Hurt and alone in Mumbai, he learned the hate lives at the border

A top student and a page of straight Bs

Muzamil opens with how he found his guest. The journalist Ramsha Jahangir, who he believes covers digital for Dawn, introduced them. His view is that food is an easy genre for views and a hard genre to understand. Most food content in Pakistan builds excitement around a place. Very little gets inside the food itself. Osamah Nasir’s work struck him as more authentic and more raw. Osamah also has a full-time day job in a very different industry.

Osamah was born and raised in Karachi. He spent 14 years at the City School, at its PCHS campus, and then moved to another City School campus for A-levels, because at the time it was the only one offering them. His mother is a doctor and he has two elder brothers. The family assumed the boys would become doctors. He was a bookworm who studied the next year’s course over the summer, and he expected to finish in the top three of his class.

His first set of O-level results was straight As. The next year brought straight Bs. The same pattern, he says, had happened to both his brothers. For a 15-year-old whose identity was coming first, it was a crisis. “Then who is Osamah Nasir, if he is no longer the one who studies and writes, and is now the kid with Bs?” he remembers asking himself. He had built his days around study, with double tuition and nothing else. “My entire life was around a piece of paper,” he says. His family, he adds, was very supportive.

He left the medical track for commerce and, not wanting to ask his parents for a pricier school, stayed within the City School system. He dropped accounts, which bored him. At AS level he got a D, an E, and an A in economics, which he sat without tuition. He added business studies and Urdu literature, and finished with an A and two Bs. He was also a shy kid who stammered, so he pushed himself into public speaking and Model UN conferences on purpose.

For university, he sat the tests for IBA, CBM and SZABIST, which he calls Karachi’s three standard choices. Maths kept him just below the IBA cut-off. He skipped LUMS because of a stereotype that you need six As to get in. Muzamil asks why so few Karachi students try Lahore or Islamabad. Osamah’s answer: everyone knows which local university a successful person attended, so students stay outcome driven and do not think beyond Karachi.

Social sciences, cafes and an anonymous food page

At SZABIST he started a BBA and met the same accounts and maths. A friend named Ramsha was studying social sciences and talked about ideas such as the poverty trap: whether a domestic worker’s child will end up doing the same work. He switched. In 2012, he says, SZABIST was the only one of the three offering social sciences. His father was supportive. His brothers warned he would never find a job.

He loved it, and wore flip-flops for four years. This was 2012 and 2013, when Karachi’s cafe culture was starting and the city was getting some of its life back. Classes ran from 8 to 11, followed by a four-hour break, so he and his friends spent the gap exploring new cafes near Do Talwar. He posted photos on Instagram, which was still new, and gave the food a score out of ten on his personal profile.

Friends kept asking what he had eaten and what it cost. After telling each one separately for long enough, he decided at 2am to start a food page for Karachi and keep it anonymous. Muzamil assumes the point was to avoid special treatment at restaurants. Osamah’s worry was different: if you write something bad, people can get to you. Influencer marketing barely existed then. People enjoyed the posts anyway.

A village in Java

Through AIESEC, which recruited at his university, he applied for an international internship. He describes the screening as a test of whether you can adapt. Some interns run home within a week because they will not wash dishes or sleep on the floor. Muzamil adds that the programme is a cultural exchange, and that an intern also represents Pakistan.

Osamah first wanted Russia, but an embassy letter did not arrive in time. Indonesia came up almost at random. The trip was self-funded. His stay was covered, and his food was not. Muzamil makes the case for paying to work. The most successful people he has met chase value more than money, and the real sum is whether the experience is worth more than its cost.

Osamah thinks it was. He went in his second year, during Ramzan in July 2014, on his first trip abroad. He stayed with a host family and then in a village in the Jogja area of Java. Washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms taught him to value what his family did for him at home. The group had members from China, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and when they voted on a leader, they chose him. He also presented on Pakistan to 500 people. One night he mistook a huge black lizard for a snake. His host explained it was a tokay, and the family pet.

Muzamil links this to solo travel. Without friends around, he says, you can be anyone you want and build a new personality. The confidence you bring back is hard to shake.

