What Ten Years Gave Me That I Didn't Have at the Time

I came across a post my Pakathon Melbourne colleague Alea Rizvi wrote back in July 2015, right around when we launched. I hadn't read it in years. It sent me back to reread something I'd written myself about that same period — and going through her thoughts, then sitting with my own again, I think I got something wrong the first time.

In my original post about starting Pakathon, I called it self-interest dressed up as community building — that I wanted a network in a new city, and the mission was mostly a vehicle for that. At the time, that felt like the honest, unflattering version of the story, the one I was proud of for not prettying up. Ten years and a proper reread later, I don't think it's accurate. I think I had the relationship between the two things backwards.

What she actually wrote

She called it "Generation Now" — not a generational label in the usual sense, but her own term for people ready to take a chance and seize the moment, regardless of age. She'd been at a friend's 40th, talking about whether anyone wanted to be 22 again, and nobody did. What she was describing was a group built on combining the wisdom of middle age with the vigour of youth — where what got you in the door wasn't your age or background, but your ideas and your actual desire to change something.

Where I think I had it backwards

Building the personal network was real. It happened, and it mattered to me. But reading Alea's account of why she joined — and then actually sitting down to write about it properly, instead of just thinking about it in passing — made me realise that gain was the outcome, not the reason. What actually drove the thing, day to day, was a real community mindset and a genuine want to push back on a status quo we didn't like — the sense that Pakistani professionals in Melbourne mostly stayed in their own separate lanes, and that a group like this could do something different.

Having people from genuinely different age groups in the team wasn't incidental to that either. It let us show up as a wholesome community group actually trying to change something, not just "young people doing a startup thing." That mix is part of why people in the community engaged with us the way they did.

I don't think I was lying the first time I wrote about this. I think "self-interest" was the more comfortable story — it sounded like self-awareness, like I was being harder on myself than I needed to be, which is its own kind of flattering. The truer version took longer to get to, and needed someone else's account of the same period to actually see it.

The part that still holds up

Alea came to Australia in the 90s, when the US and UK were still the default destinations for Pakistani students. By the time I got here, that had shifted. We were part of a genuinely different wave of migration, for different structural reasons, and I think that's actually why the "Generation Now" framing still holds up for me a decade later. It was never really about age. It was a specific group of people, arriving for specific reasons, at a specific moment, choosing to build something instead of just settling in quietly.

If you're reading this, Alea — I still had your post bookmarked, apparently for a good reason.