An Interview with Nasser Khan Ghazi

#11 digicom1 have said it all it were the pardesis(Aslam Pardesi) who are the real pioneers.... and only those who know the inside story can verify that this person was just a selfish opportunist

Digicom is a great service to Pakistan.

I can completely relate to your experience. I too had come back to Pakistan, and had a similar experience in trying to start up a venture, and have now left the country to regain my financial and professional vigor.

I wish Nasir Ghazi good luck.

I was an employee of Digicom from the early days and have seen what went internally in the company and who was responsible for the final downfall.

Mr. Ghazi is attributed as the pioneer of Internet in Pakistan which is totally false and baseless. imran and other small UUCP based e-mail service providers were there. Most of the upper high tech class was able to access the Internet through PDN (X.25) networks. I had personally seen people accessing compuserve

through X.25 before digicom went ONLINE.

Digicom can be attributed of bringing Low cost Internet to the masses.

All technical people can realize the complexity of setting up a UNIX based TCPI/IP network LAN/WAN. A PIECE OF CAKE. The only issue was the HIGH SPEED LINK, COST and Availablity.

Digicom was a financial failure till the day we went online and even after that. Any Pakistani business man would have bailed out of this venture. Nobody would have withstood Mr. Ghazi`s childish and stupid management. The guy just wanted to hold the steering whether the company was going downhill or uphill. I always said and knew that Mr. Nasser Khan Ghazi had no COMMON SENSE.

No one might know this but Mr. Aslam pardesi, who blindly invested in Digicom from its early days

from my point of view is the true pioneer. Without his money their would have been no HIGHSPEED link hence no ONLINE internet. That was the only thing stopping other competition from coming in and wiping us out, The cost of the link and whether their would be enough market. He piped money into the company even when we personally saw that their was no return.

Pakistan and karachite`s saw INTERNET because of sheer will of Aslam to make this company work. For a memon matriculate this is something.

Aslam made ghazi a partner in the company, A guy who had nothing to offer financially. As I had said earlier that Mr. Ghazi had no common sense he did not realize the opportunity he was given and totally bungled up the situation.

I can say with my experience working in Pakistan that no pakistani bussiness man would make someone a business partner if he had nothing to offer financially.

Mr. Ghazi had a good deal which he wasted and knowing ghazi, I would say he will be regretting it now.

How did ghazi meet the Pardesi`s ? through his inlaws, pardesi was a friend of Ghazi`s father in law. Ghazi was a smooth talker (Inherited from his father ) and was a able to lure aslam in his trap of setting up a company that would return in millions. Aslam was looking for other oppertunities at that time as his cloth export business was not doing well and wanted to invest in other areas.

A little inside on Mr. Ghazi, He was an outstanding spokesman and politician. Technically he was above average but not hot stuff comparable to Einstein as claimed by Samir hoodbouy maybe samir is comparing Mr. Ghazi with his own abilities but definately with the talent moving around in Karachi Ghazi was just above average. further more if he is such a brilliant engineer why is he working for Microsoft as a support manager. a job for a average person. He had worked in the West seen the development enviroment of a software company but nothing special. Mr. Ghazi has mentioned that he was placed 21st in the state of Tamil Nadu for his secondary edu. but fails to mention how he performed in his engineering courses.

He wanted to come back to South Asia as he missed the luxuries and easy life he had spent earliear. India was not a possibility as they were technically ahead of us in the the race and a person with average tech. skills would find again a difficult task of adjusting himself. Pakistan was a land of oppertunity for him his wife being a pakistani was his ticket into the arena. I believe that`s why he married a pakistani. He wanted to do something big like his father and be in the pakistani spot light of fame and fortune. He found Aslam so he had the financial backing the only problem was his nationality, being an indian national and working in the communication area was a big threat. All digicom employees had to face this fear.

The problem could be easily solved by ghazi taking pakistani nationality but the major problem and in the end the reason why Digicom ,its employees and customers had to suffer was that this true patriot of technology and great personality had some property in india and wanted to sell it before he could convert from indian to pakistani national but hadn`t paid propery taxes for quite sometime and hence could not sell his propery if he converted his nationality all this property would be confiscated by the indian goverment. Hence came in the great agreement between Mr. Ghazi and Mr. Aslam that Mr. Aslam would

provide the money to pay of the outstanding dues so that Mr. ghazi would be able to sell his property and convert his nationality. NOTHING WAS ON PAPER.

