I really don’t like my carbon footprint right now. With most of the recent major activity taking place in emerging markets, I’ve spent a lot of time on planes this year. Depa, the first true entrepreneurial IPO to come out of Dubai, was a highlight, as was the London Stock Exchange listing of Lucky Cement, which marked the return of the Pakistani capital markets after the political turmoil earlier this year. I’m getting tired of travelling, but as the dominance of conventional old economies continues to erode, I don’t see it letting up.

Emerging markets work comes naturally to me. My background may have something to do with it: I was brought up in Pakistan, before coming to the US to study at Harvard. After a shaky start as a lawyer — my initial response on joining Cleary in New York was “Oh f*ck! This is a mistake” — I got dragged onto a bunch of Latin American deals, including the privatisation of Telmex, the Mexican telecoms company, and realised that a lucrative career could also be interesting and worthwhile.

I kind of like the gamesmanship of corporate law. Finding loopholes, coming up with solutions, building the edifice that gets a result. It’s like chess. Constructive chess. Being non-contentious, it’s not “I won, you lost”, but “You won and I won”. Which is nice. Plus, without wanting to get too carried away with the psycho-babble, there’s a very strong sense of affirmation in getting something right when you’re being heavily relied upon to do so. Vainglorious, sure, but satisfying all the same.

It can be difficult for people of colour to find mentors. I was lucky. Very quickly I met a couple of great guys — Ed Greene and Les Silverman — who helped me get my career on track. They both had an incredibly democratic world view. How junior or senior you were was never an issue. All they cared about was whether or not you had an idea. And if you did, it was always: “Let’s go on, let’s see what you can do.”

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London was supposed to be a pit stop on the way back to Pakistan. But I arrived here and found myself getting lucky with the type of work that I got to do. The first two and half years was a kind of who’s who of big deals, which included the privatisations of Deutsche Bank, France Telecom and Telecom Italia. So I ended up staying. And with my kids at school here, it looks like I’m stuck for the time being.

There is no dominant paradigm in Europe. I like that. In the US there are central precepts that you take for granted, even for an Asian or a Latino transaction. Here it’s less fixed, and as a result — dare I say it — more dynamic. Even when you’re talking about English-law-governed transactions, people are looking at competing market practices and considering alternative structures that may better suit the parties involved.

I can be a hard taskmaster. But I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Having said that, I operate on the basis that the people working under me think I’m nuts. I’m convinced that everybody finds their superiors to be fundamentally psychotic, or at least failing in some way. Mocking those we work for is how we keep ourselves human. It’s our revenge in life.

Nobody enjoys listening to people pontificate. I hate it when you have someone who constantly feels the need to demonstrate how bright they are by making points that don’t need to be made. It happens more often than I’d like. Cut a deal, get an end result, shut up. Of course, every now and again I find myself going on more than is strictly necessary. At which point I try and slap myself.

The English beat themselves up about race and gender issues. I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t significant problems — in particular, there are disproportionate challenges facing women who want to combine a career with having children — but London is much more of a fluid and accepting place than people give it credit for. For my part, I’ve always been treated as a rarefied but incredibly expensive foreign commodity.

I’m 43, so who knows what comes next? Part of me has always desperately wanted to be a novelist. I’d also like to edit Granta, make a movie, have my own television station and maybe run a banana republic. I enjoy what I do and I’m happy doing it for the moment, but, to quote Vivian Leigh, “Tomorrow is another day.”

Ashar Qureshi is a corporate finance partner in the London office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton

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