-largest district. The landscape is genuinely mixed: desert on one side, wheat cultivation on another, mountains twenty-five kilometres further out, and an unusually diverse population of Baloch, Pashtun, Punjabi, and Hindu residents.

The economic base, he says, is narrow. Agriculture, then government jobs. “Private jobs aren’t a thing on that side right now,” he tells Muzamil, “because there’s no economic growth, no talent at that level, and it’s a very disconnected area. The internet barely runs.”

A scholarship, a private school made of broken benches, and one failed attempt

Sheryar’s education is the through-line that explains everything else. He studied up to fifth grade in Kharan, partly at the government school where his father teaches — a school he describes with unusual precision. Fifteen teachers, eight hundred-plus students, broken tables, half the students without textbooks for half the year, and walls that, in his phrase, “I cannot describe in words because the building is so broken-down.”

The private school he transferred to was, in his telling, no better in absolute terms than a government school in Lahore or Islamabad. The teachers were younger and slightly better; the children still sat on the floor on a tata mat with torn books and torn clothes.

What changed his trajectory was a scholarship test for Pak Turk International Schools and Colleges in Quetta. He applied the first year, sent his documents by post — “it was so out of reach I just sent them by post” — and failed. He describes the year that followed in flat terms: “It was a very heartbreaking time. I just spent the whole year like that. Completely hopeless, completely depressed, and I just left everything.” He applied again the following year and ranked in the top six out of five hundred candidates from Balochistan. The scholarship covered a place where students normally paid thirty-five thousand rupees a month. He paid nothing.

Why he turned down the second scholarship offer

The Pak Turk hostel ran on a strict schedule. No mobile phones. Laptops impossible. “It was like a jail,” Sheryar says. He completed matric there, and when the institution offered to extend his scholarship through college after COVID, he turned it down.

The reason was specific. The freelancing idea had been sitting on his head since 2017. Fiverr and Upwork had been on his mind since then. Another year inside the hostel meant another year unable to test any of it. “If not more, then at least one year I have to give to this,” he tells Muzamil. “I just wanted to explore this world — what it actually is.”

His father wanted him to become a CSS officer. He was willing to pay heavy fees at any large college in Quetta or anywhere else in Pakistan. Sheryar refused, told him he was going to Kharan College instead, and rode out the conversation. “My achievements are mine, yours are yours,” he remembers telling his father. “My decision is that I’m going to Kharan College.” His father eventually agreed.

The going rate for a government peon’s job

To understand why this choice mattered, Sheryar gives Muzamil a number that anchors the rest of the conversation. In Kharan, the going rate for a grade-four government job — the role he calls naib qasid, the office boy, the chaprasi — is between fifteen and twenty lakh rupees. That is the price the family pays to secure the position. “What does that mean?” he says. “You pay fifteen lakh rupees and you get the job.” It is, he confirms, a standard transaction.

Sitting around the dinner table at home, he tells Muzamil, seven or eight gazetted government officers of grade seventeen and eighteen routinely circulate through the room. Both his parents are grade-seventeen and grade-eighteen government officers themselves. “In that environment,” he says, “for a freelancer or a business-minded person to emerge — it’s shocking for anyone.”

How freelancing actually found him

The story of how he stumbled into the Amazon ecosystem starts in an unexpected place. In 2016 and 2017, Sheryar was a part-time coin seller for the mobile game Eight Ball Pool and an affiliate for someone selling accounts. The money was rupees; the satisfaction was that there was any money at all.

Through that world he met a software engineer who was selling services on Upwork. Every week or two, the friend would post screenshots: a few hundred dollars, then a thousand, then eighteen hundred dollars across a fortnight. “I was shocked,” Sheryar says. “I’m doing affiliate marketing for fifty dollars, hundred rupees, and I was really happy. Then he’s posting that he earned eighteen hundred dollars in two weeks. I was shocked that — yes, this is possible too? What world is this?” He went to look at Fiverr and Upwork. He understood what was behind the figures.

He chose Amazon consulting deliberately. The skill had to be non-technical — he disliked maths and had no interest in coding or web development. Amazon FBA, as he describes it to Muzamil, fit. Sourcing from Alibaba in China. Launching and ranking products. Some PPC, which involves maths, “but I avoid that part myself.” Removing rival sellers from a listing through case work with Amazon. Brand awareness and audits for sellers who came to him saying their product wasn’t moving.

He took a free Extreme Commerce course — he could not afford a paid one and his parents, still hoping he would sit for the CSS, were not inclined to subsidise the detour — and started.

The accident, the operation, and the test he took on crutches

The first phase of his freelancing worked. He was studying the videos, taking notes, copying everything, motivated. Then a bike accident broke his leg and his knee, and an operation in Karachi put him in bed for a month. Six or seven days after the operation — with stitches, a knee brace, and a walker — he travelled by bus from Karachi to Quetta, eight hundred kilometres, to sit a Directorate scholarship test his father wanted him to take. He scored 102 out of 150 without preparing. He did not pass.

