Why Syed Owais Ali moved back to Pakistan at 28

A reverse migration most people do not make

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Syed Owais Ali as a content creator with a small but unusually loyal following — “not glamorous numbers,” he says, “but the numbers he has, they follow him aggressively.” The hook for the conversation is the direction of travel. Most stories from this generation of Pakistanis run the other way: out of the country, toward the Gulf, toward the West. Owais has done the opposite.

He lays out the arithmetic quickly. His family moved from Pakistan to the UAE in 2002, when he was ten. His father was a professor at Barani Institute on Murree Road in Pindi before that, and ended up teaching in the UAE for roughly sixteen years before retiring. Eighteen of Owais’s own years were spent in the Gulf — schooling through grade four to high school in Fujairah, then university in Qatar. “There was a strange bug inside me,” he tells Muzamil. “A passion that I had to do something for Pakistan. I don’t know why it was there. But I wanted to follow it.”

The decision crystallised around the age of 27, once he had what he calls financial stability. He framed it the way deliberate people frame irreversible choices: as a regret minimisation problem. “I knew that if I didn’t make this decision, I was going to regret it in the later stages of my life.” On 1 April 2020 — the day he resigned — he posted the intro video to the YouTube channel that the conversation is, in part, about.

How a Fujairah teenager ended up at Al Jazeera

Owais is generous about the path, and the path is not a straight line. He was an exceptionally strong high school student in a small town in the eastern UAE — seven A-stars, two As at O-level, finishing A-level Maths in a single year — set up by every external signal for the engineering or medical route. He chose filmmaking instead, and credits cricket for it.

In 2008, on the trailing edge of YouTube’s montage era, he started cutting Pakistan-Sri Lanka highlights on Windows Movie Maker, then music videos for Linkin Park’s What I’ve Done, then for Pakistani songs. The work spread through his school and his town. A Sheikh Maktoum Ramadan tournament — a Counter-Strike event — paid him 2,000 dirhams to make the opening video while he was still in high school. “I got it,” he says, recalling the moment the path became real. “I could do something. And I was passionate about it.”

The university application round was less kind. He applied to Harvard, the University of Chicago and most of the top US film programmes. Every one rejected him except DePaul. His US visa was then stuck for six months, costing him a year. In that gap year, Owais says, “I was very down, depression-wise. There was an option — yaar maybe this is not for me, MBBS soch lete hain.” He stayed with the decision. By accident — through a sister visiting a cousin — he stumbled on Northwestern’s Qatar campus, applied because the application was free, and landed a 50% scholarship with the rest on interest-free aid.

The university year that mattered most was the third. Owais secured a fully funded grant to make a documentary, and chose to follow a labourer from southern Punjab — near Alipur, below Muzaffargarh — on his first migration to Dubai. He lived in the village during off-days, filmed the first flight of the man’s life, and stayed with the story through the Dubai chapter and the return. “I started documenting everything,” he tells Muzamil. “What does he like? What is the village lifestyle? It was new for me too. So I was filming all of that with a fresh lens.”

The film closed as a student project. By chance, a senior interning at Al Jazeera showed it to an executive producer, who showed it to the executive producer of Witness. Al Jazeera acquired the piece on an “acqua-mission” basis — buying the existing footage, then putting more money in to complete it — and paired him with Asad Faruqi, the cinematographer on Sharmeen Obaid’s Saving Face. The documentary aired on 26 April. Owais graduated on 1 May.

The crash on the other side of the credit

Muzamil lets the next beat land without softening it. Owais walked into the job market at 23 with an Al Jazeera credit and assumed the doors would open. They did not.

“It was crushing,” he says. International students at his university had one week to vacate the dorms after graduation. He spent that summer living in a professor’s friend’s house with his car loaded with everything he owned. Oil prices had dipped, Qatar’s hiring market had tightened, and the savings ran out. He eventually messaged his executive producer and asked for anything. He got a data-entry job in Al Jazeera’s legal department, reviewing copyright clearances and consent forms on incoming documentaries. He stayed about a year. “I used to get paid to watch documentaries,” he says, dry about it.

The next role was the one most people would have stopped at. He went to work for the chairperson of Qatar Foundation — “think Melinda Gates type, but of Qatar” — running social media and video for about three years. The job took him to the UN General Assembly and put him in the same rooms as the UN Secretary-General, the prime minister of Italy and the president of Ghana. It was, in his own words, “a dream job. Zero room for error. And very well paid.”

