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At 43, I am starting something that, on the surface, may look like a new venture, a new chapter, perhaps even a surprising shift. But the more I sit with it, the less I can honestly call it “new” in the ordinary sense of the word. It is new in form, yes. New in execution. New in risk. New in public declaration. But in spirit, it does not feel new at all. In spirit, it feels old. It feels delayed. It feels as though something that had been quietly forming underneath many different phases of my life has finally found a name, a structure, a language, and the courage to stand in the open. It feels less like a sudden beginning and more like a long-hidden continuity becoming visible.
We are launching The Way Forward, and while people may describe it as an online school, or an education startup, or a bold move into a different field, I myself cannot look at it so simply. For me, this is not just a venture. It is not merely a response to market demand. It is not a side passion that has now become formal. It feels more like the point where many roads, roads I walked knowingly and roads I walked without understanding, roads I embraced and roads I resisted, roads that looked random at the time and roads that felt painful, have somehow come together and begun to reveal that they may have been leading here all along.
Back in 2010, if anyone had told me that one day I would stand with this kind of conviction about education, I would probably not have believed them. At that time, what I wanted from life looked very different. I was a Hafiz of the Quran, and one of the deepest desires in my heart was to go to Makkah and study religion properly, especially to understand the Quran more deeply. That desire was not symbolic. It was not a passing mood. It mattered to me. I wanted that path to open. I wanted admission there. I wanted that life.
At that age, one does not easily know how to interpret such moments. When the heart is attached to something and the door does not open, there is disappointment, but there is also a kind of inner confusion. One wonders why the longing was placed there if the path was not going to be granted. One wonders why the prayer remained unanswered. At that time, I did not know what to do with that feeling.
But now, with the cruelty and mercy of hindsight both available at once, I can see that life was not simply rejecting that yearning. It was redirecting me through a longer route. I wanted one kind of preparation, but Allah had written another. I wanted to go directly into one stream of understanding, but I was first going to be made to pass through work, responsibility, pressure, ambition, technology, business, marriage, parenthood, spiritual return, and many other things before I would be brought back toward that original thirst in a more mature and expanded way.
Today, I do not see that moment merely as a denial. I see it as the beginning of a longer and more complex preparation. It is as though I wanted to enter one kind of understanding directly, but life had written for me a route through the world before bringing me back to knowledge with a heart that had been tested, stretched, humbled, and widened.
So I entered what many would call the normal path. I started working. There was no grand entrepreneurial declaration in me at that time. I was not one of those people who always knew they wanted to build companies or create institutions or become founders. In fact, I entered the technology world carrying a fair amount of self-doubt. I genuinely suspected that perhaps I did not belong there, perhaps I was not made for this world, perhaps I would not get a proper opportunity, perhaps I was simply not good enough for the IT industry.
My first entry came through a friend who had started a company and needed someone to join. It could easily have remained, in my own mind, a kind of favor or a backdoor opening rather than some clean validation of merit. Perhaps that is why I worked with such intensity from the beginning. I wanted to prove, first of all to myself, that I was not there by accident. I worked very hard, spent nights there, learned quickly, and pushed myself until one thing became very clear to me: I was not incapable, I was untrained.
That distinction has stayed with me for life. Many people think they are weak when in fact they are simply badly taught. Many people think they lack talent when in fact no one has helped them see how their mind works. Many people think they are behind when the real problem is that the path itself was not designed well for them. I did not know it then, but this early realization would later become one of the deepest emotional foundations behind what I now want to build in education.
Even my earliest assignments shaped me in ways that now feel strangely relevant. The first project I worked on was ERP development, which meant I had to go to the client, understand the requirements from end to end, and interact across departments like production, inventory, lab, admin, and other functions in a factory environment. That experience taught me far more than technology. It taught me how to listen properly, how to extract meaning from complexity, how to understand systems as living realities rather than abstract diagrams, and how to deal with people whose needs are real even when their language is incomplete.
Then came another role, and with it another experience that still stands out vividly in my memory. I had been hired for web development, but unexpectedly I was thrown into a desktop software project that had been hanging for years. The team that was supposed to work on it had left. I was handed the codebase on a USB drive and expected to figure it out. That was all. There was no polished handover, no comfort, no carefully managed entry. Just a dead or stalled system and a person standing in front of it.
