Founder’s Notes
Rome. My Roads, My Roots.
I learned Italian long before I understood it, because I had heard it from a doll.
I was still living in Karachi when my father sent me a doll from Italy. I remember it being extremely tall, though it probably wasn’t. I was simply very small. It was one of those dolls with batteries, and every time you pressed it, it would sing an Italian nursery rhyme.
Giro giro tondo, casca il mondo, casca la terra, tutti giù per terra.
Of course, I understood none of it, so I created my own version, guided by sound rather than meaning: Giro Giro Tondo became completely different words. Casca il mondo became one long sound. Those were my first Italian words. Not words at all, really. Just sounds. Sounds without meaning, yet somehow already familiar.
Sometimes later, after we had moved to Italy and life had become life in Rome, there is one image that is impressed in my mind almost like a photograph:
I am holding hands with the little girls from my neighborhood. We are standing in a circle, turning around together, singing exactly that nursery rhyme.
For the first time, I found where that song belonged, and perhaps, where I belonged.
Taste arrived shortly afterwards.
My childhood friend had an American father and an Italian grandmother. Sometimes her grandmother would take us to a park in Rome’s E.U.R. neighborhood. At snack time she would give us a typical rosetta bread filled with Nutella.
To this day I remember the smell of that bread, and I remember the smell of Nutella. And the incomparable smell of bread with Nutella!
Memory has a strange way of preserving fragrances.
One afternoon I only ate half of my sandwich. I carefully wrapped the other half in the tissue paper and tucked it into my pocket.
Later that day I walked into the neighbourhood alimentari. I remember the counter being impossibly high. I must have been five or six years old. I placed my piece of bread on the counter and pointed to the chocolate inside, as I didn’t speak Italian yet. We were living in Rome, enrolled in an American School.
The lady understood and handed me a jar of Nutella.
In those days we had an open tab at the deli. My parents would settle it later. That was simply how neighborhood life worked in Rome.
And that is how Nutella entered our family.
Then came places.
Whenever relatives or friends visited us in Rome, my siblings and I became their tour guides.
Looking back, I smile at the confidence with which children believe they own an entire city.
Our family driver would take us around Rome with our guests. He was Italian and knew every hidden street, every shortcut, every alley. I was always carsick, so I sat in the front seat beside him while everyone else sat behind.
We visited St. Peter’s Basilica. San Pietro in Vincoli, to see Michelangelo’s Moses. The Colosseum. The Spanish Steps. Throwing coins into the Trevi Fountain.
I honestly think we must have accompanied hundreds of extended family members, friends, friends of friends, and their relatives who came to Rome simply because Rome is Rome.
Without realizing it, I was learning the city, I was studying it, living it. To date, I drive through Rome and realize my body knows where to go before my mind does.
I often say that in Rome I have my roads and my roots, I belong here.
I think about a nursery rhyme I could not understand. The smell of warm bread and Nutella. The rhythm of the days marked by church bells. The front seats of our cars. The confidence of a child who believes she knows an entire city and its infinite history.
I belonged to Rome before understanding the place. It was with a sound, a taste, a street, a memory.
Only to discover that this is what becomes a home.
Freedom, by Chance
Freedom is something we underestimate until we encounter someone who does not have it.
My trip to Nosy-Be, Madagascar, in 2026 made me aware, once again, of something I have long respected: what we call chance.
Chance. Luck. Fate. Whatever name we give it, it remains humbling because, ultimately, none of us chose where we were born. Invisible circumstances shape entire lives. We did not choose the family we were born into, the passport we first held, the language we first spoke, the opportunities that naturally opened before us, or those that remained closed.
A mentor once taught me three words that I carried with me, understanding the deeper meaning at each ‘growth juncture’ of my life: humility, gratitude and admiration. Or, perhaps more importantly, the absence of envy. My mentor called it the ‘qualities of the spirit’. Those qualities, she would say, nourish the soul because they begin with accepting that much of life was never ours to control.
Travelling with an Italian passport, today ranked the fourth most powerful in the world, gives me the freedom to choose where to go, which experiences to live and which memories to collect. It is a freedom so ordinary that it almost becomes invisible.
Yet I only became an Italian citizen after the age of thirty, despite having lived in Italy since I was three years old. Born in Pakistan, to Indian parents. Life unfolded differently from what I imagined. Bureaucracy, circumstances and the unpredictability of life meant that, for many years, travelling was never something I could simply decide to do.
