Pakistani students can read English. They cannot speak it.

Why this conversation, and why now

The episode opens with Muzamil restating a thesis he has been working through across many recent conversations: Pakistan’s economic future runs through services — IT, engineering, anything that can be sold across borders for hard currency — and that future is gated by language. Specifically, English. Without it, a Pakistani professional cannot communicate inside the global environment the work actually lives in, and the export opportunity quietly closes.

To pressure-test that thesis from the supply side, he sits down with Dr. Sonia Irum, who teaches English literature at the International Islamic University in Islamabad and heads the university’s alumni affairs office. She has been in the classroom for more than a decade, with a five-year pause for a PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London in ecocriticism — the study of the relationship between literature and the environment. Between teaching and alumni work, Sonia spends her days with two populations: the students arriving at university, and the graduates a few years out who are now doing real work in real places. That dual view is what Muzamil wants to mine.

English as a third language, and the wall it builds in the classroom

Sonia’s first honest observation is structural. English literature, she says, was never going to be a mass discipline — it draws a small, selected set of minds — but the wider problem is that English itself arrives in her students’ lives as a third language, sometimes a fourth. “For me, it’s my third language,” she says. “Because it was Urdu, then it was my mother language, and then it was English.” When she tries to teach not just the words but the philosophy underneath the literature, the language barrier shows up first, the conceptual barrier shows up second, and the students are doing two pieces of translation at once.

The compromise teachers make is bilingual delivery. Sonia is open about using both languages when she needs to land a concept, but is also clear that in certain courses the rule has to hold: instruction in English, so the students actually learn to operate in it. Her diagnosis of the underlying problem is not academic. The students can read English. They can write English. They handle it in media, in text messages, on their phones. What collapses is spoken communication. “Even at graduate level,” she says, “in spoken, it’s not there.”

The real bottleneck is confidence, not vocabulary

Muzamil pulls this thread harder because he has lived the same pattern. He recounts arriving at FAST in Islamabad with students who had come from every corner of Pakistan, and watching them seize up the moment they had to speak in English in front of a peer. The mental energy that should have been spent finding the next word was instead being spent monitoring the room for a friend’s smirk. He contrasts that with his current life in Dubai, a regional capital full of accents, where “nobody cares” how a word is pronounced as long as the idea lands.

Sonia agrees and goes further. She describes her own accent as “a medley” — American, British, Pakistani, Indian, and something of her own — and treats that as a feature, not a bug. The instruction she now gives her students is the simplest one available: speak. “Unless and until you won’t communicate in that language, you won’t learn.” She tells them to drop the bias that English is not their language, drop the worry that the accent is wrong, and accept that the only way out is repetition. The colonial-versus-decolonial conversation, she says, is a separate fight — and one you cannot even properly join unless you first own the language well enough to argue in it.

Muzamil makes the same point in micro terms. Forget the macro debate. Selfishly, the body of human knowledge available in English is so vast that refusing to speak it is a tax a Pakistani student is choosing to pay on themselves.

Five years in London, and what they actually changed

The conversation shifts to Sonia’s own trajectory. She had wanted to do fine arts, then psychology, and was steered to literature by the standard family logic that the other fields had “no scope.” Once she landed in her first semester she stopped resisting and fell in love with the discipline. The Higher Education Commission scholarship round that took her to Royal Holloway was, by her own admission, almost an accident — an email circulated in a department inbox, two applications submitted, two acceptances received, and a missed Cambridge response that she now uses as a cautionary tale for her students.

What surprised her was not the work but the arrival. She had grown up watching English-language films and had assumed cultural dissociation would not be her problem. It was not — until the friend who had travelled with her left. “I was like, what have I done? Why did I come? What was I missing in my own country?” She caught the first available flight home at Christmas, then came back and rebuilt from the inside out. Five years later she returned to Pakistan a different person — more confident, more critical in a constructive sense, and able to see the country through more than one frame.

Sonia is also unusually disciplined about what she does not do with that exposure. She points out that most Pakistanis who study abroad come home and spend the rest of their lives saying “there it was like this” — using the foreign context as a stick to beat the local one. Her view is that the context there is genuinely different from the context here, and the only useful move is to localize: take what you learned, reshape it for where you actually live, and let that be the creative act.

Why the Royal Holloway classroom and the Islamabad classroom cannot be compared

Muzamil walks through the supply-side numbers that frame the rest of the conversation. Roughly five million Pakistanis turn eighteen every year. The total seats available across all higher education — first year through fourth, plus associate programs — sit around 450,000 to 500,000. Two million young people, every year, are structurally outside the system. In ten years that gap is on track to widen to 8.5 million eighteen-year-olds against an education infrastructure that is not growing at the same rate.

