The seventy good years might have been the aberration

The school that was almost an afterthought

The episode is billed as a conversation with the man who built Dubai’s first serious culinary school. By the end, the school has barely been discussed. Zaigham Haque opens with the honest version of how SCAFA began — not a business plan, but a taxi ride in London. A friend, laughing, told him he should bring the Cordon Bleu to Dubai. “Bara typical Pakistani reaction hua,” Haque says: yaar, this I can also do. He looked into licensing the Cordon Bleu, the match did not work, and he went independent. The feasibility study, the premises hunt, the build-out — that took from 2010 to a 2012 opening.

Muzamil tries, gently and repeatedly, to steer back to the food. Haque keeps drifting somewhere more interesting. After ninety minutes Muzamil gives up and asks to have him back for a part two devoted entirely to the school, because the man’s life and his reading of the world had eaten the whole hour. “There’s just so much flavor to you,” he says, “that we spent the last one hour thirty minutes talking about everything under the sun except for the one thing that we actually got together to discuss.” This write-up follows the conversation that actually happened.

A 1960s London childhood and a degree changed on the plane

Haque was born in Lahore, the son of a naval officer, and spent his first four years and earliest schooling in London while his father served as an attaché at the high commission. He was in the UK during the 1965 war. His memories of that London are a child’s — falling into streams, fights, “tamashas” — and one adult observation: “London today is less white than it was then.”

Back in Pakistan he moved with the postings — a convent in Karachi that took boys to class three (a “scary period” surrounded by older girls), Karachi Grammar, a year in Pindi, and finally Aitchison in Lahore from 1976 to 1978, an institution he remembers as extraordinary, especially for sport. He went to the University of Essex in 1979 to read literature and philosophy, because he loved reading. His uncle changed that. The day Haque left Islamabad, the uncle told him he knew a man with exactly that degree who was starving. The line ran in his head the entire flight. He landed at Heathrow, found the admissions office within a day or two, and switched to accountancy, finance and economics.

That Heathrow arrival carried a second detail he never forgot. He had dutifully obtained a visa. The officer told him a Pakistani passport needed none. “You’re here for university. You have a Pakistani passport. You do not need a visa.” It is a small thing that he raises deliberately — proof, decades on, of a status that has since evaporated.

Why Pakistani sport died, in one word: economics

Aitchison gives Haque his first lens on national decline, through sport. In his era, he says, Pakistan was a different country in athletics — world-class sailing, chess, and a squash dynasty chasing the Australians. Almost all the great squash players came from one village, Nawakili. The explanation, he insists, is not mystery or lost talent. It is the ten-thousand-hour rule meeting a hard life. “There was a time when these sports made a lot of financial sense to people. This was a way for them to get out of their terrible life and into a better life.” As those earning opportunities thinned, so did the volume of practice, and the pipeline dried.

He extends it to Pakistan’s golfers, who he says are genuinely good but stall at the local level — “what they get from it is enough for them” — for want of sponsorship, care and interest. He points across the border at India, now with four or five players inside the world’s top fifty, as what sustained investment looks like. He notes the flickers — a world junior squash title after thirteen or fourteen years, a silver in the javelin — without overselling them. “Koi kuch chingari hai.” Some spark remains.

The seventy good years as a historical accident

The conversation’s intellectual spine arrives when Muzamil raises the global polarisation he sees everywhere — nationalist governments rising left and right, a sweet globalised moment giving way to decoupling. Haque offers what he calls a very depressing take, and it is the most quoted idea in the episode.

From the end of the Second World War until roughly a decade ago, he argues, the world lived in “a charmed world which never existed in history and may not exist in the future.” Seventy years of striving toward democracy, rights, gender equality, of seeing society as something moving toward continuously kinder and fairer. Step back across the full history of mankind, he says, and those seventy years look like an aberration. The norm is people “led by ruling classes brutally.” And the swing back has accelerants the past did not: social media, its hijacking, and the unknown directions AI may take. “I was lucky to live in it. It scares me that my children, my grandchildren will not have this world.”

He grounds the abstraction in a personal one. He sits on a golf group of mostly Indians — his wife is Indian, met in his university’s first year — and watched a clip of a Pakistani minister circulate, recut and weaponised by a shrill Indian commentator into evidence of Pakistani contempt for India’s lunar programme. The original clip, Haque knew, was the minister mocking Pakistan’s own moon-sighting committee. His Indian friends accepted the manipulation without question. That, to him, is the machine of the new era working in miniature.

Modi, Zia, and the uses of a bogeyman

Asked to read India directly, Haque is blunt and careful at once. “He’s an incredibly effective leader,” he says of Modi — the butcher of Gujarat, rehabilitated, hosting the G20, visas to the United States restored. Fascism, he argues, is a tool: it unifies people and makes them face one direction, and keeps them facing it by terrorising the chosen target — in India’s case, Muslims. Modi manages two constituencies at once: the man on the street, mobilised with hope and a licence to hate, and the wealthy business community, kept very happy, with NDTV-style destruction reserved for anyone who refuses to engage and benefaction for anyone who does. He expects Modi re-elected, perhaps with a thinner majority, agenda unfinished.