The night in Mumbai

In his third year, his teacher Sheema Kermani, who taught gender studies and the arts, had places for two students at a 15-day conference in India. He signed up at once. His family’s roots are in Delhi, and he had only seen India in dramas and films. The rules said students had to stay at the host university. After six days in Mumbai, he and some new friends slipped out late at night. They stopped for pav bhaji. All he wanted was to see Shah Rukh Khan’s house.

He never got there. He remembers being dragged and then blacking out. It was 6 June 2015, and he was wearing shalwar kameez. He heard his roommate, a dancer, calling his name. When he woke again, he was in a taxi with a stranger at the wheel and a man lying on the back seat. The streets looked like Karachi, but the writing on the walls was Hindi. His wrist was swollen. His phone and watch were gone. His small travel pouch was still there.

At a government hospital, which he remembers as well kept, he limped in alone, covered in blood. Staff told him an accident case had to be reported to the police before treatment. He was a Pakistani named Osamah, in India, in the middle of the night, and nobody knew where he was. He tried not to say where he was from. The police asked three times for a number to call his family. He told them it was half past two and there was no point waking anyone. In the end he told them he was from Karachi.

Treatment stopped while they processed that. He had no national ID card and no passport, only his student card. That card, he says, saved his life. The police came back and told him: “You are a guest. You are our guest, and you are a student, so we have no fear. Get your treatment.” Doctors fixed his dislocated elbow and put his shattered wrist in plaster, and told him it needed surgery. He wanted to rejoin the tour, so he paid in Indian rupees and asked to be discharged.

The university’s vice president picked him up and said only, “So, the fun’s over.” At the police station, Osamah chose not to press charges, worried the case might become national news. Then he walked barefoot through Mumbai to see the car. It was completely shattered. His roommate had a fractured hip. The friend on his other side walked away without a scratch. The group never met again.

Getting home, and what India taught him

Back at the hostel he had no money and no phone. He stood in the canteen, and the man behind the counter made him an omelette and gave him aamras juice. An older woman in a saree sat beside him and asked if he was hurt. That small human contact stayed with him. He called only his middle brother, because he needed money and trusted him to keep quiet. His brother told him to fly home at once. His Indian counsellor told him to stay, since the surgery could wait and he might never see India again. He stayed. People kept telling him he looked like the actor Karan Kundra, and kept feeding him for free.

“This hate and this nafrat just exists at borders,” he says. The people he met asked him to stay longer and stayed warm after he told them he was from Pakistan. The tragedy, as he sees it, is that the two peoples are alike and have no way to meet.

Muzamil calls this the secret the distance is meant to hide. “That secret is they’re just like me,” he says. A planned visit is always polite. “It’s really when you go out there in a non-structured environment that you genuinely get to see what the DNA of a culture is.”

The route home was hard for someone in plaster: 16 or 18 hours by train from Mumbai to Delhi, six more to Amritsar, a 45-minute bus to the Wagah border, and a flight from Lahore. The flight was delayed, so his parents were asleep when he got in. On the plane, the passenger in the next seat turned out to be his mother’s closest friend. The next morning she called his mother at her clinic to ask how he was. That is how his mother found out. He had the surgery in Karachi, and his parents, he says, lost some trust in him.

He wonders what would have happened if he had stayed in that night. Muzamil’s view is that risk is fine, but a little calculation goes a long way. He adds that experiences like this can take away fear, because they show how vulnerable people really are.

From an ad agency to bitcoin.com in Budapest

After graduating, he did not know what a social sciences graduate could do. A university Facebook group posted an internship at a top advertising agency. He found 40 other candidates for one role. The interviewers asked why someone with a social sciences degree and an economics major was applying. “Does the degree really matter?” he asked. He handed over his phone and showed his food blog, where he wrote the captions and took the photos. Around that time, Dawn had published a list of 20 Instagram accounts to follow, with big names at the top and his food blog at the bottom. By the time he got home, the agency had called to say he could start the next day. He spent two years in advertising.

