It must have been fate, then, that saw me sitting in the office of the Coordinator for the Media Sciences department at SZABIST last summer, resume in hand, offering my services yet again for a teaching position at one of Pakistan’s best universities. I still am not quite sure how I made the decision to become a teacher – albeit part-time; I had an active writing career going on at the same time and wanted to devote most of my time to that. However, I had talked to a lawyer friend who told me he would be teaching in the law faculty at that university, and for some reason the thought of working in higher education appealed to me in a way that teaching elementary or high school never had.  You know what, I thought to myself, I could do that! 

Given that I was a writer and journalist by now of some experience, I thought that I would be most useful as a writing teacher, but the SZABIST administration had other ideas for me. In fact, it would be useful at this point to say that the minute I decided to go ahead with my plan to teach, nothing actually turned out the way I envisioned it. For example, I approached my interview with the same solemnity that a priest would conducting his first funeral: I prepared myself for challenging, probing questions about the state of education in Pakistan, my abilities as a writer, and my hopes for the youth of Pakistan.

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