Why the car scheme was the wrong gift for overseas Pakistanis

Topology, Saint Andrews, and an unplanned career

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Ariba Shahid as a star reporter at Profit magazine — a publication he recommends without any commercial arrangement — and asking a simple question: how does someone who loved economics from O-levels end up in journalism?

The answer is less linear than the résumé suggests. Ariba had a scholarship to study at Saint Andrews in Scotland, a specific choice driven by a desire to experience a smaller city after a life in Karachi. At the last moment, her mother fell seriously ill during A-level exams, went into a coma, and came out of surgery on the final day Ariba had to confirm her university place. She stayed.

That decision funnelled her into IBA Karachi, where economics and mathematics were a compulsory dual major. The mathematics, she is clear, was not a source of joy. Topology — the branch of mathematics where, as she explains it, a donut and a coffee mug are technically the same object because they share one hole — nearly broke her. “I specifically remember this,” she says. “Karachi mein stabbing can you die if someone stabs you — and I realised the chances of dying of getting stabbed are not high if you don’t pull out the knife. I was like, you know what, I think that sounds better than giving the exam.”

She graduated in 2018, took a corporate research and investigation role, then worked as an economic researcher at another firm. A casual interview at Profit — one she did not prepare for and did not expect to lead anywhere — sat dormant until she sent the editor a petroleum article she had written independently. He replied that the position was still open. She took a week to think about it. Her closest friends, she says, were genuinely surprised: “They’re like, you never said you wanted to be a journalist. What happened? And I’m like, I have no idea, but I like it.”

What a week of reporting actually looks like

Muzamil presses Ariba on the mechanics of the job — specifically, what fills the hours that are not spent writing. The answer is more granular than most people expect.

For a short story, she estimates three to four hours reviewing financials, another three to four hours reading prior coverage and building background on the people involved, and an hour or two constructing an Excel sheet to organise the material. A longer investigation is a different matter entirely. One story on private vaccine procurement required her to read through a thick stack of court documents — not once, but three times. “Every time I went through them I found something new,” she says. Another piece took a month of back-and-forth drafting, where she would write the argument, then deliberately write the counter-argument, then integrate both, cycling through until she and her editor were satisfied.

The writing itself, she notes, cannot be forced. Sitting in front of a screen for nine hours does not produce nine hours of output. Profit’s editor eventually introduced a hard clock-off time, though in practice the job bleeds into everything else. When Muzamil asks about her trip to Islamabad — which he had glimpsed on a calendar that included a slot labelled “chilling time” — she clarifies that she is moderating a lecture event the following day, an engagement that came through her professional profile rather than a direct editorial assignment. “Even when you’re talking to your friends, you’re working,” she says. “My friends don’t like talking about work with me anymore.”

The right to reply — and the two people who still hate her

One section of the conversation covers the ethics of the reporting process itself. Ariba describes the standard practice of reaching out to anyone who features in a story before publication, giving them the opportunity to respond. If they do not reply, she has done her job. If something is printed in error, a correction or editor’s note is possible.

The practice is not always comfortable. She describes messaging a source she knew disliked her — for a second story she knew he would dislike even more — by leading with the observation that he loved journalism and she was hoping that would be enough to get him talking. It was not. She sent him the finished article anyway. A separate subject called her “a snake in the grass,” also declined to comment, and also received the published piece. The principle, as she frames it, is consistent: reach out regardless of the relationship, document the attempt, and publish.

Overseas Pakistanis, remittances, and the wrong sector

Later in the discussion, the conversation shifts to economic policy — specifically the government scheme offering overseas Pakistanis preferential terms to purchase cars. Ariba’s critique is precise and worth following closely.

She does not object to incentivising overseas Pakistanis to send money into Pakistan. The logic of attracting foreign exchange is sound, and she acknowledges that remittances, whatever the sender’s motivation, do flow into the current account. Her objection is to the choice of sector. “The auto sector was doing really well,” she says. “We’ve got new players coming in. You didn’t need that extra push for a sector that is primarily rent-seekers.”

The second layer of her argument is distributional. She notes that more than fifty percent of Pakistanis who move abroad are labourers or drivers — people who could, in principle, pay the full price for a car without a special scheme. Directing a policy concession toward them in the form of a car import benefit is not obviously the right use of that instrument. “My critique is not: don’t encourage overseas Pakistanis to send money. Encourage them. But don’t make the locals feel inferior to them. And choose the right sectors.”

She adds a third point that Muzamil does not push back on: Pakistan does not need more cars on the road. It needs public transport. She mentions that she does not use ride-hailing apps because she does not feel safe as a woman in them, and that Karachi’s geography has grown too large for any single transit system to cover adequately. The car scheme, in her reading, moves in exactly the wrong direction.

Women, bank accounts, and gold as a financial instrument

One of the more grounded passages in the conversation comes when Ariba describes a colleague — a LUMS graduate, working at a company, receiving a salary transfer — who was unable to open a bank account without having her documents attested by a male relative. The bank did not accept her valid national identity card and proof of income on their own.

From there, Ariba connects the structural exclusion of women from formal banking to a practice that often gets dismissed as superstition: buying gold. “A lot of reasons why women give gold to their daughters at weddings is primarily because it’s immediately in your possession. You don’t need a bank account for it.” She adds that the statistics on women holding bank accounts likely overstate female financial autonomy, because many of those accounts are joint accounts rather than sole accounts owned by women. “Without bank accounts, without stuff like this, you can’t do business. There are lots of things you need a bank account for.” She is direct about what does not solve the problem: “Pink checkbooks are not the solution. Optics are not the solution.”

The stock market is not the economy

Muzamil asks about the experience of being a financial journalist on social media — specifically, how Ariba handles the friction that comes with making claims that contradict what people want to hear. She gives a clean example: the stock market is not an indicator of the economy. It is a point she says she makes consistently, regardless of market direction and regardless of who is in government. Some followers have unfollowed her over it. She is not troubled by that. “I would say this when the market’s up and also when the market’s down. It’s constructive. Constant. Regardless of who’s in power.”

The broader point she makes about social media discourse is that the platform rewards the appearance of expertise. Anyone can spend five minutes reading about a topic and arrive with a confident opinion. The result is that genuine disagreement and bad-faith provocation are hard to distinguish in the moment, and responding to the latter as if it were the former is a trap she tries to avoid.

Trolling, harassment, and the organised pile-on

By the end of the conversation, Ariba and Muzamil are working through a distinction that she admits she finds genuinely difficult: where trolling ends and harassment begins. Her working definition is behavioural rather than tonal. A sarcastic comment from a single account is not harassment. Repeated contact from masked numbers is. An organised group coordinating to flood a single person’s mentions is. “I would call organised trolling harassment because you’re firing like bullets and you’re like, save me from all those places.”

She also describes a smaller, quieter form of dismissal — being called a “girl” on Twitter rather than a woman — and credits a senior woman she respects for pointing out why the word choice matters. The intent may be innocent, she says, but the effect is to frame the subject as young and unimportant. She connects this to a broader point about how norms shift: things that were acceptable a few years ago are no longer acceptable, and the right response is usually to update quietly rather than to perform outrage or to dig in.

On cancel culture more broadly, she is careful. She will not enforce her own judgements on others. She can choose not to platform someone she considers a genuine harasser, and she would note it if a friend did otherwise. But she stops short of claiming the authority to declare anyone permanently cancelled. “I don’t know if I’m the judge,” she says. “I can cancel someone on my behalf, but I cannot enforce it on you.”

Muzamil closes the conversation at the fifty-two minute mark, noting that Ariba has a lunch to get to and that Islamabad is waiting.