The first dollar after the accident came from a Facebook group called Amazon FBA Titans. Someone was asking about a sourcing problem with a Chinese supplier; the Pakistani commenters, in Sheryar’s reading, were getting it wrong. He posted a long, detailed correction starting with “hahaha,” partly for fun, and went back to scrolling. A notification popped up: the original poster had mentioned him in a comment and asked him to DM. The project was discussed. The work was delivered. Within three days, he had earned his first post-accident dollar. Because he was under eighteen and could not open his own account, he had his cousin set up a Payoneer account in the cousin’s name and routed payments through it. Only recently has he opened a bank account and a Payoneer in his own name.

Over eighteen-plus months of work, he tells Muzamil, his gross revenue is now close to twenty thousand dollars.

Working at one a.m. in a sweltering room with no electricity

The mechanics of doing this work from Kharan are worth pausing on. The PTCL connection at home runs for forty or fifty seconds at a time before dropping. The workable internet is on mobile data, tethered as a hotspot. The work happens after midnight, partly because the US Amazon clock requires it and partly because that is when the line quiets down. Load shedding runs ten to twelve hours a day. Summer temperatures touch forty-nine and fifty degrees Celsius in June and July. “It’s just a person sitting in an empty room with a laptop, sweating, at one or two a.m. with no light,” he says. He has spent roughly six to seven months of his career at the Extreme Commerce incubator in Karachi, where the conditions are easier. The rest has been in Kharan.

Mian Channu, mindset, and a software update

Muzamil pushes on the larger question. If freelancing can generate twenty thousand dollars in a desert town, what stops the kasba from compounding it into a real economy? Sheryar answers in two halves.

The first is Mian Channu. He uses it as proof of concept. “There are about four to five hundred Amazon drop-shipping offices in Mian Channu,” he tells Muzamil. “It is a small town. People there have been freelancing for ten years. Their generations can live off what they have earned.” The conditions are right: 4G, electricity, a critical mass of practitioners.

The second is mindset, and this is where his frustration is sharpest. “Where it comes to mindset, we can do nothing,” he says. The government can extend electricity to eighteen hours a day. PTCL can double its bandwidth from eight hundred megabits to two thousand. “But at the end of the day, who is going to be the user of that PTCL? Who can afford it?” The cultural assumption — that without a government job you are nothing, even if that government job is grade one — has been planted across generations. He has freelancer friends who tell him that if a grade-ten government job came through, they would quit freelancing.

His plan, the one he describes to Muzamil in detail, is to stop trying to argue against this with numbers and start trying to influence it with presence. He wants to meet his divisional commissioner — Kharan is a divisional headquarters — and ask for nothing more than a letter to a college principal authorising a two-hour session. He has already given one such session at his own college. He has invited mentors and influencers to come to Kharan. “Even if ten percent of a hundred students start,” he says, “that’s ten students. If even four or five of them eventually earn five thousand dollars, just imagine how big an economic activity that becomes.”

He is honest about the local circulation problem. There is almost nowhere in Kharan to spend the money he earns. The petrol in his bike is Iranian. The goods in the shops are Iranian. The multiplier that a thousand dollars a month would generate in a Punjabi kasba leaks across the border before it can compound.

Why he is leaving — and what he would study if he were not freelancing

Muzamil presses on whether Sheryar will stay in Kharan after college. The answer is no, at least not for graduation. He is considering Turkey, Germany, Italy, and Australia. Australia he has effectively ruled out because there is no scholarship culture there for international students and he refuses to pay ten thousand dollars a semester. Germany has free education. Turkey is on the list because of scholarships. In Pakistan, GC University Lahore is, in his words, his dream university — “even before the Harry Potter show that’s been doing the rounds,” Muzamil clarifies, “this has been my dream college.”

The degree he would want, if freelancing had not pulled him sideways, is in international relations, political science, or history.

Twenty thousand Balochistan students, and a federal Shariat Court chief justice from Kharan

By the end of the conversation, Sheryar wants to push back on the picture of Balochistan as static. He cites the figure that twenty thousand Balochistan students are currently studying in other cities of Pakistan — at NED, at NDU, at Namal — and that the cohort returning home as teachers, lecturers, and professors is changing what is possible in the schools they came from. “They have suffered,” he says. “They don’t want anyone else to suffer like they did.” He notes, almost in passing, that the federal Shariat Court’s chief justice, Muhammad Noor Maskanzai, is from Kharan and still lives there when off duty.

Muzamil closes the conversation at the one-hour mark. Sheryar’s parting line is the one that frames the whole episode without overstating it: “Balochistan is a golden bird. The untapped beauty of Pakistan. If Balochistan changes, massive change will come to Pakistan. And if you embrace Balochistan, Balochistan will embrace you.”