I still remember standing in airports around the world, approaching the yellow line before passport control and feeling that tingling in my stomach of anticipation, waiting for the passport to be stamped and knowing that, until that moment, entry was never entirely a given. I remember college friends in Rome organizing spontaneous trips to Paris, Madrid and Amsterdam, while I needed to apply for visas. I remember being twenty years old and simply learning to accept that, for reasons beyond my control, I was not yet ‘qualified’ to move freely across borders.
Looking back, I appreciate the mind of the person I was then. At some unconscious level, I had already understood something, for which I only have words today:
When one possibility is unavailable, life is in fact inviting you to look elsewhere.
Since travelling abroad required planning and time, my attention turned towards what was already around me. I discovered Rome. I discovered Italy. I walked through its streets, entered its palaces, connected with its people and lifestyle, absorbed its history with complete attention, because that was what was more readily available to me.
I entered it fully, only after I had spent enough time struggling with it, resisting it, wishing things had been otherwise, and perhaps trusting that there was something here I had not yet seen. This is where everything began.
Over time, I became aware that what is here is here for me, not against me, giving me a direction, and every circumstance is asking us to look somewhere, like an invitation.
Since childhood, I imagined a diplomatic career, that of an ambassador for Italy, and much of my education followed that direction, leading me to study International Relations. By the time I obtained Italian citizenship, however, I had passed the age limit for applying to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Looking back, life was inviting me to understand that perhaps what had always attracted me was not the title itself, but what it represented. I have, in my own way, continued to feel like an ambassador for Italy ever since, albeit unofficially, promoting its people, its products, its culture and its way of living through consultancies, initiatives, the guests welcomed here over the years, and eventually through founding ISportTravel.com and now Naquist.com.
I have come to believe we define ourselves through the way we choose to express what is already within us, and if something genuinely belongs to our nature, life has a remarkable way of opening different paths through which it can find its expression.
Over time, I also came to understand that family extends far beyond the one we are born into. Families are made of neighbours, of family friends, of school friends, of work colleagues, of the people whose paths we cross. The deepest connections for me are spiritual before they are biological. They are chosen, cultivated, reciprocated. And perhaps this is one of the greatest freedoms we are given: to create family wherever we find humanity.
Years later, that way of seeing the world found its fullest expression in the Naquist platform.
Naquist is, ultimately, about environments, about places. But above all, about people. It is about understanding that places only become meaningful through the people who inhabit them and the stories they carry, asking us to look deeply rather than broadly, and choosing presence over accumulation.
I have been very fortunate growing up in Italy, within an international environment, surrounded by different cultures, international schools and my parents’ diplomacy culture. Expanding my horizons and appreciating every opportunity, knowing what it felt like to wait for them.
Years later, standing in Madagascar at the inauguration of a school for children, built through the commitment of an Italian association, I found myself singing the Italian anthem as the flag was being raised. My hand instinctively rested on my chest, unexpectedly feeling. I felt, to the core, the connection to that anthem, to that Constitution, to the opportunities that Italy had given me, and to the idea that a country can reach far beyond its own borders through people who simply choose to help.
Madagascar simply reminded me that, after all, our entire existence is shared humanity.
When I heard that someone from Madagascar needs visas even to travel to many African countries, I felt a sense of claustrophobia because I remembered, in some distant way, what it feels like when movement is not yours to choose.
Freedom is never only about movement; it is about becoming aware that what feels ordinary to us may be extraordinary to someone else.
And perhaps gratitude begins exactly there.
In the Momentary Surge of Joy: The Revelation of Purpose
Every now and again I hear someone close a speech, a mindfulness retreat, a commencement ceremony or a conversation with the words, follow your purpose. Sometimes it is preceded by an even more abstract invitation: find your purpose.
I never quite understood what that meant.
Rather than inspiring me, those words often left me with a quiet sense of confusion, and at times even guilt. I understood purpose as something almost heroic, a grand gesture, the founding of a social enterprise entirely dedicated to elevating others, somehow placing their needs above my own, their aspirations above my own desires. Anything less seemed, in comparison, selfish.
Looking back, I realize that I spent years trying to understand an idea before I had enough life to understand it.
My understanding of purpose did not arrive all at once. It formed over a lifetime, through conversations with people wiser than myself, through reading biographies, which remain my favorite kind of book, through learning about neuroscience and the intersection of mysticism and science, observing the lives of people who are loved and who themselves know how to love.
