It was in third grade in his native city Lahore that Hassan for the first encountered Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and fell in love with the character. For most of his secondary and high school years, he developed a habit of reading every day and realized through this habit, his love for knowledge, his passion and longing for well-written works, and his desire for a life of knowledge. To escape the mundane routine and the mechanical and linear thinking promoted, taught and promulgated in secondary and high school; he found solace not only Sherlock Holmes but in works of Kafka, Proust, Manto, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Maupassant as well. There works enchanted his imagination, humanized his emotional and rational response to the other, and instilled and inculcated in him, a sense of skepticism. This is one of the reasons; he is pursuing master’s degree in International Political Theory from The University of Edinburgh and intends to do a PhD in Politics and International Relations from there as well.

Hassan was also the editor of the English section of his school magazine and has participated in and organized Model United Nations. During his school years, he interned with WWF and participated in several adaptions of Shakespeare as well.

During his bachelors from Webster University, he became a fervent reader of continental philosophy – especially Wittgenstein, Derrida and Foucault – and because of this reason his early essays are mostly in philosophy and literature. Hassan has campaigned against modern forms of slavery and human trafficking and has worked as a freelance reporter for Lahore Times as well. He has previously published poems and fiction in The Bombay Review, Outrageous Fortune and blogs at Global Ethics Network.