It was also the job he walked away from.

What it costs to choose home

Muzamil pushes here, gently, because the choice is the part listeners will remember. Owais is direct about the trade. “It was a very well-paid job. People had second thoughts for me. A lot of people said don’t go back to Pakistan. But it was something — in my head it was a promise. I was looking at it from my deathbed. If I don’t do this, I’m going to regret it.”

There is a second layer to the decision that Owais surfaces carefully. His parents had moved back to Pakistan two years before he did. He is an only child. “For an overseas Pakistani who has spent sixteen, eighteen years outside, when they move back, it’s like they are moving to a new country,” he says. “Even though they grew up here. The network resets. Everything resets. My mom was really struggling. So there was a responsibility on me as well. That was a very big motivator.”

He had also been married for about two and a half years by the point of the move. The marriage was arranged, both partners are filmmakers — his wife studied film at SZABIST — and he had been explicit before the nikah that he did not yet have the job that would later become Al Jazeera. “I wanted somebody who was willing to take the risk with me.”

What the YouTube channel is actually for

By April 2020 Owais had resigned, moved to Islamabad — into the house his father had spent eighteen years of overseas income paying off — and started posting. He went from roughly 200 inactive subscribers to 43,000 in the eighteen months leading to this conversation. His wife runs a separate channel near 37,000, oriented to a more female audience. The intent was daily vlogs; in practice the renovation of the family home and life events made the rhythm weekly, then monthly.

The framing of the content is the part Muzamil drills into. Owais says the original audience was overseas Pakistanis weighing a return — people who would face the same culture shock he was facing in real time. “I am a third-culture kid. Something that looks very strange to me may look totally normal to a regular Pakistani.” The early viral video was a guide to buying solar. Then a guide to buying an air conditioner. Then airline reviews of AirSial and Serene Air. “Why has nobody ever done that — how to buy an AC?” he asks. “It’s not rocket science. I made the video. It went viral. If you’re in any mature digital space, it doesn’t go viral like that.”

Word by word, the content philosophy he and his wife have settled on is simple. “If our goal is that someone starts from zero and finishes the video, he should learn at least one single thing new. If two, even better.” Muzamil’s reading is that this is the actual recipe — unglamorous compared to prank channels, but the kind of brand discipline that compounds across years.

A long argument about whether Pakistan’s media is free

The episode’s centrepiece is an extended, occasionally tense exchange on journalism, the state, and what “free press” actually means in Pakistan. It runs long because neither man yields ground easily, and it is worth following on its own terms.

Owais opens by saying he wants to do real journalism on his channel eventually. He defines a journalist by training — someone whose job is to keep a check on the government, which is the fourth pillar of the state, regardless of party. He says investigative journalism is largely absent from Pakistani mainstream media: nobody, in his view, has bothered to walk down to the cash-and-carry below Bani Gala to ask why the store stopped accepting card payments under the current government’s “digital Pakistan” pitch.

Muzamil pushes back on the framing that this is a free-speech problem. His argument is structural. He says that until the previous government, roughly 70% of media revenue came from the state. “It’s unprecedented. You don’t run a business where the entire funding is coming from the public sector. If that’s what you’re doing, your business model is incorrect.” When that funding was withdrawn, he argues, media houses without a private-sector model could not pay salaries, and the layoffs that followed are being mis-attributed to political crackdown rather than to a broken business model.

Owais is not persuaded by the macro frame. He brings up the journalist shot in Islamabad, the picking up of Asad Toor in a black Vigo, the case of Mir Shakil-ur-Rehman, the closure of 24 News. He cites Pakistan’s slide on the global press-freedom and transparency indexes. “I don’t think I truly believe that the crackdown isn’t there. I see it.”

Muzamil’s counter is twofold. He says the indexes are myopic — designed in a Western lens that does not register what is actually said on Pakistani Twitter every day. He distinguishes nationalists (“psychopathic, extremist”) from patriots (“solution-oriented, critical where it’s warranted”) and places himself firmly in the second camp. And he reads the Papa Jones-Asim Bajwa story specifically — the family franchise allegations against the then-J-CPEC head — as a case where, in his view, the actual data underneath the story did not survive scrutiny but the scandal carried far enough to push a senior general into resignation. His reading: a system in which that story can run, and that resignation can follow, is one with more press freedom than people credit, not less.

