The mobile phone that ended a PMA career and started Bedaar

The phone in the satchel

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing his guest as the founder of Bedaar Travels, a company he calls an interesting attempt at modernising how travel is done in Pakistan. Within a few minutes the conversation has moved past the company and into the moment that made the company possible: a mobile phone, an inspection at the Pakistan Military Academy, and a decision that came down the same afternoon.

Ijlal Khattak was a Karak-born, Pindi-raised cadet roughly twenty months into a twenty-four-month commission course at PMA. The phone — a basic Nokia 1208, he is careful to specify — was something junior cadets routinely carried before they were senior enough to move freely. When the rooms went up for inspection, Ijlal moved the phone into his satchel. A staff member found it. A second staff member escalated it. By the afternoon, the written withdrawal decision had already arrived.

“I wasn’t even given the rest of the night,” Ijlal says. There was no slow process, no chance to apologise. His uncle, a senior officer in Abbottabad at the time, was reached by evening, and by night he was gone. Some men in his platoon were crying. He is unsparing about whose fault it was. “It was my mistake. I was caught and I was given the punishment the zone saw fit. A person has to own their mistakes. That’s the only way a person can move forward.”

What Ijlal will not do, then or now, is criticise the institution. His grandfather retired as a brigadier; his family is, as he puts it, full of these officials. “A decision is a decision. Everybody respects that.”

Major Taimur and the discipline that outlasted the academy

Before the article gets to Bedaar, the discussion lingers on the person Ijlal credits more than any other for the way he absorbed the discharge: his platoon commander, Major Taimur Mehmood — who was, as he notes in passing, Pakistan’s number three tennis player at the time, and who later went to fight in Waziristan while the rest of the tennis circuit kept playing.

Muzamil lets Ijlal tell the story of one PT session at length, and it is worth quoting. Major Taimur ran his platoon through sprints and push-ups until the cadets began to collapse. Then he started shouting. “This is just one PT,” Ijlal recalls him saying. “These are just a few push-ups and a few sprints. You have no idea how much life is going to hit you.” The instruction that followed was about posture under collapse — keeping your knees off the ground, looking the moment in the eye, staying upright the way a man should stay upright not when everything is fine, but when it isn’t. “Maybe for some of the others those were just words,” Ijlal says. “But for me those words mattered.”

He frames the rest of his life as an attempt to live up to that scene. Within two or three days of returning to Pindi, he had found a job at a call centre near Pindi Stadium and enrolled in an external DMUC bachelor’s programme. He was waking at five-thirty, finishing the day past midnight, and starting again. He put himself through it, he says, “intentionally, because that’s what our platoon commander taught us. You will not break.”

The Olympiad debt and the meat-supply collapse

Two failures from this period set up the failures that came later. The first was a college event Ijlal helped organise — an Olympiad — financed by an unsecured loan of two and a half lakh rupees from people he describes obliquely as a Honda-type property crowd. The event happened. The promoters disappeared into their lives. Ijlal sat with the loan and, as he puts it without melodrama, was “on gun points” over an amount that the lenders themselves did not need.

“Even someone who has two and a half hundred crore,” he says, “will not leave you two and a half thousand rupees, unfortunately.” It is one of his sharpest lines in the conversation — a working theory of how capital actually behaves in Pakistan that he says he had to learn by losing.

The second failure was a UAE-based meat-supply venture with a friend that started clean and unwound after one good month. He recovered from both episodes by paying down the debts piece by piece. The closest friend he had approached for support during the second collapse asked for the money back the next day. “That broke me,” he says. “Everyone aside, this one person — this one person means so much to me.” The lesson he draws from that betrayal is not bitterness. It is the principle he names later in the conversation: do whatever work you do well enough that someone says, “if I’m having shoes stitched, I’m having them stitched by Ijlal.”

Why Bedaar started — and what it wasn’t trying to be

Bedaar Travels began in 2017, around five years after PMA, and Ijlal is clear that there was no plan to build a large company. There wasn’t even a plan to make money. He had been travelling the country since college — sometimes with the Tablighi Jamaat, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone — and he had watched the same valleys he loved deteriorate year after year. The Naran stream coming down from Saiful Muluk was getting filthier every season. “I have been travelling,” he says. “I can do this. Why am I not doing it?”

The original name had been One to Eight Travels, after his long course. The Bedaar name came from his elder college brother, who had been building a comics imprint by the same name — an APS Attack issue had even been published. Ijlal asked permission to use the word because it fit the thesis: Bedaar means awake. “Our nation needs this,” he says. “Every day we’re only going down.”

The model he wanted was the opposite of how Pakistani group travel had been working. He wanted travellers to be educated about the place they were entering — its people, its norms, the fact that the valley they were visiting was someone’s home. “Until you make people feel that this is also our home, this is also our people, this is also our country, they will throw garbage.” Nobody throws garbage in their own house. The garbage problem, in his framing, is a belonging problem.

Waliya, the trousers, and the first push

Muzamil presses Ijlal on how the company became visible at all, and Ijlal credits one piece of unrelated hustle from the period before Bedaar existed. He had been sourcing export-leftover clothing to make pocket money — and through that he had ended up with a pair of DL1961 trousers from a Paris fashion week edition. He cold-messaged Waliya on Instagram, met her in F-11 with a course-mate, and let her pick a pair. No money changed hands. “This is my way of doing stuff,” he says.

