Why Qutaiba Mehmood came back to Pakistan from Australia

From electrical engineering to “I want to do media”

The episode opens with Qutaiba Mehmood recounting his school years in Karachi, where he was a top student but already felt pulled toward writing and ideas rather than circuits. When he enrolled in an engineering programme, the mismatch became impossible to ignore. He passed his first semester, he explains, but the work felt hollow. His parents were supportive when he told them he wanted to move toward media — a rarer response than he acknowledges it to be. That parental backing gave him the room to apply to Australia, where he eventually enrolled in a media and communications programme.

Muzamil presses him on what that transition actually felt like, and Qutaiba is direct: the pressure was not from within himself but from the environment. In Pakistan, he says, the expectation is that you do not think about work until after graduation — and by the time graduation arrives, “hum jab field mein jaate hain, humein idea nahi hota” (we enter the field with no idea what we’re doing). The rust has already set in.

Arriving in Sydney fifty kilometres from the Opera House

The early Australia experience Qutaiba describes is deliberately unglamorous. He had imagined living near the Opera House. The reality was a house fifty kilometres outside Sydney, three students to a room, and no idea how to cook. His first meal abroad was a single hospital roll. He called his mother, who walked him through basic cooking over the phone. “Pehle din ek hospital roll tha — ek time ka khana” (the first day it was one hospital roll — one meal for the day), he recalls, laughing.

Muzamil notes that this gap between the imagined overseas life and the actual one is something many Pakistani students never hear about before they leave. Qutaiba agrees. The community he found was largely Pakistani and Afghan, concentrated around mosques and familiar social structures. Comfort was available, but he made a deliberate choice to push past it.

Pizza delivery, security work, and the case for working before you graduate

One of the more pointed arguments Qutaiba makes is about part-time work. In Australia, he worked in a desi restaurant, did pizza delivery, and took a security job — all while studying. He frames this not as hardship but as education. “Work ethic jaayegi, industry ke baare mein pata chalega” (you’ll develop a work ethic, you’ll learn about the industry), he says. The specific job matters less than the habit of showing up.

He contrasts this with what he observed back home: a Twitter post had gone viral in Pakistan showing job listings that included seat-cleaning roles, and the comments were full of people saying they would not do that kind of work. Qutaiba finds this genuinely baffling. The mentality of waiting for a “good” job while doing nothing, he argues, is not a class position — it is a trap. He is careful to note he is not criticising individuals so much as a system that teaches young people to see certain work as beneath them.

Muzamil pushes back gently, asking whether the problem is also one of social acceptability — that families and communities judge people for taking low-status jobs. Qutaiba concedes the point but holds his position: the cost of waiting is higher than the cost of the judgment.

A Samsung tablet, a Karachi election, and the first video

The origin of Qutaiba’s content career is specific and accidental. In December 2015, he was back in Karachi on holiday during the local body elections. Political parties were active, the streets were busy, and he found himself filming reactions and commentary on a Samsung tablet — the only device he had with a front-facing camera after his Sony Xperia had died in a swimming pool (he had misread “water resistant” as “waterproof”). He uploaded the video to Facebook, went back to work, came home, charged his phone, and found his messages full. Some people were happy, some were upset. “Kuch log khush the, kuch log upset the” — but something had clearly landed.

He did not immediately treat this as a career signal. For the next year or so, he continued making videos without editing them properly — no titles, no structure, just uploading to Facebook from the train. It was only around 2019 that he began taking YouTube seriously, setting up the channel properly and understanding how monetisation actually worked on both platforms. Facebook monetisation had started earlier, almost without him noticing. YouTube, he says, he “properly started” in September 2019.

The documentary years and winning in Sydney

Later in the discussion, Qutaiba touches on the documentary work that earned him recognition in Australia — winning Best Documentary at the Dot Motion Awards in Sydney in both 2018 and 2019. He describes building up his gear gradually: starting with no camera, borrowing equipment, adding lights, learning editing. The first video he properly edited had only a light background music track added to it. He describes this incremental process without false modesty — it took time, and the early work was rough.

By this point he had also begun covering current affairs and political topics more deliberately, moving away from pure vlogging toward opinion and analysis. He credits encouragement from viewers for pushing him in that direction, though he is clear that the shift also came with new risks.

The political centre and why Qutaiba won’t pick a side

One of the more sustained threads in the conversation is Qutaiba’s relationship with Pakistani politics. He describes spending years in Karachi attending meetings of multiple political parties — not as a card-carrying member of any of them, but as an observer. He would sit with party workers, listen to their manifestos, ask what they actually wanted, and watch how they operated at the ground level. “Jab andar baithe hote na, to aapko samajh aata hai” (when you’re sitting on the inside, you start to understand), he says.

Muzamil asks him directly where he sits on the political spectrum. Qutaiba calls himself centrist, and explains why: every time he has expressed support for any party, he has lost credibility with everyone else. He has watched new political figures emerge with genuine grassroots energy only to get absorbed into the same structures. His conclusion is not cynicism exactly — he believes change is possible — but he is sceptical of the idea that one charismatic individual or one new party can fix a system this entrenched. Real change, he argues, takes decades and has to come from within existing institutions as much as from outside them.

The urban-rural gap and what Pakistani politicians actually talk about

One of the sharpest observations Qutaiba makes concerns the disconnect between elite political discourse and the reality of most of Pakistan. He describes a moment where government ministers were discussing GDP figures and current account deficits in media appearances, and he pushed back: “Aam aadmi ko to matlab hi nahi hai” (the ordinary person has no idea what any of this means). The majority of Pakistan’s population lives outside the major cities. Their issues are not laptops and export figures — they are basic education, water, and roads.

He uses the example of laptop distribution schemes: a policy that makes sense in Lahore or Karachi is largely irrelevant to someone in a rural district who does not have reliable electricity. The political conversation, he argues, is almost entirely calibrated to urban audiences, which means it is almost entirely disconnected from where most Pakistanis actually live.

The engagement trap and why negative content wins

By the end of the conversation, Qutaiba and Muzamil turn to the mechanics of social media and what it does to the people who use it professionally. Qutaiba describes running a social experiment: he posted positive content and critical content on the same platform and tracked the results. The critical content — calling something out, naming something wrong — consistently outperformed the positive content by a wide margin. “Agar main bolunga yaar isne yeh galat kiya, yeh galat hai, woh galat hai — insaan dharti hai” (if I say this person did something wrong, this is wrong, that is wrong — people flock to it), he says.

He treats this not as a discovery to exploit but as a structural problem. The incentive to be negative is baked into the platform. He is explicit that he does not want an audience built on outrage, because that audience teaches you nothing and holds you to nothing. He would rather have fewer viewers who are genuinely engaged than large numbers drawn in by controversy.

Muzamil closes by asking about the responsibility that comes with a platform. Qutaiba’s answer is simple: a basic sense of accountability — to facts, to fairness, to the people watching — is not optional. It applies whether you are in conventional media or on social media. The medium changes. The obligation does not.