Why raising a son well is the harder job

A Faisalabad couple, an Islamabad detour, and an unplanned podcast

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Zenab Rauf to the studio. She has not travelled to Islamabad for the show specifically — her brother lives in the city and the family rotates weekends — but when the invitation arrived she did not want to miss it. “When you guys invited me, thank you so much,” she tells Muzamil. “I thought that I should tag along, I shouldn’t miss this opportunity at all.”

That detail sets the tone of the conversation. Zenab is warm, direct, and slightly self-deprecating about her own answers — “I was brutally honest,” she says, when asked whether she preferred her O-level school or her A-level one. Muzamil walks her through the early biography quickly: a Faisalabad upbringing, O-levels at Beacon House, A-levels at City School, and then a Bachelor’s in textile design from the Pakistan Institute of Fashion and Designing in Lahore. Her thesis ran three to four months past her batch’s deadline, and she graduated late. Within fifteen days of her thesis display, she was at her own mehndi. The marriage came at the end of 2017.

Lawn, copy culture, and why she did not take a textile job

Before pivoting to YouTube, Muzamil asks Zenab how she reads Pakistan’s fashion industry from the inside. Her answer is more pointed than the conversational set-up suggests. She did internships at two well-known textile firms during university and came away unconvinced. The constraint, she says, is creative: at the big lawn houses, the brief is to make florals and prints inside narrow guardrails, and the room to build a mood board from scratch — the part she actually trained for — barely exists.

She goes further on what she calls Pakistan’s lawn copy culture. A hit collection from one of the established houses gets pulled up on screens at smaller design studios, lightly amended, recoloured, and run out as a different label’s offering. “I was like, I don’t want to do that,” she tells Muzamil. It is one of the reasons she did not take a job after graduation. The YouTube channel filled the gap.

Starting the channel, and a husband who pushed

Zenab started her channel in June 2018, six months after the wedding. She had been a heavy YouTube viewer for years — back when, as she puts it, you “scratched a card to put internet on” — and Michelle Phan was the creator who made her fall in love with the medium. The first video was a vlog titled, with characteristic honesty, “my first awkward vlog.” She edited it on Final Cut Pro, which she had picked up during her design degree. The camera was her phone. She has since moved to a Sony RX100 Mark V for the beach trips and travel cuts.

Her parents’ first reaction was hesitant — “what is this, going out in public like this” — and she dropped the idea until after her marriage, at which point Hassaan, who had watched her live half her waking life on Snapchat, pushed her to try it. “He was like, no, you should do it. Let’s just give it a try, just for fun.” Her in-laws, she says, are openly supportive. “If someone in the family tells them from far away that we watch Zenab, they are very happy.”

The rough cut beats the cinematic cut

Muzamil and Zenab spend a useful few minutes on what works on YouTube and what does not, and the answer in both their experiences is the same. The travel vlogs Zenab and Hassaan have laboured over — Hassaan does the colour grading, both of them think hard about how scenes open and cut — do worse than what she calls “a random vlog, normal day in my life.” Jump cuts. Phone footage. The texture of an actual day.

“The rawness of it always works a lot more,” she says. Muzamil agrees. “The more cinematic you make it, the public is just like, no, yaar — they want to see the actual raw behind-the-scenes of your life.” Both of them note that this is also the content they themselves prefer to watch: the kind they can relate to.

A surprise baby, a one-week lockdown, and no help in the house

The conversation moves to parenting, which becomes its centre of gravity. Aahad — their son — is, as Zenab puts it, “a surprise baby.” Neither of them was planning. When she told Hassaan, he was taken aback enough to ask, “Are we ready?” “I was like, how can you say that?” she remembers. “I am giving you such good news. We have to be ready.” They both came around to excitement before the reality of newborn weeks landed.

Aahad was born roughly a week before Pakistan’s first COVID lockdown. That timing turned what could have been an isolating experience into something Zenab calls “a blessing in disguise.” Hassaan was at home twenty-four-seven for the first stretch. They have no household help. Zenab is matter-of-fact about what that means in practice: “Washing the dishes, washing the feeders, changing the diapers, managing the clothes — literally no help.” The duties divide naturally because both of them are there for all of it.

