Death by Chance

What’s the chance of a bad outcome,like death, in Karachi? Based on anecdotes circulated on social media and what you read in the news, you might assume that chances for a series of unfortunate events remain high in this city.

This prompted a friend to do some calculations to gauge chance of an unexpected death in Karachi, compared to any major metropolitan city in the U.S. Assuming how the percentages were arrived at was fairly accurate, the bottom line, if true, was intriguing: the likelihood of an untimely, unexpected death was similar in the two places.

Delving into death rates in Karachi vs. elsewhere was perhaps meant to be an intellectual discourse following the meaningless death of a colleague’s sister in Karachi. Being gunned down outside a famous restaurant after a meal there is hard to rationalize as an expected outcome of a botched cell phone robbery attempt. But this is Karachi. And such occurrences are unfortunately all too frequently heard and shared. Even a single such account is one too many and if the victim is known to you then the mind (and heart) tends to assume that tragedy is at everyone’s doorstep in Karachi, irrespective of what the statistics reveal.

Most people, myself included, had not quite come to terms with the tragic demise of our colleague’s sister, but in its wake a series of back and forth emails resulted. The objective of the process was meant to be a catharsis of sorts, by providing a forum to vent. Regardless of the likelihood of a bad death being similar in two markedly distinct places like the U.S. and Pakistan, some colleagues were adamant that it was time to pack up and move (or move back, as the case may be) to a safer haven, like the U.S.      

That got me thinking about traumatic experiences of mine. In the not too distant past two things had happened to me that shook me up.

(1) My car was shot at. The trajectory was straight through the number plate, back seat and the bullet had then lodged into the glove compartment up ahead. Luckily, or perhaps by divine intervention, my daughter was not in her car seat: the bullet had neatly penetrated the infant car seat, along with the back seat.

(2) My house was burglarized. The front door was rammed through and it hung on its hinges. Cabinets, drawers, wardrobes, kids’ toy chests, everything had been rifled through. The burglar alarm was ripped off the wall and it lay on the ground, ineffective. The telephone cable outside had been cut. Luckily all this happened while we were out for dinner. What if we had been home and the burglars had decided to force themselves on us and our kids?

The above were also statistics – a game of luck by chance, perhaps. And you might assume that it occurred to me in Karachi. Sorry to burst your bubble, but both episodes, now etched in my memory, were in two different localities of Houston, Texas, where I lived for a long time, prior to my relocation to Karachi two years back. They occurred over a five year period (2008-2012). The burglary happened in one of the best, and presumably safest, neighborhoods of Houston.

Perhaps I am a harbinger of bad news by suggesting it might be a false sense of security that upscale neighborhoods of the U.S. are far safer than their counterparts in Karachi. My basic premise is that when an unfortunate, unexpected event happens to you, you add to the statistics, and that then becomes your reality, no matter what the odds were of that occurrence. So delving into percentages and likelihoods to explain or rationalise poor outcomes seems to be an exercise in futility.

And perhaps same goes for what ‎happens in Karachi. If badness happens to you then the odds of it happening in Karachi is a meaningless discussion point, in my opinion. Or in the words of another friend, “statistics provide little comfort when you are the victim”. 

How do you deal with the likely or unlikely adverse outcome, being beyond the scope of this article, will be a story for another day.

[from the Karachi-Houston Diaries]

Acknowledgment: A version of this was first published by the Express Tribune Newspaper.