The LUMS bubble: empathy, burgers, and life after the gate

A third year at LUMS, in his own words

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guest with a small, telling slip. He calls Muhammad Saim Rehman a content creator, an Instagrammer, a YouTuber — and Saim interrupts to correct the framing. “Storyteller,” he says. “That’s the core.” It is a small moment, but it sets the tone for an hour-long conversation that keeps returning to the question of what a person is actually doing when they make something for an audience.

Saim is in his third year at LUMS, majoring in management sciences with a minor in psychology. Muzamil asks him to walk through the courses he is taking this semester. The list is unglamorous and specific: qualitative and quantitative research methods in business, game theory, personal effectiveness, and social psychology.

The first course, Saim admits, is defeating him. “The name itself sounds like a big deal, and it is. That’s why I can’t quite get it done.” The work is mostly SPSS, surveys, and significance testing — running data through software to find which variables actually matter. Game theory he can speak to more confidently, partly because the prisoner’s dilemma keeps surfacing in every economics course he has taken. Personal effectiveness, he says with mild embarrassment, is “literally personal effectiveness” — mindful thinking, self-awareness, journaling, managing personal relationships. Social psychology is his favourite, and it is also the course that produces the sharpest exchange of the episode.

Cognitive dissonance, a 1950s cult, and the $2 lie

Saim’s social psychology course has him reading about cognitive dissonance, and he uses two studies to explain it. The first is the Dorothy Martin cult of the 1950s — a woman who became convinced aliens would arrive on a specific day to save her followers from the end of the world. People left jobs, families, and ordinary lives behind. The day came and went. The aliens did not.

What happened next, Saim says, is the interesting part. The followers who had given up the least quietly drifted away. The ones who had given up everything believed harder. “Your level of dedication to the idea determined your belief in the fact of whether the aliens would come or not,” he explains. The admission that they had been wrong was the one thing they could not afford to make, so they bent the world around the belief instead.

The second study is the classic one about a boring task and two payments. Subjects were paid either two dollars or twenty dollars to tell the next participant that an obviously dull experiment had actually been interesting. The people paid two dollars, Saim says, ended up genuinely believing it had been interesting. The people paid twenty did not. “Two dollars wasn’t enough to justify the lie, so they justified it by changing what they thought of the task.”

Muzamil takes the point and pulls it out of the lab. “You offer people an insane amount of money expecting their heart will be in it,” he says. “But I’ve seen that the more money you put on the table, the less of their heart you actually get.” It is a small reframing, but it lands — and it is the kind of move the conversation makes repeatedly, where an idea from class is dragged into the daylight of Pakistani working life.

BMI, A-levels, and the question that comes up in every comment section

Before LUMS, Saim was at BMI in Islamabad for four years — tenth grade through A2 — after an early childhood spread thinly across Rawalpindi, Sialkot, and Lahore as his father moved with the military. His mother kept them as anchored to Lahore as she could.

Muzamil uses this to raise a question he says comes up in his comment section repeatedly: does an A-levels education give a Pakistani student an unfair head start? Are the people he interviews simply benefiting from a credential the average viewer was locked out of?

Saim’s answer is measured. He does not deny that something exists between the two camps, but he refuses to call it intellectual. “I’ve seen students who do exceptionally well, whether they’re from matric, FSc, NIS, or O-levels and A-levels,” he says. The students from FSc backgrounds, in his observation, often outperform the A-levels kids once university starts, because their math and physics map more directly onto what is being taught.

What A-levels schools really sell, he and Muzamil agree, is social sophistication. Dressing, accent, the rhythm of how to speak in a room of strangers — the curriculum of confidence. Muzamil pulls in his own memory of FAST, where he says less than two per cent of his batch was OA-levels and where he quickly concluded the FSc students were the smarter half of the room. The mental barrier, he argues, is built on both sides. The public-school kid assumes the private-school kid is better. The FSc kid assumes the A-levels kid thinks he is better. The arbitrary becomes architectural.

The five days that made LUMS look like a different country

Saim’s first week at LUMS — orientation week, or “O-week” — was, he says, the most social five days of his life. Fifty or sixty groups of fifteen students each, two coaches per group, parties, activities, late nights, and the steady manufacture of friendships. “I socialised more in those five days than I think I have in my whole life.”

Then classes began on the Monday. “I couldn’t comprehend how quickly the academic pressure came down on me.” Muzamil asks whether the pressure is intrinsic to the workload or to the company — the constant awareness that the room is full of the country’s sharpest students. Saim says both. He grew up with extremely high expectations at home, and any small academic stumble would send him into a spiral. There is a moment in the conversation, mid-sentence, where he describes failing a math quiz in his first semester and sitting in his hostel room that night unable to process it. “Math, I was supposed to be the star student. What is this, man?”

By second year, he says, something shifted. He had been chasing the Dean’s Honour List with the same single-mindedness he had brought to chasing A-stars at A-levels. He made it in his first year. He stopped caring as much after that. “I’ve stopped letting it control me as much. My focus is on things I feel are more important now.”