When Muzamil asks Hassaan in to join the conversation — which he does, slightly reluctantly, after Zenab notes he is camera shy — the second guest opens with one of the better lines of the episode. Describing the moment he first saw his son, Hassaan says, “I am not usually the kind of person who would cry, but automatically my eyes got wet. You wait for one thing for months and you bear everything difficult that comes — and then when you basically see your child, it makes it all worth it.”

He picks up the thread Zenab started about the work. The first weeks were not the hard part. The hard part came when they returned to their own house and the supporting cast of aunties and parents was no longer in the room. “When he was learning to use his hands and his legs, that’s when the difficulty hit. Every exercise has a different muscle — and raising someone, every part of it has a different muscle too.” When he travelled to Sharan forest for three or four days and left a six-month-old Aahad behind for the first overnight separation, he started missing him by the second day. “I came back after three or four days, he was just six months old, and he started crying when he saw me.”

Nazar, baby photos, and the public child

One of the more delicate threads Muzamil pulls runs through nazar — the cultural belief in the evil eye — and what it means for a creator couple to put their child’s face on the internet. Muzamil lays out his own working theory honestly: he believes nazar exists, but he refuses to let it become a reason not to share what is genuinely joyful. “If you live in the fear of nazar, would you do anything in your life? Rather, share what’s joyful, and protect yourself by putting good karma out — give charity, do those kinds of things.”

Zenab took her time with the public side of Aahad. She did not announce her pregnancy publicly until after he was born. The pregnancy vlogs went up retroactively, on her schedule, not the audience’s. After the delivery the channel was active again, with Aahad in frame from early on. Her own concern was less about strangers and more about close-circle disapproval — “they don’t approve, why are you sharing him online” — and her answer was to take the timeline on her own terms.

The fupis, the tayis, and the internet aunties

From there the conversation moves to the broader experience of being told how to raise your child by people who are not raising your child. In a Pakistani family setting, Muzamil notes, the in-person fupis and tayis come with the territory. You can usually nod and move on. The harder ones, he says, are the internet versions: “There are big fupis and tayis sitting on the internet who will sit there morning and evening telling you what to do.”

Hassaan’s rule is unsentimental. “For Aahad, I don’t listen to anyone. Let it be anyone. When it comes to him, I do what I think is right. You should listen to elders — listen to them. But then you do your due diligence. Filter the information yourself. What you think you can apply, apply it. What you can’t, leave it. Listen to everyone, decide yourself.” It is the cleanest formulation of a parenting principle in the episode, and Muzamil lets it sit.

The harder job: raising a gender-sensitive son

The heart of the conversation arrives when Muzamil widens the lens to the country. He frames the moment carefully: Pakistan is in a troubling period on gender-based violence, but also a hopeful one, because for the first time the gravity of those incidents is being collectively understood. “Solutions only ever come when the problem is named,” he says. As parents of a young boy, he tells Hassaan, this is something that takes a lot of mental real estate.

Hassaan’s answer reframes a phrase Pakistani parents say constantly. “We say, one year, two years, three years — he won’t understand anything yet, he’s just a child, let him do this, let him do that. Actually, if you look at the studies, from the first month till five years of life, this is the most important time. Whatever he learns, he learns in this time.” The implication is that the cultural permission slip — boys will be boys, they are small, they do not know — is in fact the moment the wrong lessons get installed.

He is precise about the local texture. Faisalabad, he says, is three to four years behind Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi on this kind of awareness. “What I have seen around me is — yeah, he’s a boy, he can do this, let him do it.” The culprit, in his framing, is parents who indulge first and try to correct later. “This is basically the time when you can set things right. Later it normalises. It starts to look cool. Appreciate him — boy or girl — but at the same time, you have to be a little strict from the start.”

