The man who built Pakistan's insect community from scratch

From a village childhood to insect taxonomy

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Azaz Ahmad as a guest he has referenced multiple times on the show — the man behind a community of over 87,000 people who can, at any given moment, find out exactly what an insect is and what it does. That framing sets the tone: this is not a story about a credentialed academic. It is a story about someone who built expertise and then built an audience for it, in that order.

Azaz grew up in a village, studied in different cities, and came to entomology not through a biology degree but through a personal turning point in 2016. That year, he committed seriously to insect identification and taxonomy — reading, observing, and documenting on his own. He describes the process simply: “Bas uske baad yeh phir toh uske baare mein padhna, yeh karna” — after that, it was just reading about it, doing it. No formal lab, no supervisor. His early access to computers was itself borrowed: he used to get mobile data loaded onto someone else’s machine, and that machine introduced him to the wider world of science online.

How Keero Ki Dunya actually started

Azaz founded Keero Ki Dunya on 18 September 2018. The origin was not a grand plan. He had been active in another Pakistani group where someone mentioned him, and people began reading his posts carefully. When problems arose in that group — problems he declines to name — he left and started his own. It began with roughly 200 members.

Within three years it had grown to 87,000. Muzamil presses him on this: how does a group about insects reach that scale? The answer is not algorithm or advertising. It is that Azaz answered every question, identified every photograph, and built a record that people kept returning to. “Agar ek database already ban gaya hai toh main website par jaoon” — if a database already exists, you go to the website, browse the categories, and find what you need. The group became that database.

The Google problem — and why Pakistani data matters

One of the sharpest arguments in the conversation is about Google image search and insect identification. Azaz says that if you use Google to identify an insect you found in Pakistan, you will get the wrong answer roughly 95 percent of the time. The reason is structural: Pakistani insects differ from American or European specimens, and the images that dominate Google’s training data come from those regions. “Pakistan ke keede aur America ke keede alag hote hain” — Pakistani insects and American insects are different things.

The deeper irony, which Azaz points out, is that the correct data now flows the other way. Communities like his are the ones uploading accurate local identifications. Google learns from them. “Google ko hamsay chahata hai” — Google is learning from us. This is not a small point. It means that citizen-science communities in underrepresented geographies are not just consumers of global knowledge; they are, quietly, its producers.

The journal paper and the English question

Azaz describes what would have been a landmark moment: submitting what he believes would have been the first Pakistani paper to a European journal of taxonomy. The reviewers sent it back, saying the English was weak. Azaz was unconvinced. He selected three reviewers himself — one in Australia, one in England, one in the United States — and sent them the paper. All three said the English was fine. More than that, they offered to put their names on it without credit. “Aap beshak hamara naam na len. Yeh hum Pakistan ke liye kar rahe hain” — you don’t even have to include our names. We are doing this for Pakistan.

Muzamil’s reaction to this moment is visible in the transcript. The image of three foreign scientists volunteering to co-sign a paper anonymously so that Pakistan gets the credit lands as one of the conversation’s emotional high points. Azaz’s reading of it is characteristically direct: the change is coming. People are showing up.

One third of your food, and why you shouldn’t kill insects

Later in the discussion, Azaz makes the ecological case for insects in terms that are deliberately practical. He is not asking people to find insects beautiful. He is pointing out that one third of everything a person eats — every apple, every banana — exists because of insect pollination. “Teesra seb khate hain, teesra kela khate hain. Matlab har aapke khaurak ka teesra hissa inhi insects ki wajah se aata hai.”

The habit he is trying to break is reflexive killing — seeing something crawl across the floor and reaching for a slipper. His argument is not sentimental. It is that awareness changes behaviour, and behaviour has consequences for food systems. He estimates that among the 87,000 members of his group, about 60 percent have already shifted their attitude. That is the metric he uses for progress.

Village versus city — and what actually holds science back

Muzamil raises a question that runs through many conversations on this show: what is the difference between a student who grew up in a village and one who grew up in a city? The assumption, Muzamil notes, is that the city student has more resources, better schooling, more opportunity — and should therefore be ahead.

Azaz pushes back. He says the conditions for science are roughly the same in both places, and the problem is not geography. “Science ko lekar taqreeban haalaat ek jaise hote hain” — when it comes to science, the conditions are more or less the same. What both environments share is a curriculum that teaches children to study in order to earn money and own property, not to be curious. Nobody tells a child — village or city — that you can make a living from apiculture, or silk farming, or insect research. The system does not model that path, so children do not see it.

Azaz is direct about his own position: he is stable, he is not chasing money, and he is doing science. He says this not as a boast but as evidence that the path exists.

22 discoveries, a future institute, and the naming of things

By the end of the conversation, Azaz lays out what he is building toward. He has 22 new-to-science insect discoveries in Pakistan. He intends to name them himself — because, as he explains, the person who first observes and documents a species is the one who gets to name it. The people who named the insects in Pakistani textbooks were the ones who first looked. Now he is looking.

His longer vision is an institute: a large lab and museum where students can study live specimens, read the literature of major scientists, and access taxonomy resources without needing a personal connection or a letter of introduction. “At least udhar aane ke liye aapko reference ki zaroorat nahin hai” — at least to come there, you should not need a reference. He also wants to write a book — not a theory-heavy university text from the 1960s or 1970s, but something practical, something that makes entomology in Pakistan legible and usable.

He is aware that China is publishing data on Pakistani insects that Pakistan itself is not producing. “Mujhe bahar waale is cheez ko lekar woh keh rahe ki chalo Pakistan ka ho jaye. Hum kyun nahin kar rahe hain?” — outsiders are saying, let this belong to Pakistan. Why aren’t we doing it ourselves?

Muzamil closes by telling Azaz directly: “You can support us there.” But before the logistics, he says something simpler — that he cannot express how proud he is of the work Azaz is doing. It is one of the few moments in the episode where the host steps out of the interviewer’s role entirely.