Waqas Hassan

We experienced something unreal.

About 150 kids & adults gathered to meet us because of AI Education we've been delivering to them in Pakistan. I've never seen anything like this in my life - where a vibrant, energetic community is being built because "people love learning".

This is what Kaabil stands for.

The love, the laughs, the sense of belongingness - all of it just made us realise that we need to triple down on our mission of bringing worldclass education to everyone 💚

Thank you Playce.co for venue support - what a magical space you have 🎸🥳

Urgent! HELP! 🚨

I’ve been captured! Mujhay sirf eik message ki ijazat mili hai aur mein ye message ap kids ko send keraha hoon kyunki ap mera crew ho.

Captain Aliem sent his special agent Zoëlena to our ship “The Seven Seas”. I thought she was one of us but she was actually a working of Captain Aliem.

I’m now in the prison at their ship “The Neon Voyager”. Their technology is very advanced, I can not break free.

But kids! Ap mera crew ho. Ap mujhay nikal saktay ho takay mein dubara apke sath adventures karoon.

Class 7 mein Tuesday ko Captain Aliem coding sikhayen gay aur ap ko eik task dein gay. Agar 100 kids wo task ker paye sirf tub ye prison khul sakta.

Pleaseee help! I know you kids will be able to free me again 🏴‍☠️

Aye Aye,
Pirate Waqas

My cofounder asked me yesterday, "How are you feeling now that you've started a movement?"

I didn't answer right away. I've been trying to sit with that question.

This has been the most insane week of my life.

More than 10,000 kids across Pakistan have let me into their homes and accepted me as their teacher. Kids from Balochistan, Chitral, Gilgit, every city and village in Punjab, Sindh, and KPK. They are learning AI. And what they are doing with it — their creativity, their imagination — is beyond anything I have ever experienced in all my years of teaching.

There was a movie I watched as a kid in India called Taare Zameen Par. The thing it showed me was what happens when children are given the freedom to dream. I have never seen anything at that scale in real life — until this week.

Thousands of assignments are pouring in. AI stories, raps, drawings, games, poems. My entire team spent the week just going through them, and none of us could believe this is happening. In Pakistan. In one week. From children.

The kids have taken the six characters — Uncle Waqas, Waqas Baba Ji, Pirate Waqas, Waqas Panday, DJ Waqas, My BFF Waqas — and done things with them I could never have imagined. I want to print every single submission and put them on my wall. I've shared some of them with this post, but there are so many more.

But that's not actually the point of this post.

The point is what happened when I tried to answer my cofounder's question.

I reflected back, and I realized — the first formal training I ever delivered in my life was in the second week of August, 2017.

That is 464 weeks ago.

It's in those 464 weeks that I learned how to stand in front of a room and not be afraid. It's in those 464 weeks that I figured out that teaching is not about what you know — it's about what the other person feels. It's in those 464 weeks that I failed in ways I never told anyone about. It's in those 464 weeks that I got up the next morning anyway. It's in those 464 weeks that I learned to read a room, to simplify what seems complex, to make a stranger trust me with their time. It's in those 464 weeks that I taught adults across countries and industries and slowly, without realizing it, was being prepared for the one room I didn't know I was building toward — a room full of children.

It took 464 weeks to get to this week.

And this week, it surely does feel like a movement has started in Pakistan. A movement that is going to change the lives of thousands of kids. A movement that is then going to change the lives of their families. And a movement that is eventually going to change the trajectory of the country itself.

So here's to the movement.

Yours,
Waqas