What is interesting is that I did not yet belong to the modern culture of hesitation. Or perhaps more accurately, I had not yet been trained in the modern culture of excuses. I did not begin by collecting reasons why this was unfair, unclear, badly managed, or outside my role. I simply began. I used paper and pen. I took notes. I tried to understand the boundaries of the software, the screens, the functionalities, the logic, the flow. I moved through it piece by piece, and within roughly four months I completed software that had been stuck for nearly two years.
When I reflect on that phase now, I feel that life was teaching me something that would later matter in many more places. Sometimes you do not begin because you already know the route. Sometimes you begin because beginning honestly is the only way the route reveals itself.
Looking back now, I can see that those years were sharpening me in ways I did not understand at the time. Life was sanding down laziness, naivety, immaturity, softness, and many other loose edges that could not survive prolonged contact with responsibility.
But life was not neat. There were complications in my personal world as well. There were emotional struggles. There were issues around marriage. There were distractions. There were seasons in which I pursued singing seriously because some emotional lane in life had opened there too. So this was not a story of a perfectly focused young man marching neatly upward. Not at all. It was a more human and scattered story than that.
Yet even in that scatteredness, one thing kept becoming stronger in me: my ability to understand clients, deal with them directly, earn trust, and carry responsibility in difficult situations.
Eventually, the company through which I had been working broke, and I ended up working directly with the client whose software I had completed. They trusted me enough to continue and to place a much bigger opportunity in my hands, a project worth around eighty-six thousand dollars, nearly a hundred thousand. That was my first real leap into entrepreneurship. It was no longer just a job. It was my name, my judgment, my credibility, my delivery.
What is important to me now, when I look back at that moment, is that I did not respond to it with ego. The project was web-based, and I knew that if I tried to use it as a playground for proving my own technical ego despite my limitations in that area, I might ruin the work and damage the trust I had earned. So I made a decision that says a lot about the kind of businessman I was slowly becoming. I hired the best people I knew. I wanted to protect the project. I wanted to preserve the relationship. I wanted delivery to win over pride.
That project ended up producing something very interesting in my life. The product itself did not become the shining commercial success one might dream of. It did not sell in the big way one imagines when building something substantial. But the relationship with that client continued for roughly a decade. They kept the support going. They kept paying. They kept trusting. And years later, when I visited the United States, I was welcomed into their home.
To me, that says something profound. Sometimes an effort may not be crowned by the market in the way you hoped, but it still produces something deeply valuable in the human world: respect, affection, trust, and proof that sincerity and competence leave behind a real trace.
Still, even as things moved, I was not settled in any final sense. I kept searching, trying, experimenting, and doing so without the kind of entrepreneurial playbook that some people inherit from family or environment. I got admission into an MBA, I got married, I kept exploring, and then came a major chapter in my life: SMSall.
That was the phase in which I felt the actual fabric of startup life much more intensely. I became co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, and for the first time I really felt what it means to live inside strategy, growth, uncertainty, execution, pressure, and the daily strain of trying to build something bigger than a service contract. I worked with an intensity that sounds dramatic when put into words, but at the time it was simply reality. Sixteen to eighteen hours a day, six days a week, especially in the early period when there was little meaningful compensation beyond what older work still supported.
We took what had been more like a university-lab-style initiative and tried to shape it into a real brand. We built a network of around thirteen million users. Political parties used the platform for campaigns. Major television channels showed interest in strategic partnership. Educational boards used it for result announcements. Brands used it to broadcast messages. We explored, pivoted, pushed, and kept trying to make something meaningful happen at scale.
I even went to Silicon Valley to represent the company as part of a selected cohort, which was a memorable experience in its own right. We also did World Bank consulting work, and I personally led major parts of those assignments. One involved building a mobile survey system for thirty thousand households in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, from procurement of phones to application development, dashboards, reporting, field coordination, training across locations, and real-world execution. Another involved capacity-building work in the water and sanitation sector across multiple cities in Pakistan, dealing with WASA structures, leadership, government employees, travel, planning, and the operational realities of institutional systems.