The company the employees and the customers were all black mailed technically and professionally by Mr. Ghazi. He would hide the technical manuals and configuration details and was quite bitterly depressed by the people working in the technical side as they would on their own come and say we also know this and also that and this is the right way to do it. Proud to say that we showed this Indian what we are made of.

The final and ultimate problem started between the so called partners when Digicom went online. It was a habit of Mr. Ghazi after achieving a COLLECTIVE mile stone he would demand for some kind of reward from Mr. Aslam , He asked for the money to payoff his property taxes etc etc. Mr. Aslam at that time was quite angry with Mr. ghazi he bad mouthed with Pak Datacom and sabotaged a good bussiness deal, It might be a news to some people that Mr. Ghazi had a very bad temper and would usually have a fit of anger like a small child. In short he refused to pay. Mr. Ghazi (who was in india at the time ) some how got hold of the complete system passwords and changed them and got complete control of the system and started to blackmail the whole company untill the money is not paid the system will remain shut.

Mr. Aslam paid off the money but things were no longer the same. No more funds were available anymore for new stuff. I would ask the readers to be the judge and examine who was at fault, what would you do if you were in the shoes of Mr. Aslam. Mr. Ghazi on return tried to smooth talk his way back into things but the original guy was exposed and hence started the long tug of war between Aslam and Ghazi

The system had no harddisk space fine , until Aslam gives me a new car there will not be any kind of space expansion , the customers suffered and the name of digicom suffered. Senior people left as there was nothing to do then watch this childish war.

Mr. Ghazi continued this untill competition caught up with Digicom. At that time Aslam was again forced to make a decsion that Mr. Ghazi will be the sole controller of Digicom including financial transactions etc etc. Aslam agreed, the very next day he emptied the bank account of Digicom and left for the US. And there was

NO BACKUP OF THE SYSTEM, the BACKUP had

flown to the US.

I leave the reader to decide what should be the conclusion on Mr. Ghazi and his achievements .

Though I can go on and on but this sould be an

eye opener for all believers in Mr. Ghazi.

A great interview of a great guy.

I was fortunate to meet Nasser Ghazi in 1994, in a meeting at my parent`s house. The topic du jour then was the creation of the Usman Institute of Technology (which later merged into Hamdard University.) I was a freshman back then, returning home for the summer, and was extremely excited about the idea of creating a university in Karachi -- one of technical excellence.

I`d just spent a year integrating ``e-mail`` and the WWW into my life at RPI and like any arrogant freshman, was pretty sure that that was the way the world was going to work. I couldn`t understand why so many people thought of that idea as crazy in of itself back then.

Being the youngest loudmouth of the group (which consisted of a really exciting band of freshly returned US college graduates) I was of course not taken seriously, but I will never forget how Nasser Bhai quietly and with clear logic asked and answered the question ``why not?`` It had to come to Pakistan. He defended his arguments with technical excellence that none could well argue against (again, this was a technically very savvy group, not to mention really uninhibited.)

After everyone else had left, while he and my father, Samir Hoodbhoy, were in the midst of an extremely engaging post-meeting discussion, I vividly remember realizing that I was sitting in the presence of a person who was going to do great things.

For the record, the obstacles that Nasser Bhai overcame in setting up Digicom were monumental. As one who was a direct witness of the process, and despite being the son of an eternal optimist, at times I thought he was nuts. But he persisted with a determination that is almost impossible to describe. This is a man who did everything from physically going up on top of buildings to set up satellite transponders to successfully going through the entire bureaucratic process of getting an ISP license when the process itself didn`t exist. The argument of who had the first ISP service in Pakistan is merely academic.

The tragedy in all of this is how shamefully Pakistan treated him. Nasser Ghazi is a jewel of a human being and technically one of the most outstanding engineering professionals I have ever met, anywhere in the world. In losing him, Pakistan has perhaps lost the equivalent (almost) of another Salaam.

Vis a comment made by another avid reader, ``if only there were more people like him``, allow me to posit that there are people like him, working hard in Pakistan. The list of people Nasser mentions, while small (and even though he didn`t intend it -- woefully incomplete), is representative of a large minority of talented, dynamic people who are committed to bringing about real, tangible change. And that`s just the people in the IT world! There are many, many more social scientists, teachers, doctors, architects, intellectuals etc. whom we rarely recognize.

But it is people like us who have to find them, keep encouraging them, and work with them as and when they are in the midst of things. Not to merely eulogize them after we`ve lost them and to poo-poo the ``system``.

