Naba Khalid on switching to architecture in week one, building a wedding-photography business by 22, and what the people about to inherit Pakistan actually think

The week-one decision

The episode opens with Muzamil orienting the audience around an unusual guest: a 22-year-old still in university who is also running a wedding-photography business at a level he says he hasn’t seen in Islamabad. The conversation starts with the obvious question - how do you end up here at 22? - and Naba Khalid traces it back to a moment most students never get: the chance to pick between two universities, in two different disciplines, in the first week of class.

She had applied to NUST for engineering. Computer engineering specifically, which she calls “ek bohat anomaly” - an oddity - for someone who’d topped through school. While filling out applications she noticed a second degree at NUST that combined engineering and art under one roof: architecture. On something close to a whim she sat the test, unprepared, and ended up in the top ten merit positions. Engineering, where her heart had been, only admitted her on the third or fourth list.

The NUST architecture test, by Naba’s account, isn’t what most people imagine. It’s roughly 50/50 - half aptitude and art, half engineering subjects: math, physics, English. No interview, unlike NCA or COMSATS. The crossover with engineering, she points out, is also baked into the curriculum: architecture students at NUST study structures, maths, and building physics alongside design.

Then came the call from her mother, mid-first-week of architecture studio. The engineering admission had come through; she had to decide, that day, whether to switch. Naba’s read on that first week is unsentimental: “Pehle hafte mein aapko to sahi pagal karke rakh dete hain ke aap kahan pe aa gaye hain, takay jisne drop out hona hai wo shuru mein hi drop out ho jaye.” They mess with your head deliberately, so the people who shouldn’t be there leave early. She decided to stay.

Muzamil reads this as the smarter call. A field where you’re already a top performer beats a field where you scraped in on a fourth list and will spend four years catching up. Naba agrees - she realized the same thing once she got past first year and saw both the difficulty and the upside of the work. Her GPA today: 3.5. (Muzamil cheerfully notes his graduating CGPA was 2.1.)

Photography that started on a phone

In this conversation, photography arrives as something Naba describes as “inbuilt.” Long before architecture, she was the official photographer of her class - the one who took every shot on her iPhone, who put visible thought into Instagram stories until friends started telling her to split off a dedicated account. That account, when it started, was an architecture-and-art feed: photo walks, friends, the city.

What it wasn’t, at the start, was a wedding account. The shift to weddings came in third year. By Naba’s telling, third year is the worst year of an architecture degree - the moment the curriculum moves from forgiving small projects to high-rises with real technical demand, full of physical models and animations and the kind of work that doesn’t end. Her roommate started calling her a zombie because Naba was at her studio desk when the roommate left for class and still there when she came back. On heavy weeks they stopped going to campus at all and just kept working.

Starting a business in that exact year sounds like the wrong call. Naba’s reasoning was the opposite: “If I wait for another year or so, probably jo is time pe mujhe client ya jo reach milegi, wo us time pe shayad na mile.” The university window - the moment when peers were getting married, when she had a built-in audience for a new visual style, when her own status as a student lowered the stakes - wouldn’t come back.

Muzamil draws this out into a broader pattern: as a student you have permission to push the client’s mind toward something new, which is harder once you’re a professional and the client is paying for what they already want. Naba’s clients during this stretch were also students, also up for something different. That symmetry was the market-first opening.

The COVID year, and why small weddings turned into an advantage

Her first full wedding season was the year of the conversation - which made it, in Muzamil’s framing, the COVID season. Naba is matter-of-fact about the impact: yes, the scale dropped, but weddings didn’t stop. A photographer is just as necessary for twenty guests as for two hundred, and clients planning smaller events were if anything more willing to spend on the people who would make the day look good.

What’s interesting is that the constraint turned out to fit her style. Naba’s work is intimate, emotion-first; smaller weddings let her capture the family dynamics that disappear at scale. Large events, she’s honest, can be overwhelming for the photographer too - “ek event pe there’s a lot of things that are happening, koi kahin se naraz ho jata hai.” Small intimate weddings, by her own admission, were a blessing for her early career.