These years stretched me enormously. They broadened me. They taught me about scale, public-facing work, institutions, society, complexity, and the practical world beyond the neat boundaries of software itself.
And yet, even inside all this movement and visible progress, a restlessness remained. I was building, yes. I was growing, yes. But I was not fully at home. Eventually, issues emerged and I started RLTSquare, a services company that also came into being through a mix of intention and accident.
Someone pointed me toward a niche technology ecosystem. A family-related software idea had briefly influenced my thinking. A loan from a family member helped me get started. When I reflect on such things, I often feel that major life decisions are far less orderly than people later make them sound. We narrate our lives as though every turn followed a clear strategy, but many crucial turns arrive more like collisions. Someone bumps into us. A door opens briefly. Another closes. A circumstance pushes us. We step, not always with certainty, and later we give that step a cleaner story than it really had.
RLTSquare brought a different kind of life. Compared to startup chaos, services work was smoother, more standard, more stable. The problems were different: client service, delivery, talent retention, team continuity, sustainable operations. There was less thrill than startup life and less chaos too. It was steadier. But in that steadiness, another truth became harder to ignore: I was no longer fully alive in that world. My wife knew this long before I acted on it publicly. I knew it too. It had become a respectable and necessary way of surviving and building, but not the place where my deepest energies were converging.
Around this phase, another older current returned powerfully into my life. Roughly a decade after that earlier moment when I had wanted to go to Makkah and study but could not, I entered Darse-Nizami and began studying in a madrasa.
This was not a small thing for me. It felt like returning to an earlier thirst, not as a young man frustrated by a closed door, but as a more experienced person who had now seen business, pressure, technology, startups, consulting, travel, speaking, and the market. My studies there were deeply fulfilling, but they also did something more than fulfill. They reawakened something that had been waiting inside me. And because I had already lived through so many other worlds by then, that return to serious religious learning did not narrow me. It widened me. It connected old longing with new maturity. It brought meaning into dialogue with experience.
Then came parenting, and with it perhaps the most decisive convergence of all. When I became deeply involved in my daughter’s learning, I was not doing so casually. I had put her in the best school I thought I could. I attended meetings. I was intensely involved. I was trying hard to understand how she was learning, where she was struggling, what could be accelerated, what could be enriched, and how one could help a child not merely survive education but actually become stronger through it.
At that time, I was not yet thinking, “I will build a school” or “I will create a system for others.” I was simply being a serious and deeply invested parent. But because my entrepreneurial temperament does not let me sit with a problem without wanting to understand its structure, I could not remain at the surface.
The more I engaged, the more I saw. I saw how much time gets wasted. I saw how disconnected subjects can feel. I saw how children can move forward without gaining confidence in thinking. I saw how the sequence itself often seems badly designed. I saw how much of education becomes an exercise in coping rather than a journey of strengthening.
At the same time, something else became impossible to ignore. I loved teaching. Not as a respectable side activity. Not as a hobby. I loved it with a force that had clearly been showing up in my life for years.
And when I looked back carefully, I realized that teaching had been chasing me for a very long time. In grade four, I already had this odd pleasure in learning ahead and then sitting relaxed while others were still being taught, almost boasting that there is something beautiful about accelerated learning because when others are catching up, you are already free.
In grade ten, I helped a friend pass an exam he had struggled with for years, and he would later remind me again and again that I had changed something important for him. In university, whenever I had studied well before an exam, I often found myself surrounded by classmates, teaching them, explaining things, making sure they were prepared. During my master’s at LUMS, I would return home and rehearse what I had learned, even subjects like computer networks, to my wife, simply because I found the ideas too beautiful to keep to myself. In madrasa, I repeatedly helped classmates, including a friend who remains with me in this educational journey today. In my company, I would speak to employees about mindset, growth, and learning. In family circles too, because I was perceived as someone on a stronger educational journey, people often came to me for explanation, encouragement, or help.