While we are at ``setting the record straight``, I may add that .PK domain system for Pakistan was established in 1992 (three years before Mr Ghazi invented the Internet). However Mr. Imran Anwar did not have any part in the creation of .PK, according to .pk folks at http://pknic.net.pk

On behalf of my friends in Pakistan who are benefitting from the internet, THANK YOU Mr. Ghazi. You are a truly a hero. Its sad that the world is changing so fast and our archaic system and primitive, suspicious and cynical mentality just won`t allow people of your caliber to realize the true potential of what Pakistan can be. My best wishes to you and your family.

regards,

Rehan.

PS Thank you Ms. Bina for bringing it to us.

Good informative piece.
Good luck with everything, Nasser Khan.

re: Bina
It would be incorrect to call Digicom the first ISP in South Asia. Maybe you mean first private ISP. Don`t know the technical significance of that, though ? VSNL and before that ERNET in India have been ISP`s since the early `80s.
I have had an ERNET account since 1986.

Great article, the kind Chowk.com is sorely in need of as opposed to the cliche-ridden ones that are in abundance. However, calling Mr. Ghazi the founder of ISPs in South Asia would be a stretch...regardless of his enviable accomplishments.

The first internet e-mail commercial service was established in Pakistan in 1992-3 by Imran Anwar, an electrical engineering graduate of Engineering U., Lahore and later an MBA graduate from Columbia Business School in New York. As a matter of fact, the top level domain for Pakistan, .PK did not even exist, until Imran Anwar and one of his associates had it created/registered.

Imran`s service that also carried press feeds and had several hundred individual and commercial accounts besides offering a free PakistaNews (which was among the first DAILY NEWS services on the internet at that time), was arguably the real pioneering idea.

Of course it did not offer live web services at that time. And Imran eventually moved out of offering internet services. As a matter of fact, his recognition as the pioneer comes also from the international media, like the Wall Street Journal, and their magazine Far Eastern Economic Review. Yet, it is strange that a Pakistani e-zine like yours fails to realize or recognize that.

Perhaps we should do more background research before making the kind of hype-ridden claims South Asians are accused of. As disclosure, I went to high school (Aitchison College, Lahore) though I did not know him there, and later to university with Imran (imran@imran.com) where we were acquainted. He still hangs out in Long Island, NY and can be checked up at http://www.imran.com

Thank you very much Bina and Spider mag (Dr. Altamash?) for an enlightening and excellent article. Mr. Ghazi shines as someone who has surmounted great hurdles to achieve something that really should be thanked for by all internet-using Pakistanis. Without his intervention and perseverance, internet usage could have been near nonexistent in Pakistan because of misdirected government control.

And don`t worry Mr. Ghazi: the numerous packed internet cafes popping up near NIPA roundabout in Karachi are a testament that your vision may actually come true. More and more people from less advantaged classes appear to be using the Internet. Not only do internet-pakistanis need to thank him, but all pakistanis who favor real freedom do too.

As a person who has strong ties to both India and Pakistan, I don`t understand some readers` attempts to classify Mr. Ghazi`s motives/background as strictly Pakistani or Indian. I completely understand his enthusiasm for trying to achieve difficult technical accomplishments in Pakistan and his energy at trying to attack such challenges. If only there were more people like him ....

re: Rishi

My thoughts exactly. Mr. Ghazi has certainly had a remarkable career. But the questions that you raise did come to my mind too. One plausible explanation that I could invent was that Mr.Ghazi, after extensive interaction with the powers that be in Pakistan (meaning the bureaucracy) has started taking a widely acceptable line(in Pakistan) when answering questions(especially since this article was published first in some other magazine). If he feels un-Indian I too would certainly like to know the reason.

Ashish

Bina:

Nice piece. Came across on the Spider but could not interact there.

Seems like we specialise in driving talent away,

not only ours-- in the sense of being born locally--- but also others--- who are attracted for various reasons.

(I know, I know, you went back. and others want to return. I am not discussing the exceptions).

Good luck to you Ghazi.

regards

A splendid career worth emulating.

I apologize ahead for this tangent.

Some Questions me being an Indian :

1. Is Nasser Khan Ghazi`s interest in Pakistan merely industry or is it also oriented towards nationality ?

2. If he longs to be a Pakistani (could be a wrong assumption ) and not an Indian, does he have any reasons for it ?

3. Does he have any misgivings in India. A cursory glance at his profile shows that he has been fortunate to have had the best education, not only India but even south asia has to offer .

4. However he is indeed a good example of atleast the secularism which India tries to bring forth to the helm.

5. Does he feel Indian at all ?

Bravo, Ghazi sahib, Bravo.