Tariq Mustafa

My father was an avid reader, and our house was full of books. His taste was good and his reading lists impressive. Every evening or so, his close banker friends would surround him on the pretext of some pending work chores, but I could see that the discussions almost always went towards books, philosophy, and psychology. Politics, I am so proud to say, never sustained a presence there. These settings had their small but permanent mark on my developing mind.

I was lucky enough that even after the premature death of my father at an age of 52, my education at age 18 continued on the back of whatever finance was available to my young widowed mother. The decision we took together to decline a clerical job offered to me under a scheme called “deceased quota” by my late father’s employer turned out to be a good one. I enrolled in the premier engineering university of Pakistan in the Electrical Engineering department for my graduate education.

Something weird happened at the engineering school. I had developed a taste for books, reading, and thinking in solitude already. The engineering university exposed me to a very high standard of curriculum, authored by top North American technical authors. I was drawn towards the technicalities being discussed, the quality of the authorship, and the big picture concepts. I was sucked in by the abstract sections of the various subjects these books were discussing. Sometimes, I would re-read the paragraphs or pages or even entire chapters—not for the lack of understanding them but for giving me the delight of reading them again and again.

In 1995, I was among the few dozen people in the city of Karachi (with a population of well over 10 million) for whom the “Internet happened.” From a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) funded arrangement, we used store-and-forward dial-up Internet to send and receive emails from Karachi to New York, US. But around 1996, the Internet became much more accessible to all in Pakistan, and the information floodgates opened.

Unlike youngsters today, who consider the Internet a utility just like gas, electricity, or water, I had seen the Internet bloom from a very young state to a solid presence it has become today. Much of the unique closeness I experience from having seen the Internet blossom into what it is today has to do with the fact that it has allowed me to learn so much about myself and my introvert personality. From pop culture to serious research articles and audio/video content on introversion, the Internet has given me more than what I could’ve asked for.

When I entered a professional career, I got successive jobs in telecommunication companies of Pakistan, where my work invariably revolved around the Internet. In the past 19 years, I climbed the corporate ladder to eventually achieve the top slot of a network technologist in an important telecoms operation. As I look back at the work done, teams developed, and business conducted, I become more and more conscious of the introvert nature I have carried all along.

The works by leading introverts, their books and blogs, and accompanying research have handed me a mixed bag of charms and chills. From the personal to the professional, the advent of the Internet, much like the books of my youth, has changed my life in many ways and made me who I am today.

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