There is a saying I once reflected on, that if not knowing something is itself a difficulty, then knowing something can become a greater difficulty, because then you feel compelled to tell everyone. That is close to how I am. If I truly understand something and I see beauty in it, I want to spread it. I want others to taste that clarity as well. I want to share not just the information, but the joy of seeing the thing properly.
Another layer of this journey, which I now realize was deeply important, is my attraction to turning concepts into something alive. I had a gift for what I call storifying ideas. This sounds light if one hears it casually, but it is in fact a major pedagogical force when used properly.
Long before I consciously connected it to educational design, I had a habit of turning abstract or technical concepts into scenes, characters, tensions, movements, and memorable little dramas. In Arabic grammar, I could animate things. In programming, I could almost make the bits and instructions feel alive. In teaching, I would switch voices, create invisible characters in the room, act out both sides of a confusion, and students would laugh, engage, and remember.
When homeschooling my daughter, this became even more visible to me. I realized that story was not decoration. Story was structure. Story could carry concept. Story could make things stick. Story could structure memory. Story could make difficult things human and give even technical material warmth, movement, and emotional grip.
Then I asked myself a bigger question: if I can do this in language and in programming, can I do this in mathematics too? And over time, especially after reflecting much more deeply on mathematics than one usually does when simply passing exams, I found that the answer was yes. I had gone into mathematics philosophically, intuitively, creatively. I had tried to feel the anatomy of concepts, not merely their outward procedures. So when that deeper understanding met storification, I began to feel that something special was possible here, especially for younger learners and for the middle years.
This is where the idea of the middle years took hold of me in a very serious way. I began to see these years as among the most underused, underdesigned, and underestimated years in a child’s life.
I began to feel that these years are the crux. Before them, children are more open, more shapeable, more impressionable. After them, they get trapped in grade pressure, exam systems, and more rigid academic expectations. But the middle years, especially roughly around grades four to eight, contain extraordinary possibility.
If these years are designed intelligently, one can build foundations properly, accelerate honestly, strengthen language, strengthen thinking, connect subjects, remove waste, and save enormous time without “rushing” in the ugly sense of the word. This is not about overloading children. It is about redesigning the flow. It is about sequencing concepts better. It is about connecting what is usually fragmented. It is about creating acceleration through design, not pressure.
From there emerged one of the simplest and strongest expressions of the vision: save years in middle school, and create space for thinking, entrepreneurship, and AI.
I still feel this line carries immense power because it points to something real. If the middle years are taught properly, then the time saved is not empty time. It becomes opportunity. Opportunity for deeper thinking, stronger language, entrepreneurial imagination, AI readiness, self-discovery, broader intellectual horizons, and a more confident relationship with learning itself.
Another thing I now understand more clearly about myself is my attraction to planning, structuring, arranging, and giving form to things long before I fully understood why that gave me such satisfaction. When I went to the United States years ago, one of the things that fascinated me most during shopping was not some flashy gadget or luxury item. It was a planner.
Until then, I had not properly encountered the idea that a notebook-like object could be designed around planning one’s life, organizing one’s days, mapping priorities, and giving shape to intention. I loved it immediately, and I still have it with me to this day. At that time, I did not know why I was so drawn to it. Like many other things in life, I only understood its significance later.
I now see that I have always been deeply attracted to order, sequence, flow, architecture, and the idea that things should not merely happen but should be designed to happen well. In some sense, even this part of my personality was preparing me for education, because education at its highest level is not merely teaching. It is design. It is deciding what should come first, what should come later, what should be connected, what should be delayed, what should be accelerated, what should be repeated, and how a learner can move through years of growth with greater clarity, beauty, power, and purpose.
At some point, all of this stopped being private reflection and became decision. I knew I wanted to do this full time. I remember the day I told my team that we were moving into education and that I could no longer keep this as some half-hidden desire while pretending my heart was still fully elsewhere. My wife had known for years that I was not truly alive in the old industry anymore. I knew it too.
What we are launching now is only the first visible layer of the vision. We are not building this merely as an extra offer to fill gaps left by mainstream schooling, nor simply as a better way to teach the same subjects. I see TWF as a carefully thought-out structural intervention in the middle years, one that can inspire a better way of using these years altogether.