Some weeks later he saw she had travelled with another company to Hunza and Fairy Meadows. When Bedaar launched, he reached out again and asked if she would travel with them. She said yes. Ijlal does not soften the credit. “I haven’t seen a person like her in the social media circle,” he says. “Extraordinarily generous. Very respectful.” He calls it a piece of universe-conspiring luck, but the company still did not become a business overnight. In Bedaar’s first eight months, it ran three trips and earned roughly fifty thousand rupees in total profit.

King Edwards, three and a half lakh, and the wife who closed the gap

The trip that almost ended Bedaar was the first big one: a one hundred and eighty-person group from King Edwards medical college. “We thought, this is it, now the real fun begins,” Ijlal says. The trip lost three and a half lakh rupees. The maths, he admits, was simply wrong. They had not built in a per-head buffer of even one or two thousand rupees.

What he does next in the conversation is the most personal disclosure in the episode. He says his wife had been earning her own money designing clothes since their nikah in February 2017, and that when the King Edwards loss landed she transferred the entire amount to him — covering the full loss, not just his half as one of two partners. “These are the gestures, these are the moments,” he says, “where the value you build for each other across a whole life gets made.” When COVID later hit and the company’s cash had vanished in another accounting shock, his wife went out and sold every piece of gold she had been given at her wedding. “She said, Ijlal, what am I going to do with this?”

That gold, Ijlal says, ended up converted into a small real-estate holding, and the real-estate holding ended up generating more income in a single year than the travel company had ever produced. He says this without grievance. He means it as evidence that the rizq he had been chasing in tour buses was, in the end, going to arrive through a door he had not been knocking on.

The contrarian bet on quality, and the ad account that never ran

The most counter-intuitive operating fact in the episode is delivered almost in passing. Muzamil asks how Bedaar grew, and Ijlal answers that the company has not run a Facebook ad in more than two and a half years. There was no card on the ad account. “So where would the marketing come from?” he says. “It just happened. I think it was in our naseeb.”

The one thing Bedaar refused to compromise on, he says, was absolute quality — in hospitality, in the accommodations included at a given price point, in how the company behaved when things went wrong. The market around him was racing downward on price. Bedaar held the line, and the more the market dropped, the more Bedaar’s share grew. He cannot fully explain why this worked. He attributes it to a product that sells itself, the way he picks up his phone on the table during the conversation: “You use it once, you’re in its ecosystem, you’re stuck.”

He is honest about the operational cost of holding that line. Bedaar’s coasters have been hit by landslides three times. A young videographer from Peshawar broke nineteen bones and his skull in six places when a motorcycle struck him on the Khunjerab road. Pakistan has no air ambulance. Ijlal escalated all the way to the DGISPR’s office at the time, Major General Asif Ghafoor, to get a plane that could fit a nine-seat stretcher and a tenth seat for the boy’s father. It happened. The boy walks today. Ijlal has never met him.

What Pakistan’s tourism boom is getting wrong

Later in the conversation, Muzamil shifts the discussion to the industry itself, and the two of them work through a shared diagnosis. The growth, Ijlal agrees, is exponential — both in investment and in tourist numbers. His concerns are structural. “Just the roads,” he says. The Ghizer-to-Chitral road is a nightmare. Babusar down through Thak is a daily landslide. Skardu access is unreliable. The announcements are running ahead of the infrastructure.

The bigger problem is cultural. Pakistan’s tourism, in his view, has grown by inserting tourists directly into village life — a tiny hotel built inside a community where the visitors and the residents share the same lanes. Globally, that is not how tourism is done. Muzamil makes the point sharply: “Tourism in communities is a different thing altogether.” Resorts go in tourist zones. Communities are left alone.

Ijlal extends the example with a story from Mantokha, where local residents stopped one of his coasters and respectfully asked that women dressed inappropriately for the area be seated back inside. The incident was not hostile, he says — the locals were polite — but it was a clear signal that the country’s tourists and the country’s host communities were operating off two completely different scripts. The Skardu billboards already ask visitors to respect a dress code. They are being ignored.

His solution is zoning. Build separate resorts on the Maldives model, where guests who want one kind of experience are concentrated in places designed for it, and host communities are not turned into backdrops for behaviour they have not consented to. “Once you give them super-luxury stuff and different experiences,” he says, “you can keep them separate.”

Why scope is not the question

Two threads from the conversation tie together in its final stretch. The first is Ijlal’s working theory of rizq — that the monetary risk in a person’s life is fixed by Allah, that he can die tomorrow, and that there is therefore no point in chasing what everyone else is chasing instead of what he is actually good at. The second is his rejection of “scope” as a useful career question. Muzamil agrees with him directly: scope is relative. The best painter in a country where painting has no scope is still a wealthy man.

Ijlal frames it as the only argument that should matter. “Do work — whatever work you do — and reach a level of excellence in it where people say, brother, if I want shoes stitched, I’m having them stitched by Ijlal.” Muzamil calls the line a powerful one, and the article ends roughly where the company started: with a discharged cadet refusing to choose his work by what the market said was hot, and building, slowly, the kind of operator the market will eventually need.