The greatest lesson, however, came much closer to home.
My father possessed an extraordinary sense of commercial intelligence. He built businesses, created opportunities and generated wealth. At the same time, generosity seemed to come to him as naturally as breathing. Throughout my childhood I remember him arranging food for those who needed it, helping families in difficulty, supporting people whenever circumstances allowed. There was never any announcement, no desire to be recognized for it, as it was simply part of who he was.
Only after he passed away, in the year 2000, did I come to understand the true extent of that generosity.
Among his personal papers and diaries, my mother discovered records of donations that he had made over many years to carefully vetted associations. Those organizations, in turn, were educating orphans, helping widows establish small tailoring businesses, creating opportunities for families to regain their independence with dignity rather than dependence.
In the months that followed, people began reaching out to my mother.
Young men and women thanked her for what my father had done for them. Some had been supported from childhood through university, becoming doctors and engineers. Some had families of their own by then, and had never met my father or us personally, and we had never known they existed.
I often think that it wasn’t about the money, my father’s greatest act of generosity was the fact that he never made those acts part of his identity. He simply continued living his life, building his businesses, raising his family and allowing his empathy to find its natural expression.
It took me many years to understand what I had been looking at while I had assumed that purpose meant dedicating oneself to others. What I came to understand is that my father had never separated the two: His purpose was not philanthropy.
His purpose was to express, as honestly as possible, the qualities that were naturally his:
Commercial intelligence happened to be one of them. Empathy happened to be another. One generated the means through which the other could find its expression.
What is called purpose, I call connecting with oneSelf.
We have each been given a talent, a quality, an inclination, a certain taste for certain things, an intuition. Initially, it is about becoming aware of those intimate and unique qualities, refining them over time and then acting through that awareness. In doing so, we inevitably touch other people’s lives, and if in some way it ameliorates another person’s moment in life, then the ripples no longer belong to us. They belong to humanity itself.
We come from the same source: Each one of us is created by a Force that we do not control, in which we do not partake. As beings arriving on Earth from a common source, we belong to one another, we are parts of one another. We continually mirror ourselves in those we meet along our life journey, by apparent chance, whether partners, friends, colleagues or the family into which we are born. We exchange something as intangible as thoughts and something as tangible as a meal. Every encounter leaves something inside us.
Among the qualities that make me who I am is the desire to connect people, together with what I have come to recognize as commercial intelligence. Those qualities are simply mine. I did not choose them, but I am responsible for refining them and lending them as tools to generate value for those who dedicate time, care and extraordinary talent to creating beautiful things and to improving other people’s lives.
Over time I also came to distinguish between giving back and creating value.
Giving back and creating value operate in fundamentally different ways, although they are often spoken of as though they were the same. Giving back usually comes after value has already been created. It is a response to a need, a gesture of generosity, and its value is profound because it rests on empathy.
Creating value, however, begins much earlier.
It begins with the very way we choose to think, to work, to organize, to build and to serve. It is structural. It shapes the conditions through which value is continually generated long before anyone speaks of giving it away.
When a chef devotes decades to mastering her craft, she is creating value. When an artisan preserves techniques that might otherwise disappear, he is creating value. When someone builds a business responsibly, creating meaningful work for others, they are creating value.
The giving begins long before any donation is ever made.
Human excellence rests upon fragile ecosystems. Artisans, intellectuals, researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs and visionaries all require environments that allow their work to endure. We can choose to extract value from those environments for short-term gain, or we can choose to sustain them so that future generations continue expanding the knowledge, beauty and opportunity they contain.
In that sense, creating value becomes the very foundation upon which economies, communities and human relationships circulate. Ethical intelligence, commercial intelligence, creativity, rationality, empathy and countless other forms of human intelligence are not in competition with one another. Together they become the ecosystem through which society continues to grow.
Looking back now, I realize that the search for purpose never asked me to become someone else; rather, it asked me to become more fully myself.
Whenever I find myself connecting people, creating business opportunities, helping extraordinary individuals express their gifts, or designing systems that allow value to circulate responsibly, I recognize a familiar feeling. It is not dramatic, not loud, but a surge of joy, a tingling somewhere within me that tells me I feel happiness in this moment.
Perhaps that intimate feeling is purpose itself.