In that sense, I see The Way Forward as an attempt at pioneering middle years education for the AI age.
We are beginning with a premium full-time online program focused on the middle years because I believe this is where one of the most powerful interventions can be made right now. These years are flexible enough to be redesigned and important enough to change the direction of a child’s life.
In the current phase, the first year is built around accelerated learning through our own way of sequencing and teaching, so that core learning can move faster without becoming shallow. The second year opens into entrepreneurship and AI, because saving time is only worthwhile if that time is then invested into what actually matters. The vision is not just to make children better at surviving school. The vision is to make them stronger human beings, more capable learners, more confident thinkers, more ready for a changing world, and more aware of themselves.
But even this is not the whole roadmap. One path from here moves downward into the earlier years, where I believe storification, imagination, and thoughtfully sequenced foundations can transform how children enter learning in the first place. Another path moves outward through productization, so that what begins as a premium and deeply involved model can eventually become accessible to many more families in Pakistan and beyond, including those who may never be able to afford the most intensive format. And another path moves upward toward a fuller K–12 rethinking, where the principles we are discovering and refining can extend into higher levels with the same seriousness.
So when I say The Way Forward, I do not merely mean a school that will teach a few children differently. I mean a living model that, if Allah wills and if we remain sincere and capable, can contribute to redefining education more broadly, not only in our own society but potentially far beyond it. The ambition here is not small. I do not want merely to run classes. I want to help build a more intelligent, more human, more future-aware educational architecture, one that can stand as an argument for how learning might be reorganized in a better way across the world.
Then began the work of giving this new thing a form. One part of that was the name, and even that took time because I did not want to rush something so central. We had begun moving before finalizing the name because I wanted the right one, not merely a functional one.
Then came The Way Forward, and when it came, it arrived with its own breeze. The phrase was familiar enough to feel natural, but precise enough to hold a whole vision. It sounded modern, directional, open, serious, and civilizational all at once. The moment it landed, I loved it.
And ever since, one of my prayers has been: O Allah, make The Way Forward the way forward.
The same words repeated, but not with the same meaning. Once as a name, once as a plea. Once as an identity, once as a destiny. That is how deeply I feel this project.
When I sit with all of this quietly, I think of the many different versions of myself that life produced along the way. The young man who wanted to study in Makkah and could not. The uncertain beginner in tech who feared he might be a misfit. The early worker trying to prove that he was not there by accident. The one handling ERP requirements across departments. The one handed a dead codebase on a USB drive and told, in effect, to figure it out. The one learning to protect trust through honest entrepreneurial choices. The startup builder working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. The consultant traveling across cities and dealing with institutional realities. The services founder trying to keep a company alive. The madrasa student returning to an old thirst. The father obsessed with his daughter’s learning. The man who could not stop explaining things to others whenever he understood them. The hidden teacher inside all these identities.
None of those selves fully knew where they were going. Yet now it seems possible that all of them were, in one way or another, coming here.
So The Way Forward is not, for me, a random shift of industry, and it is not merely a rebranding of my professional identity. It is what happens when many years of work, pain, curiosity, ambition, longing, teaching instinct, spiritual return, parenting, observation, planning, and prayer begin to form one sentence.
I do care about sustainability, scale, and business success, because serious ideas need serious execution and serious resources. I do want this to become big. I do want it to become powerful. I do want it to become financially meaningful. But beneath all of that, there is a deeper prayer. I pray that this becomes genuinely useful. I pray that it helps children not merely perform, but awaken. I pray that it helps parents find courage where courage is needed. I pray that it saves years that are otherwise wasted. I pray that it proves that thoughtful, beautiful, demanding, future-aware education can be built from here, not merely imported from somewhere else. I pray that it creates communities of proud learners who are not merely chasing careers, but discovering themselves. I pray that it becomes a source of dignity, clarity, and possibility for those who enter it. And above all, I pray that The Way Forward truly becomes the way forward.
This is only the beginning of the visible journey. But it is not the beginning of the story. That story began long ago, in many places, under many names, through many struggles, and through many hints that I did not fully understand at the time. What has happened now is simply that the story has finally found the form it was moving toward.
