On civil service, Balochistan, and building a life worth living: a conversation with Awaid Bhatti

Traveling alone and what it teaches you

The episode opens with Awaid Bhatti reflecting on his years of solo travel - through Europe, the United States, and elsewhere - and what that experience gave him beyond stamps in a passport. He describes staying in student hostels, being entirely alone in cities where he knew no one, and finding that the isolation quickly dissolved into connection. When you travel alone, he explains, you are forced to speak to people you would never otherwise meet, and within a day or two those strangers become your companions.

Bhatti is direct about the practical lesson: “Jab tum akele jaate ho to poori duniya ke dost tumhare ban jaate hain” - when you travel alone, the whole world becomes your friends. The freedom to move at your own pace, eat whatever the local food is, spend an entire day in a museum because nothing else is pulling you away - these are things group travel rarely allows.

He connects this to a broader point about confidence. Managing your own money, navigating an unfamiliar transport system, solving problems without anyone to fall back on - these experiences, he argues, build a kind of self-assurance that no classroom or training programme can replicate. By the time he sat the CSS exam and entered the civil service, he had already been fully responsible for himself in countries where he did not speak the language. That, he suggests, is not a small thing.

The decision to leave the private sector

Bhatti spent time working in the private sector after his studies - including a period in which he cleared a significant portion of a chartered accountancy qualification in a compressed timeframe. He describes the work as technically demanding and the company as large and well-regarded. But something was missing.

“Meri company ke andar meri tarah ke 500 log kaam karte the,” he says - there were five hundred people doing work like his, and five hundred similar companies doing the same thing. His impact was minimal. He was, in his own word, replaceable.

Muzamil draws out the moment when Bhatti finally decided to pursue the CSS. It was not a clean, confident leap. Bhatti had savings, a contract, and family members who were supportive but anxious. His parents wanted him to think it through carefully - not because they opposed the idea, but because they knew that if he left his job, sat the exam, and did not make it through on the first or second or third attempt, the cost would be significant. He burned his boats anyway. He resigned, used his savings to fund the preparation period, and committed fully.

The private-sector years were not wasted, he is careful to say. The accounting background gave him a subject in which he could score well in the CSS, and the work experience gave him something to say in interviews. But the underlying motivation for leaving was simpler: he wanted to do work that meant something, work where the impact was visible and the people affected were real.

What it actually felt like to top the CSS

The written result came while Bhatti was abroad. He had no Pakistani SIM card, no reliable internet connection, and was moving through an airport when the messages started arriving. Friends were sending congratulations. He did not know what they were congratulating him for.

He describes the sequence with some humour: he found a way to connect to the internet, searched for the results list, scrolled through it, and could not find his own name. People were calling. He still could not confirm anything. Eventually, through a chain of calls back to Pakistan, a teacher confirmed it - his name was on the list, and the number next to it was one.

Muzamil presses him on what that moment felt like. Bhatti’s answer is measured. He had prepared himself for any outcome. He had told himself, and told the people around him, that anything could happen - the result might not come, he might need to sit again, life would continue either way. So when the confirmation finally arrived, the feeling was not the explosion of relief one might expect. It was quieter than that. Satisfying, but quiet.

The final result - after the interview stage - took even longer. He describes months of waiting, of rescheduling plans, of calling contacts in Pakistan to ask whether anything had been announced. When it came, he was again not in Pakistan. His CSS result photograph, which circulated widely, was taken in Dubai.

Kuchlak: libraries, water, and what a posting in Balochistan taught him

After training, Bhatti was posted as Assistant Commissioner to Kuchlak, a subdivision in Balochistan. He describes it as a place where the previous AC had not been seen for years - where the population had essentially no expectation that the office of the Assistant Commissioner would do anything for them.

He engaged with the local youth, held meetings, and identified two concrete gaps: there was no library, and there was no clean drinking water. On the library, he found a derelict building, raised contributions through Instagram and from contacts including a doctor and the Akhtar Foundation, and within two months converted it into what he describes as the first women’s library for a population of five hundred thousand people. On water, he installed filtration plants - five of them during his six months in the posting.

He is candid about a failure he observed before his own work: filtration plants installed during the Musharraf era had been switched off the day after they were inaugurated, because no one had planned for how they would be maintained. Bhatti’s response was to establish a sustainability committee before his transfer came through, so that the work would continue after he left. The library, he says, is still running.

When his transfer eventually came, the local youth organised a rally to try to stop him from leaving. “Woh kehte the ke hum aapko jaane nahin denge” - they said they would not let him go. He describes this as one of the most meaningful things that has happened to him in the service.

Balochistan, poverty, and what actually drives anti-state sentiment

This section of the conversation is where Bhatti speaks most directly as a policymaker. Muzamil asks him about the broader picture - the insurgency, the inter-provincial tensions, the sense of alienation that has defined Balochistan’s relationship with the Pakistani state for decades.

Bhatti’s answer is unambiguous: “Yeh sab kuch jo hai na, woh poverty se bahut zyada woh nikalta hai.” The anti-Pakistan sentiment, the terrorism, the ethnic and provincial grievances - in his view, these are downstream of poverty and the denial of basic human rights. When you provide health, education, and clean water, he says, the differences begin to dissolve. He saw it directly: when he worked on those basic services, the distance between communities and the state shrank.

He also speaks about what he did to try to address the structural problem. He ran CSS preparation seminars for between five hundred and a thousand students from Balochistan, sent books to libraries there, and continues to mentor students from the province who reach out to him. His reasoning is explicit: if young people from Balochistan enter the civil service, they enter the decision-making structures of the country. That, he argues, is a more durable solution than any security operation.

Managing expectations inside a broken system

The final stretch of the conversation is the most philosophical, and it is where Bhatti is most direct about the psychology of staying motivated inside a system that has real and visible problems.

He describes a mindset he considers dangerous: arriving in the civil service believing you will fix everything. “Agar aap yeh soch ke aaye hain ke main aa gaya aur poora mulk theek kar dunga, to yeh jo hai na ek mindset aisa hai jo aapko demotivation ki taraf le jaata hai.” That belief, he says, leads you to see only the system’s failures, and eventually toward corruption or resignation.

His alternative is smaller and more durable. Every day, ten cases come across an Assistant Commissioner’s desk. Two of them involve political interference. Eight of them are the cases of ordinary people - a poor man with no connections, no reference, no one to speak for him - who have come to the office because they have nowhere else to go. Those eight cases are where the work is. Fixing one drain, one school, one road in your area is as significant as fixing the whole country, because it is what is actually within your reach.

Muzamil pushes him on whether this is enough - whether incremental change inside a flawed system is a satisfying answer to the scale of Pakistan’s problems. Bhatti does not claim it is sufficient. He acknowledges the corruption, the nepotism, the politicisation. But he argues that the CSS itself - a merit-based examination open to any Pakistani regardless of background - is one of the country’s genuine assets. He describes colleagues from rural Balochistan, from modest government colleges, from backgrounds with no connections, who cleared the exam and are now shaping policy. That, he says, is not nothing.

He closes with a note about his own generation. They grew up watching the internet go from dial-up scratch cards to smartphones with constant connectivity. They have seen change happen fast, in their own lives. That experience, he argues, makes them more open to further change - and more willing to question why a file still moves on paper, why a complaint still requires a personal visit, why technology that exists everywhere else has not yet arrived in the offices where it is most needed. The direction, he believes, is right. The pace is the argument.