Some days back I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Kashif Anwar the owner and brain behind the leading coffee chain of Pakistan “Coffee Planet”. To be honest, I initially thought this was going to be another business meeting in which we will be meeting someone who only cares about the money but boy was I surprised. Mr. Kashif turned out to be everything but a person who just wants oodles of cash in his life. In fact he left a high paying job as a Project Manager for Rogers (Canada’s Biggest Cellular Network) along with various small business abroad just to come back to Pakistan because all that he ever loved was here.
Naturally, I had to ask why did he come back? It’s not every day you meet a settled Canadian who just ups and leaves everything to come back to what the West thinks of as a doomed place. His reply was eloquent and made sense for a patriot. His exact words being, “I believe this is the time to come back to the country and try to add the values that we once had, to bring back the experience we have gained from the western society and at least try to bring back the economy of this country”.
Of course, one may wonder that how can a coffee shop be able to punch a hole in a country’s economy; the answer being, “I know in a coffee shop you only employ 20 people directly but what you don’t see is that it takes 150 people to run a coffee shop.” This does make sense, I mean just by promoting local vendors over global ones (especially Chinese), Coffee Planet has created about 150 thousand opportunities. Not only that, they taught all the vendors they did deal with various aspects of quality control (something which as you can guess was absent). Of course, they did face some difficulties but Mr. Kashif went on to thank Mr. Shahbaz Shareef for all the support and good work he was doing to make things easier for investors.
Now, I know you might be thinking that, “Wow, a rich guy decides to come back and invests money. Give me a break!” Well, perhaps the notion of a person who is trying to be an equal opportunity employer and a person who’s giving educated people jobs on the basis of merit might change your minds! Let’s face it, in a country like ours, most jobs aren’t earned but they are rather sold to the highest bidder. Therefore, any person who decides to break the cycle of corruption is perfectly awesome in my books. Of course, this doesn’t really stop Mr. Kashif from going the extra mile and taking his philanthropy to the next level. As what you might not know is that Coffee Planet spent the Valentine’s Day with the children of S.O.S. village, even though they don’t believe in the relevance of the day, just because they thought that these children, who are forgotten by the society, deserved love the most. Not only that but Mr. Kashif has made it mandatory for all his staff to spend at least 40 hours in a S.O.S. village just so they can get a feel for how life is really like for these children and try to help out. Apart from the S.O.S. village, Mr. Kashif also revealed that he was trying to work with some cancer hospitals as well but all of that will be unveiled to the public in due time.
Since, this was after all an interview and somewhat of an introduction of Mr. Kashif, I obviously thought it would be best if we tried to cut it short, so towards the ending I asked him what his final words for our readers might be. He responed with the following words of wisdom, “I’m still optimistic that the situation will change and we will have a good leadership, investors will come back. A time will come when we will start giving opportunities to youngsters and to teach them how they can enter entrepreneurship. I’m trying to play my part, others should as well.”
He continued after a pause, “Please sit together and be a one nation and let’s kill the corruption. You shouldn’t pay fast money to anyone. Request to all the people who are highly educated to enter.