Sonia uses this to explain why a direct comparison between her UK classroom and her Islamabad classroom is unfair. At Royal Holloway her classes ran six to twelve students, often from already literate households, and individual attention was structurally possible. At a Pakistani public university you are teaching a heterogeneous room that includes scholarship students from under-developed areas who, as Muzamil notes from his FAST experience, often need a year or more of remedial work just to reach parity with the city kids in the same cohort. There is nothing wrong with those students — they are arriving from a different set of circumstances — but the program design that would actually serve them does not exist at scale.

The alumni department as a real institution, not a ceremony

Sonia heads alumni affairs for a university that, on her best current count, has produced about 20,000 trackable graduates and currently has 26,000 students enrolled — more women than men, across separate campuses. She is candid that until she took the role she had not appreciated how far her university’s graduates had travelled or how well many of them were doing. She now meets them in Europe, in obscure American states, across industries from computer science to marketing, and her frustration is not about the talent — it is about the projection. The work is brilliant. The story of the work is not getting told.

Her view of what an alumni department is for is straightforward. Acknowledge the people you graduated. Stay in contact. Pull their expertise back into the building so the current cohort benefits from it without the institution having to hire it from outside. Build the bond that lets graduates contribute, in whatever form they can, to the place that trained them. None of this is unusual by global standards. It is unusual by Pakistani public-university standards, and Sonia is quietly trying to fix that.

Muzamil, as an employer who has hired in Islamabad, surfaces a parallel observation: in his experience, female employees were materially more productive than male ones. He and his wife, who co-founded the company with him, have talked about why. Their working theory is that the historical bar to be taken seriously has been higher for women, so the same outcome requires more effort, and that effort becomes a habit. Sonia, looking at the same pattern from inside a classroom, agrees: female students tend to be more organized and more deliberate, and a great deal of the male complacency comes from the assumption that a job and a salary are owed.

The book culture problem, and why it cannot be lectured into being

Toward the end of the conversation, Muzamil turns to a different surface of the same issue: reading. Pakistan does not have a mass reading culture. Literary festivals exist as small upper-middle-class events. The contrast with India, where books regularly become best-sellers and startups have formed around the publishing industry, is unflattering. He asks Sonia why.

Her answer is historical. At Partition the country was already drowning in other crises, and political stability never arrived long enough for a literary culture to set. The world then jumped past Pakistan: “the world has moved to post-modern. We had not even arrived at modern.” Gadgets, technology, and global content landed before a domestic culture of reading had been built, and the country was carried along in someone else’s stream. To reverse this would take a deliberate, organized effort — filtering the trash, lifting the good content, and getting parents, teachers, and media to treat the presence of books in a child’s bag as a baseline expectation rather than an eccentricity.

Muzamil pushes back productively. He thinks the problem is not effort. It is that the educated class in Pakistan has historically been disconnected from mainstream Pakistan, and the books being written do not speak to the audience that exists. He gives the example of his own podcast — when he started it in 2020, ninety-minute conversations with startup founders pulled 500 views. Inserting an Instagram influencer or a pop-culture figure occasionally would pull 150,000, and the next startup conversation would once again pull 500. Critical mass eventually arrived: a recent conversation with a startup founder who appeared on Shark Tank crossed 100,000 views, an outcome unimaginable four years earlier. The lesson, in his framing, is that depth has to be earned through audience-shaped packaging.

His concrete prescription for literature follows the same logic. Instead of writing a fine novel for a tiny self-referential audience, a literature graduate could approach an Instagram influencer with 250,000 young female followers and ghost-write her book — “25 learnings before 25,” a girl-boss memoir, anything credible — because the demand already exists in that ecosystem. Once long-form has entered through that door, the audience can be walked further in. The point is that the content problem is not a literacy problem. It is a packaging problem.

Sonia agrees with the diagnosis and adds her own discipline to it. She does not believe in revolutions. She believes in evolution. The change has to be incremental, deliberate, and creative enough to slip good content through whatever wrapper the audience currently consumes. “Be smart enough about how you float a good idea inside the format the masses already want.” That, she argues, is the only kind of change that lasts.

Pakistan in 2050

Muzamil closes with the question he asks most guests. Forget the conditionals. Extrapolate forward twenty-five years. What does Pakistan look like in 2050?

Sonia’s answer is honest in a way the format usually does not get. Where most nations need a hundred years to meaningfully change, she thinks Pakistan needs two hundred. The current state, in her reading, contains a degree of devolution that upsets her — but does not push her to leave. She wants to stay and be part of the change. Twenty-five years, she says, is too short a window to see a Pakistan that is materially different from today. Fifty might begin to show it. The progress will happen. It will be slow.

It is a sober note to end a conversation that started on the failure of spoken English in a classroom. The thread connecting the two is the same one running through the entire episode: the work of building a country that can hold its own in a global services economy is real, it is doable, and it is going to take longer than anyone selling a quick fix is willing to admit.