He wanted to study further and chose a private university in Budapest with an evening programme, so students could work during the day. His father paid the tuition. Osamah had to cover everything else: application fees, visa fees and trips to Islamabad for visa interviews. For two years he brought lunch from home while colleagues ordered in, and they called him a miser. He had planned a degree in digital marketing, but his visa did not come through for the autumn intake. He was rejected again, applied again, and finally started International Management in the spring, which he compares to an MBA.

His favourite thing in Budapest was the bus: headphones on, the city outside the window, his own film running. He still misses it in Karachi. Within about four weeks of arriving, he won an internship at bitcoin.com after five rounds of interviews. After eight months it became a full-time job. The company even offered to pay salaries in Bitcoin, on the logic that it could not grow adoption if its own people did not use it. He says he does not hold any Bitcoin today. He used his salary to travel solo through ten countries, including Croatia, the south of France, Paris, Denmark and Sweden.

Coming home and going public

He stayed about a year and a half. Around December he fell very sick with what he now believes were COVID symptoms, at a time when doctors only asked whether he had been to Italy. He found a good opportunity in Austria, but the visa process and his Pakistani passport stood in the way. He says he came back by his own choice, because he knew he could do more, and because he had a food blog to run.

The page had run anonymously as Karachi Food Guide. He wrote honest opinions. A meal of 1,500 or 2,000 rupees is, in his eyes, an investment in entertainment, and it should return value. Popular Facebook groups had started to commercialise reviews, and their opinions often differed from his. Once, after a critical post, people tried to find out who he was. That frightened him, because life can be lost easily in a city like Karachi. From Budapest, he felt free to reveal that he had run the page for eight years. Early on, he turned down a popular drinks brand, and one of the first food delivery companies offered him 15,000 rupees for three posts. Back in Karachi, he moved into another startup job.

Value for money, biryani and Meri Dukan

Muzamil sets out the food genre in Pakistan: Kitchen with Amna, Village Food Secrets, and newer reviewers such as Hamza Bhatti. Food, he says, ranks in the top two or three areas of demand on social media, and it never runs out, because every dish can be made again in a better style.

Osamah says his reviews used to focus on flavour, which he now finds too subjective. He judges by value for money instead: the seating, whether he can bring his family, the portion size and whether he would order it again. “If I eat something for 300 rupees and don’t like it much, I would not be as sad, considering the economic value,” he says. Recommending a steak that leaves someone disappointed is a different matter.

The new direction came out of a hard stretch. The startup he had worked at for two years shut down suddenly, and for six weeks he did not know what to do. In a Liberty Books store, a man recognised him. He said he and his wife had saved every food post Osamah had made. His wife had since passed away. Everything in Lahore reminded him of her, so he had moved to Karachi with his child, using those saved posts as a guide to the city. For Osamah it had only ever been food. For this man, it had been a way to rebuild his life.

Soon after, Osamah tried a short video on Al-Rehman Biryani. He had never eaten bazaar biryani, because his Delhi family always made it at home. The video drew 700,000 views and turned into a biryani series, and people started calling him the biryani guy. He now splits Karachi food into three tiers: fine dining, mid-tier cafes, and street food such as bun kabab, which every class eats. His campaign, Meri Dukan, supports places that cook well and do no marketing. Instead of calling a place good or bad, he shows who is cooking and what makes the dish special. Muzamil predicts this will grow into rankings by value and experience once people know what exists.

Karachi in 2050

Asked how he sees Pakistan in 2050, Osamah admits that daily life in Karachi makes the question hard. His hope is for Karachi to become a financial hub, where companies grow and people like him do not have to leave their families to build a life. He wants firms like Netflix and Facebook to have a presence there, and he wants cities such as Multan, Faisalabad and Bahawalpur to grow alongside Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. He points to interest from abroad, including an American’s LinkedIn post urging companies to hire remote talent from Pakistan.

He chooses optimism, because he has seen change and expects slow, steady progress. He is honest about the present too: the 2020 monsoon he came home to, and days when he does not want to leave the house. Perhaps, he says, Meri Dukan leads to a restaurant that draws visitors from abroad. Muzamil closes by telling him he has a knack for storytelling, and that his content should carry more of it.