Muzamil draws the parallel to Zia’s 1980s Pakistan, and Haque sharpens rather than softens it. The licence Zia used, he argues, was opened by his predecessor. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared Ahmadis non-Muslim and created the passport declaration every Pakistani must still sign. “Zia just walked in happily and took advantage of it.” On Pakistan today, Haque refuses easy parallels and lands somewhere more unsettling: he is confused. “I want to be a good Pakistani and I don’t know how to be one. I don’t know what it means anymore.” Five years ago the checklist seemed obvious — adore the army, support Imran Khan, end corruption. He no longer trusts any of it, and finds the fall from being South Asia’s dominant country to trailing Afghanistan on human development “staggering, bewildering.”

Dubai when Pakistanis ran the banks

Haque qualified as a chartered accountant — easy to enter, brutal to pass, a 6% first-time qualification rate in his year — and came to Dubai in the late 1980s. The Dubai he describes is almost unrecognisable: one mall, parking anywhere, a place you came to earn tax-free and accumulate capital, saving 75% of a salary. “Now you come to Dubai for the lifestyle. You don’t come to Dubai to accumulate capital.”

The detail that stops Muzamil is the standing of Pakistanis. When Haque arrived in 1988, the dada of regional finance was BCCI; senior management was “white and Pakistani”; his classmates were among the first Emirates Airlines pilots, hands held as the airline started up. “It doesn’t sound real what I’m saying,” he admits. Muzamil, who grew up “with the idea that we are loser third-class citizens of the world,” says he would love to live in a world where this was reality.

Pressed on what went wrong, Haque declines the conspiracy frame. Real conspiracies, he says, are Mossadegh and the Shah, or what the French and British did to Gaddafi. Pakistan’s collapse is mostly self-inflicted — governance, greed, a brain drain of good people who left when they shouldn’t have, and a colonial subjugation that broke the national spirit in a way Iran or Thailand’s did not. He reaches for a cultural diagnosis: Pakistan’s military discipline traces back not to Mughal grandeur but to militias raised to collect taxes. Cultural change, he concludes, needs two things and only two: rules with strict enforcement, and time.

Strong leadership, and the case against democracy

The hardest question in the episode is Muzamil’s: does the developing world even need democracy, or does it need a Chinese or Gulf-style iron fist? Haque does not flinch from the heresy. “There’s a lot of truth in what you’re saying.” Singapore from nothing, South Korea corrupt as hell and only recently democratic — change, he argues, requires strong leadership without doubt. He explains China’s collegiate one-party climb, where a mayor governs twenty or thirty million people, “more public service experience than Obama had when he became president.” And he repeats the provocation that the greatest threat to climate action is democracy, because the biggest polluters are democracies whose governments would fall the moment they took the hard decisions.

But he refuses to make this a clean endorsement of strongmen. Pakistan has tried strong leadership repeatedly and been disappointed every time — Ayub’s boom was the Korean war, not policy; Zia, Musharraf, the present quasi-martial-law arrangement all failed or will. The real definition of leadership, he says, is someone people will actually follow. “Eat grass,” he quotes — the leader who can persuade a population to tighten its belt because there is no other way, while believing he can take them from A to B. “I don’t know what the answer to that is.”

The optimist’s three Pakistans

Across forty years and several careers — Dow Jones Markets and a management buyout that failed, a pioneering Dubai call centre, a document-management company sold to Aramex — Haque calls himself a constitutional optimist. “If you’re not an optimist naturally, you shouldn’t go into business,” he says, because business is against you 90% of the time. He is unsentimental about the money. As a boy he had four pairs of shoes and one pair of trousers and had everything he wanted; he and his wife are now deliberately downsizing their lives. “I don’t think I’ve been crazy successful. I think I’ve been successful enough.”

So when Muzamil asks how he sees Pakistan in 2050, the optimist gives three honest outcomes, borrowing the frame from Ayesha Siddiqa. The worst: a North Korea — a closed state silencing every mouth, whose theatrics the world laughs at, with early signs already visible. The middle: plodding along with no real change, which sounds survivable until you remember the Asian century is lifting everyone else, leaving Pakistan “a population of under-skilled, unwanted people on the international stage,” exporting labour that may no longer be desirable. The best, and the one he is gunning for: sustained strong leadership over a ten-to-fifteen-year horizon, not the three-year cycles that build nothing — a flag the exhausted diaspora would rally behind. He does not know who that leader is, and is careful to say it need not be Imran Khan. He only knows what the country needs.

He closes on commodities and food. A super-cycle worsened by the Ukraine war, climate destruction of crops, a global population heading to ten billion by 2050 against falling food production. Prices rise; the poor go hungry. And a warning aimed home: Pakistan, in financial distress, can too easily trade away its own food production to Gulf states securing their supply. “We have to be careful.” For a man who spent the hour saying he no longer knows how to read his own country, it is the one piece of advice he offers without hedging.