Trucks, thesis, and the shelving problem

By the time the conversation reaches her current year, Naba is deep in her final-year thesis: a workshop and visitor center for truck artists and artisans, sited on an existing truck adda near Metro Cash and Carry on the I-10 side of Islamabad, where the IJP road feeds in the vehicular flow. The idea is to make a craft that everyone has driven past - and that nobody knows the production process of - visible from the outside in. There would be a workshop floor, a visitor area with a viewing axis over it, and learning classes for people who want to actually pursue the art.

Muzamil and Naba then arrive at the thing that quietly breaks most architecture students: these projects almost never get built. Naba puts it bluntly. “The amount of good projects we have through our thesis - agar usmein se 2% bhi banne lag jayen na, to there would be a huge change in the urban landscape of this country as a whole.” A full year of work, thousands of hours, the spatial study done in detail - and almost all of it shelved. Her case is that even a small fraction reaching the ground would reshape what Pakistani cities feel like. The gap between what gets designed and what gets built isn’t a craft problem; it’s an economic one.

Houses built to be resold

That economic point flows directly into the conversation’s sharpest claim. Pakistani houses, Muzamil argues, are status declarations linked to the economy, not living spaces. “It’s a status of wealth, rather than as a living space.”

Naba extends the diagnosis: even the people commissioning a house don’t end up with what they want, because the design gets optimized for the next buyer rather than the current owner. Skylights get pulled. Custom features get cut. “Hum sochne lag jate hain isliye ye cheez ismein se nikal do, ya skylight hata do, ke kal wala jo lega wo kya sochega.” We start removing things in case the next buyer doesn’t get it. Neither of them frames this as a design failure. They frame it as a market failure - houses get treated as resale assets, so the design follows the resale logic, and the people who live in them inherit a compromise.

Underneath that critique sits a sustainability point Naba returns to: in a country with this much climatic variation, where the sun and wind and rain are different in every city, design that ignores climate is design that costs more to live in over a decade. Most people don’t think in that horizon - they think in the three-year horizon of resale.

The Islamabad photography scene - almost entirely NUST

Muzamil asks who the good photographers in Islamabad are. Naba’s answer is a small, recent industry - most of it from the same university. She names Muaz, who works with Muzamil, and Asad Iqbal - both NUST. Muzamil cuts in to point out Abu Zar Meer is also NUST. (“Aap logon ne na monopoly karna shuru kar di hai NUST walon ne!”) Abu Zar leans landscape. From her own team, Naba names Talha - a NUST Mass Communication graduate doing filmmaking full-time.

Her hiring philosophy is the part most photographers in Islamabad apparently don’t share. The default in the industry, she says, is to hire on a shift basis - call in an unknown photographer to cover the event. She refuses. She keeps two or three people in her circle who cover events as if they were their own, who share her aesthetic, who can sit down after every event and review what they got wrong. The reasoning is operational - events run better when the team trusts each other - but the deeper reasoning is creative protection. The hardest problem for an artist running a business, Muzamil and Naba agree, is keeping the creativity from collapsing under the volume.

Wedding films, and why India’s are different

Asked what’s next, Naba says she’ll stay in weddings through next season and expand the team rather than the format. They do make wedding films now - proper films, not the standard wedding video - and Muzamil opens the question of why Indian wedding films seem to operate at a different level. Naba’s answer is that the top Indian wedding photographers are directors and filmmakers first. They storyboard. They study the couple’s history. They meet the couple a week or a month before, build chemistry, then shoot. The core industry there is strong enough that those people moved into weddings - and Indian weddings have the budgets to absorb them. The gap, in other words, isn’t talent; it’s a creative ecosystem feeding into a market that can pay for it.

Why she isn’t going to be a full-time architect

Switching back to architecture, Muzamil asks if she’s planning to pursue it full-time after graduating. Her answer is no, and the reason is structural. “It’s not like a 9 to 5 job - wo 9 to 9 hi chalti hai aaj kal jitne maine fresh graduates ke halaat dekhe hain.” Pakistani architecture firms today are nine-to-nine jobs. No firm gives you the freedom to run a parallel business - and she’s already tested this in microcosm during studio juries that collided with shoot dates. You have to pick one thing at a time, she says, to make it work. The degree stays valuable - she’s clear it sharpened her, made her less shy, gave her years of crits and side projects with friends - but the business is what she’ll lead with.

