an itinerant observer

Back in 2020, while COVID-19 was peaking during its first wave, as a front-line emergency physician I was frustrated. It was not just my hectic work routine in one of the busiest emergency departments of the megapolis   of Karachi to blame. The unavailability of my gymming routine because of the pandemic-mediated lockdown was adding to my woes. To keep sane, I, therefore, settled into a nice daily home-based exercise routine: 2.5 km of outdoor running followed by 15 minutes of indoor creative movement (aka Zumba-like dancing, to be precise). The fact that I went overboard with my routine and ended up fracturing my right ankle is a story for another day .  After I had reflected enough on my intra-pandemic/post-fracture predicament and my ankle (with a metal screw inside) had healed enough, I resumed my home-based Zumba routine. But this time I added Salsa steps to it so I could make it a high-intensity/low-intensity workout. Although I became quite happy with my workout, I ...

The day I started believing in bucket lists coincided with the day salsa became a potential need, not just a want, for me to become adept at. Well…perhaps not salsa initially…it was really the tango that I fell in love with when I first saw it performed by Al Pacino in the much acclaimed ‘the scent of a woman’ .  Over the subsequent decade or so I felt a really strong urge to learn the tango. It remained an urge at most. I never proceeded to the stage of learning it in order to become a tango expert. Perhaps it was the lack of an equally excited partner to get me to actively pursue the most elegant of dances. After all, it does take two to tango. Photo credit: Riaz Khan,  a photographer based in Houston One fine night I was chatting with a friend at a restaurant in Rice Village in Houston. We were discussing ‘ the itinerant observer project’ , a potential book of short stories for which my friend, a freelance photographer, was going to provide a visual piece. We both had our i...