Zenab takes the question from a different angle. She would, she says, raise a daughter the same way she is raising Aahad — there is no separate playbook. “I never want Aahad, at any point, to feel that he is superior to anyone or that he can get away with certain things just because he is a boy.” Her examples are small and concrete. “If he wants water and his sister is also there, she’s not the one who’s going to bring it. He has to get it himself.” She is also conscious of the wedding-joke reflex Pakistanis aim at toddlers — pairing a little boy with a little girl as “friends” who are really being set up for laughs — and she will not let it happen around her son.

All-boys schools and the missing context

Muzamil adds an observation from his own peer group on how Pakistani boys learn — or fail to learn — to be around women. The boys he watched do best, he says, were the ones who started in co-ed primary schools, spent the middle years in all-boys branches, and then re-entered co-ed environments later. The ones who struggled were the boys who stayed in regressive all-boys settings the whole way through and then got dropped, without context, into co-ed university classrooms. “All the boys are like maniacs on each other,” he says. The deficit is not academic. It is contextual: they were never taught how to be around a different gender as people.

Boys will be boys, and the cost of bottling emotion

The phrase Hassaan and Zenab both return to is the cultural injunction against male feeling. Boys are told they cannot cry. Boys are told they cannot show pain. Muzamil names the consequence directly. “We see men as very aggressive in Pakistan. Part of the reason is that when a child is sensitive, when he’s crying, when he’s feeling any emotion at all, we try to suppress it. So he becomes the psycho case of not knowing when to feel anything — generally, men bottle it up, keep it inside.”

Zenab’s working rule with Aahad is short and worth quoting. “I will tell you one thing. When your child cries, you should never say ‘don’t cry.’ Give him solutions. Ask, what happened? Let me fix this for you. Tell me how you are feeling. Never say don’t cry.” She has stuck to it. Aahad, she says, is comfortable with crying, and he settles himself afterwards. It is a small protocol, but it is the kind of small protocol the rest of the episode argues actually compounds.

The Faisalabad rich kid abroad

A lighter detour, but a sharp one. Hassaan studied at Lahore School of Economics. Muzamil teases him about not doing the standard Faisalabad move and going abroad. Hassaan’s reply is one of the funnier diagnoses in the conversation. The grades-don’t-make-LUMS-or-IBA cohort, he says, has a default escape route: a year abroad on the parents’ tab. “He’s never stepped outside his house. He’s never gone anywhere except with a driver and a guard. He did A-levels, off to abroad — and a year later, he’s booking a return ticket. Oh, I wasn’t home safe.”

His own thinking was different, because he came from a business family and did the maths. “I calculated — I’m spending this much money, and I’m coming back to do what?” His CGPA, he volunteers, was 3.55. He says it the way someone with nothing to prove says it. The principle he carries forward to Aahad is the one his parents extended to him: no force on a career path.

COVID, no honeymoon, and a Dubai plan

The conversation closes on the lighter beats. Aahad is, by the timing, a COVID baby — born a month before the lockdown, raised through the most cautious period any Pakistani family has lived through in recent memory. Zenab and Hassaan were briefly worried it would dent his sociability. It has not. He is running around now, meeting new people, doing what toddlers do.

They have not taken a honeymoon. Hassaan was back at the restaurant the second or third day after the wedding, working the register because they had not yet hired an accountant, learning the hard way that distributors will test a new owner. The trip they want is on hold until Aahad is past the chaos-on-legs phase. Dubai, they note, opened to Pakistanis on the 7th of August. It is the obvious candidate.

Muzamil closes the conversation around the fifty-five-minute mark by thanking them for coming up from Faisalabad, and by noting something the episode has earned. “Honestly, you guys are the first guests I have spoken to as parent to parent.” The conversation has, on balance, been about one argument: the way Pakistan raises its boys is the upstream cause of a lot of what Pakistan now has to fix downstream. Zenab and Hassaan are not making a policy claim. They are describing the version of fatherhood and motherhood they are trying to model in their own house, in real time, with no help and a toddler who is watching everything.