Financial independence as a hostel necessity

The phrase that gave the episode its title is one Muzamil presses on directly. Naba’s path to financial independence at 22 wasn’t a philosophical project - it was a practical one. She came to Islamabad for university while her parents were still in Lahore, and moved into NUST’s hostels. The fees were covered; the rest of life wasn’t. “Aapke andar wo financial independence wali cheez bohat jaldi develop ho jati hai.” Independence developed quickly because the gap was real and immediate. She decided early that anything outside her field - the meals out, the social life, the spending hostelites do - she would cover herself.

What started as a practical necessity became leverage. By the time the photography business was real, the income wasn’t going to a wishlist; it was going to a life she had already been running on her own.

She extends the pattern to the rest of the hostel. Hostelites at NUST, she says, tend to come from places where families aren’t financially comfortable. So they look for work - content writing, graphics, freelancing on Fiverr. A real community builds around it. Inspiration moves through roommates. (Her own roommate was an electrical engineer who became a data analyst at Infinity and is now overseas on a year-long company posting - Naba sounds genuinely impressed talking about her.)

The day-scholar gap, and the rise of the “archipreneurs”

Muzamil turns the question to day scholars - the ones whose meals and transport are taken care of, who get a monthly allowance and have to optimize within it rather than generate above it. Are they working too, or is this still a hostelite-driven phenomenon?

Naba’s answer is encouraging. By her count, around 50 percent of the women in her architecture class are running businesses. (Her class is 98 percent women, 2 percent men.) The businesses are mostly product-based and almost none of them are in architecture: wedding stationery, packaging design, clothing brands. They’ve coined a term for it - “archipreneur,” architecture plus entrepreneur - and Naba estimates roughly half her class and a chunk of the broader university fits the label.

Her diagnosis of why: quarantine. The pandemic gave students enough time outside the conveyor belt of FSC-style “study, get marks, next step” to actually figure out what they wanted to pursue. The previous default was to wait until graduation day, then realize you’d waited too long. The new pattern is to start in school, run it guilt-free under the cover of “I’m just exploring,” and only call it a business once the revenue arrives. Even after graduation, Muzamil and Naba agree, the business can run as passive income alongside a job - or replace the job entirely if it scales.

Vertical vs horizontal - what Islamabad gets right

Naba is from Lahore originally but has barely lived there - army postings moved her family between Karachi, Sialkot, and Kashmir. Asked where she’d settle if she had to choose, she picks Islamabad, on the strength of where the city is going over the next 10 to 15 years.

Muzamil contrasts the two cities’ policy directions. Lahore is pushing horizontally with the Ravi Urban Development. Islamabad is pushing vertically - the Blue Area is going from 8-story buildings to 18, 20, even 25. He asks if that’s good or bad. Naba’s answer is that it’s good in principle: Islamabad is known for its greenery, and vertical expansion preserves trees that horizontal sprawl destroys. The risk is execution. High-rise done well - like in many cities Muzamil and Naba both reference, New York included - looks fine. High-rise done as staggered, unplanned growth becomes an eyesore. The fix is to designate full high-rise zones (which she points out the Blue Area is now becoming) rather than scattering single tall buildings into low-rise neighborhoods.

Carbon footprints, and the case for an architect over a contractor

Sustainability comes up next, and Naba is direct about scope: an entire off-grid village, of the kind Muzamil’s friend dreams about, isn’t economically feasible in Pakistan right now, and the mindset shift required is bigger than the design problem. But the carbon footprint of every individual building is something you CAN address - and architecture firms in Pakistan, she says, are starting to think about it.

The economic case for hiring an architect over a contractor lands on this point. The default thinking, Naba notes, is that the architect is just drawing pictures, and a contractor can build the same thing for less. What gets missed is what the architect actually saves you across a 30-year life cycle - air circulation that drops the air-conditioning bill, orientation that handles the sun, materials chosen for the climate. “If somebody is doing a 50,000 rupees ka design versus somebody is doing 5 lakh ka design - wo 5 lakh wala aapke life cycle ke andar aapko zyada paise bacha kar de raha hai through energy costs.” The people who get this win in the long run, but they’re a small percentage of the market.