Burgers, the Karachi DHA elite, and a story about a Karachi bus

The LUMS batch is roughly thirteen hundred students. The top feeder schools, Saim says, are recognisable to anyone who has paid attention: KGS and Lyceum from Karachi, BMI from Islamabad, LGS — particularly LGS JT and LGS 55 Main — and Aitchison from Lahore.

The Lahore and Karachi students do not blur together at LUMS. Saim describes a Karachi cohort with a distinct accent, a different vocabulary, and a wardrobe centred on shorts and chappals — the relaxed uniform of a coastal city. The Islamabad students, in the Karachi students’ eyes, are the burgers. “We are the burgers, Islamabad waale,” Saim says, half-laughing at it. “Karachi ka DHA elite aa raha hai, aur hum burger hain.”

Muzamil takes the burger label and pushes hard against it, with a story. He spent a few months at FAST in Karachi as a student. On a public bus to campus one day, an older man pushed him out of the moving vehicle and left him bleeding on the road. Another night, a phone-dead walk near Sea View ended with him jumping a four-foot drop onto the beach to escape trained guard dogs that had been let onto a stretch of street.

When he told his Karachi friends, he says, the reaction was not sympathy. It was a kind of mocking dismissal: why are you such a burger about it? It is here that Muzamil makes the sharpest point of the episode. “The problem is not with me. The problem is with you. You’ve gone through something traumatic, and you need rehabilitation to get out of it — not the demand that everyone else’s baseline of normal becomes your trauma.” Trauma should not be the price of entry to a city. Saim, who has been steering most of the conversation, just listens and says, quietly, “Yeah. You put it so well.”

What LUMS is actually for — and what happens when the bubble bursts

The conversation that follows is, in many ways, the heart of the episode. Muzamil’s argument is not that LUMS is bad. It is that LUMS is, in a strange way, too good — that it gathers the most critical-thinking young people in the country, puts them in a room together, and gives them a level of freedom that the surrounding country does not extend. The risk, he argues, is that LUMS students forget how unusual this is. They begin to think of themselves as the baseline rather than the privileged exception, and they leave campus angry that the rest of Pakistan is not as smart, free, or articulate as the people they spent four years with.

Saim accepts the framing. He has heard the same thing from seniors who have graduated. “The moment they step out of LUMS, the bubble bursts, and reality hits them,” he says. He does not yet know whether he will be one of them. But he does push back on one word. Muzamil keeps describing the world LUMS is preparing students for as “more advanced.” Saim is uneasy with that. The right word, he suggests, is “more diverse.” LUMS is in some ways further along than Pakistani society. But it is also narrower. The world outside is not better. It is just larger, messier, and has fewer of the tools the campus took for granted.

What LUMS gave him, he says — and what he is most grateful for — is empathy. He mentions a video he made about femicide as an example. Before LUMS, he had not really considered gender as a structural issue. After two years inside the place, hearing other students, taking the courses, sitting in the conversations, he cannot stop seeing it. “I don’t know if I’d have learned that anywhere else.”

Milwaate Hain Aapko, and the moment the numbers changed

Muzamil pivots in the final third of the episode to the work itself. Saim has been making content since around 2013, first with two friends who are now in the army, then alone — David Dobrik–style vlogs, then cinematic travel film, then a hybrid of vlog and cinema and comedy. For six or seven years, the numbers refused to move. A few hundred followers. A few thousand at the ceiling. “I’d been on Instagram for six, seven years and I had a couple of thousand followers. I just couldn’t understand what was going on.”

Then he posted the first episode of a series called Milwaate Hain Aapko — a soft, ordinary, family-portrait format. The response, he says, was beyond anything he had imagined. The second episode went further still. He cannot quite finish the sentence describing it. “Muzamil bhai, what can I tell you, I was so happy” — and then Muzamil’s own message arrived in his DMs, asking when he was next in Islamabad.

The most interesting part of the breakthrough, for him, was the word everyone kept using to describe what he was doing. Not cinematics. Not comedy. Storytelling. “I genuinely didn’t realise that at all. I thought I was just doing comedy.” Muzamil presses the point. The thing audiences responded to was not the production. It was the ordinariness — a very raw life, presented in a way that compelled people to stay until the end of a long-format Instagram video, a format the platform actively discourages.

What comes next, and the Pakistan of thirty years from now

Saim’s near-term plan is small and specific. Finish the Milwaate Hain Aapko series, which has been on pause since the summer. The next episode is about his sister. The one after that is about his cat. The one after that is about himself — the introduction he never quite gave. After that, he wants to use the management sciences degree to commercialise the digital media work he has been doing since he was a teenager. He references his Pindi Boys piece for Up Close as the model: take something everyone half-knows, do the research properly, and explain it.

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest. Saim is twenty-two. In thirty years he will be fifty-two. Pakistan will be a hundred and three. How does he see the country?

“If I’m alive,” Saim begins, and then catches himself. “I see myself very hopeful for that Pakistan.” He has a single reason, and it is the one he keeps coming back to throughout the conversation. He thinks the country is becoming more empathetic. Not fast, and not evenly, but in the direction of being able to put itself in someone else’s shoes. That, more than any policy or politician, is what he is betting on. Muzamil ends the conversation there, with a thank-you, a plug for The Pakistan Pivot, and the sense that the bubble Saim is still inside has, at least for the length of an episode, opened its doors a little.