Owais holds the line on one specific point. “Of course there are areas in Pakistan where you can’t talk about. I am passionate about journalism. I will try to cross those boundaries.”

The argument detours through the dollar, subsidies, the 2018 inflection point in the economy, the China devaluation playbook, India’s 1991 IMF crisis, and Turkey post-2001. Both men eventually converge on a single shared principle, even if their diagnoses of the present moment do not match: peaceful transfer of power, free and fair elections, and a free and fair media are the minimum conditions for a thriving democracy. Muzamil adds a fourth — a functioning justice system — drawing on a twelve-year court battle a family member of his had to fight across the sessions, high and Supreme Courts to eventually win. “Justice system is terrible in Pakistan,” he says, flat. Owais accepts the addition.

Why he thinks Pakistan’s digital media is at the start, not the end

After the political argument cools, Muzamil asks the question that may matter most for anyone listening with a creator’s ear: where is the Pakistani YouTube market actually positioned right now? The conventional wisdom is that the space is crowded.

Owais disagrees, and the disagreement is informed. “I extremely disagree with the fact that Pakistani digital media is saturated. Nothing has happened yet in digital media. The train I felt I was rushing to catch — it hasn’t left. I am still one of the first passengers.” His evidence is the asymmetry between his own results and what those numbers would mean in a mature market: a channel near 40,000 with multiple videos crossing 300,000 views. “That kind of success small youtubers do not get in a mature space like the US or European countries.”

He frames the underlying thesis in two moves. First, Pakistan is structurally a late adopter — every global trend in media, he says, has eventually arrived, and the country’s edge is that the playbook can be read from places where the same shift has already happened. Second, the advertising spend currently going to traditional media — “crores and crores” — will eventually rotate into digital, as it has everywhere else. The window, in his view, is now.

The Proton case and what regulation means in practice

The conversation closes on a concrete grievance, and Muzamil deliberately lets it run because it makes the abstract argument land. Owais had decided, on returning, to buy the most economical car that met his safety standards. He rejected the Alto on crash performance, stretched his budget from 16 to 22 lakh, and booked a Proton — at the time the safest car in that price band, sold by one of the new entrants the 2016–21 auto policy had brought to Pakistan.

The booking did not deliver. After waiting “patiently, patiently,” Owais filmed the experience into a video and sent the company a legal notice. The original booking video had been seen by 85,000 people, many of whom had booked the car on the strength of it. “A moral responsibility came on me,” he tells Muzamil. The follow-up video — the truth-about-Proton-Pakistan piece — was, when this episode was recorded, sitting around 12,000 views and climbing, with a long average view duration he reads as a leading indicator.

The wider point Owais draws from the episode is the one Muzamil has been pressing on across the conversation: there is a gap in the Pakistani digital media space, and in the journalism space, where someone simply dissects what a government policy or a corporate practice is actually doing and lets the viewer make up their own mind. “My PTA tax video — I gave the positives and the negatives both. These boring videos do really well.” Muzamil agrees, and frames the underlying audience demand directly. “People are really sick of drama. They want — add to my knowledge, don’t take me somewhere. I’ll make up my own mind.”

Closing on contentment, not ambition

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Owais where he sees Pakistan in 2050. The answer leans on the framework they have already built — peaceful transfer of power, free and fair elections, a free media, a functioning justice system — and adds a personal coda that explains the shape of the decision more cleanly than any of the policy arguments.

Owais notes that he travelled to 29 countries between 23 and 27, including a six-month internship in Chicago, and that the Western emigration default that most Gulf-raised Pakistanis follow was a choice he consciously rejected. “No offence to people who decide to raise a family there. I didn’t like it. I don’t think it’s the best place for me to raise mine.” The second life lesson he names is older and shorter. Watching very wealthy people up close, very early, taught him that money does not produce contentment. “I was ready to take that step back. Salary cut, savings spent. Try to pursue contentment instead.”

Muzamil closes by wishing him well — “I hope you don’t have to leave” — and the episode ends where it began, with a decision most people would not make, made deliberately, and now being documented in public for anyone considering the same direction.