Dream houses, grills, and the security problem

Muzamil pivots to the lighter version of the same question: what would her dream house look like? Naba wants open, airy spaces with sun coming in from multiple directions, things that can be covered when needed. A basement studio. Two or three stories so you can play with levels instead of stacking identical floors.

Muzamil shares the cautionary tale of his own renovation. They wanted the Instagram look - big glass windows, lots of light. The minute they finished, the security calculus hit: this is Pakistan, the glass needed grills, and the moment the grills went up, the beauty of the facade was gone. Two months later, eyesore.

Naba’s answer for that problem is louvers - vertical elements that open and close, designed into the facade so security and aesthetics live in the same surface instead of fighting each other. You don’t have to use bulletproof glass on a giant window (it’s too expensive to be feasible for most houses anyway). You can use louvers, smart glass choices, and a facade designed FOR a Pakistani security context rather than borrowed from a foreign one. “There are some things you have to let go.” The pure Spanish glass house Muzamil has in his head probably has to stay in Spain.

Bringing parents in, not fighting them

Earlier in the conversation, Muzamil had opened a thread he’s revisited in past episodes - the idea that the way forward for young Pakistanis is to fight their parents - and Naba pushed back on it. Not because the fight isn’t justified, but because winning it without buy-in leaves you carrying something heavy. “Aap lad ke even aap start kar lo, but at the back of your head aapke liye ek cheez bother karti rahegi.”

Her practical answer was to bring her mother into the world she had built, on her mother’s terms. She made her mom follow the big female photographers on Instagram, so the field stopped being abstract and became a list of named people doing serious work. She made the scale of her own account visible once the parents moved to Islamabad. She suggests taking parents to events, when the events are appropriate, so they see how things actually work rather than imagining how they might. The framing isn’t permission-seeking; it’s making the unfamiliar familiar.

By Naba’s read, parental acceptance isn’t a nice-to-have - it’s a precondition. “Without your parents’ acceptance ye cheez aap nahi kar sakte 100%.”

Muzamil agrees and ties it back to a broader point about Pakistani gender norms. The narrative around financially independent women is still loaded with a negative charge - the implication that they’ll “go crazy” or step outside their roles. He pushes back on that directly. His own wife is financially independent. The double-income household is increasingly the baseline for a comfortable life. And after years of education, the older default of doing nothing with it doesn’t hold.

A 22-year-old’s view of the next ten years

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks the question he closes most episodes with: what did Pakistan look like to you growing up, and what does it look like now? Naba’s answer doesn’t romanticize. Growing up she had assumed a 9-to-5 was the destination. University is where she stopped assuming that. Not because the 9-to-5 is wrong for everyone - she’s clear that people who do it enjoy it - but because she realized the courage to take a risk is something you have at her age and may not have at 40, when the regret hits differently.

Asked where Pakistan is going, she’s hopeful in a specific way. “In the next 10 years I would see a lot of young business sole owners yahan pe, kyunke jin logon ne abhi se shuru kar liya na, wo in the next 10 years they will be ruling the entire business empire.” Her reasoning isn’t about the businesses themselves. It’s about the generation gap closing. The people running the country’s business empires today are much older than the people working in them, with a standard set of rules and ideals her generation can’t quite reach. By her read, that gap is about to disappear - and the people running things ten years from now will be people her own peers can actually relate to.

Muzamil agrees, in the same terms. The people who hold power today are the people they couldn’t quite reach. The people who hold it next are people they grew up with.

She’s asked one final time whether she’s hopeful about Pakistan, and whether she wants to leave. “Yeah, pretty hopeful. I don’t want to shift anywhere else, because of the fact ke I think hamari country ne humein bohat opportunities di hain - aur hum agar sahi se unko achieve karne ki koshish karein, to we will have a better future inshAllah in the next 10, 15 years.”

The episode closes there - on a 22-year-old who built a real business in the hardest year of her degree saying, plainly, that she doesn’t want to leave the country, because she thinks it’s about to be more interesting than it has ever been.