When you looked at my portrait, what did you see?
A man in a suit? Corporate. Serious. Professional. You would not be entirely wrong. By day, I work in finance in Amsterdam. I spend my time in meeting rooms discussing investments, risk, sustainability, and the future. But most evenings, I leave those rooms and walk into very different ones. I am also a stand-up comedian.
Over the past two years, comedy has taken me to stages across seven countries, including America. I have won awards for stand-up, performed in some incredible comedy clubs, and told jokes to people whose cultures, languages and lives can be completely different from mine. And somehow, we laugh at the same things.
I was born and raised in Pakistan. I studied in Australia. I built my life in the Netherlands. Today, I am “Dutch.” And somewhere along the way, I realised that identity rarely fits as neatly as we expect it to. At work, seriousness has value. On stage, I search for the absurdity hiding inside it. One part of my life asks me to understand risk. The other asks me to take it. One gives me PowerPoint. The other gives me a microphone. I need both.
Stand-up has taught me something I wish we remembered more often: the person standing in front of us is almost always more complicated than the story we create about them. Their appearance. Their accent. Their nationality. Their job. Their religion. These things may tell you something about a person. They rarely tell you everything.
So the man you imagined when you first looked at this photograph? He is real. He is just not the whole story.
Oh, and one last thing you couldn’t possibly know from the photograph: My moustache has a name. Her name is Jessica. Why Jessica? I’ll tell you that story another time.