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What Remains Beyond Monuments: A Different Kind of Travelogue

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I met Jacob Shahid Masih years before I understood why I kept returning to him. We worked together briefly during a medical elective in a rather unassuming place in Northern Pakistan that quietly reshaped how I thought about faith, care, and belonging. I have written about that time before. He was a nurse by training. Looking back, that almost feels incidental. What stayed with me was the way he moved through the ward. He never seemed in a hurry. He simply seemed present. With patients. With suffering. With silence. He sang. Sometimes devotional songs in Punjabi. Sometimes playful ones in Urdu. Sometimes simply because the moment could hold them. I never knew where one tradition ended and another began. I never thought to ask. Jacob seemed equally at home in Catholic churches, Sufi shrines, hospital wards, and in the company of people whose beliefs differed from his own. He never appeared preoccupied with defending an identity. When conversations drifted towards religion, he ...
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Elsewhere, We Meet Ourselves

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The manager behind the hotel counter in Lagos looked up, paused for a second, and then flashed her lovely smile. It was not the polite, transactional kind. She remembered me. I remembered her. “Welcome, Dr. Mian. Welcome, Sir!”. There was a familiarity to it now. It had moved beyond routine. Over the next few minutes, between check-in formalities, she told me more of her story. How she had grown into this role. How those early opportunities had come her way - one in particular resonated because the person behind it was well known to me. He also stayed at the same hotel during work trips; during one of which he had quietly opened that door for her to become the manager. She spoke simply about how things had unfolded. These moments had started to matter more to me over time. The repeated trips to Lagos. The same roads from the airport. The congestion curling through the Mainland, Victoria Island, Ikoyi, and Lekki. The faces shifting from familiar to expected. And somewhere alon...
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The Pitt And The Pendulum: The Pause We Lose In The ER

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Louie dies, and they stop. But not for long. The ER never allows long. But long enough. In The Pitt , Louie is what we would call a “frequent flier” in our ER lingo. Chronic illness. In and out. Uninsured. System-worn. The kind of patient whose name is familiar before his face comes into view. And yet, when he dies, the team does not reduce him to utilization metrics or comorbidities. They remember him. They speak about his cheerfulness. The way he always had something kind to say to the nurses. The way he made their night shifts lighter. They celebrate his life. That pause was the most accurate thing I have seen on medical television in years. A lot has been written about The Pitt . It feels like a spiritual successor to ER , stripped of the orchestral swell and early-2000s heroics. It stands in quiet contrast to the romance and entanglements of Grey's Anatomy . People call it grittier. More grounded. Less interested in saviors and more attentive to institutional realities. ...
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Five Ways to Win a War, Five Ways to Lose One

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It is difficult these days to understand what war actually is. One hears of drones hovering above deserts and cities, of cyber-attacks that paralyze hospitals and power grids, of missiles launched from thousands of miles away by operators who may never see the faces of the people beneath them. The language has become strangely antiseptic: precision strike, surgical operation, collateral damage. And yet the images remain stubbornly human. Children pulled from rubble. Mothers running through smoke. Men staring at the sky, unsure whether the buzzing overhead is a machine or fate - wounds that someone later will try to repair. In moments like these, an old poem returns to me, one I first encountered as a boy. Edwin Brock’s “Five Ways to Kill a Man.” The poem is brief. Almost unsettlingly so. Its logic is ruthless in its simplicity. Brock begins with the ancient method: you make a man carry wood up a hill and nail him to it. From there he moves through history, through crusade...
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Biloongra to PediTales: Twenty Years of Learning How to Listen to Children

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I didn’t set out to build anything. In the late 2000s, in Houston, I was doing what I was employed for, pediatric emergency medicine: long shifts, clinical and academic/research competence, the steady rhythm of a life that made sense on paper. And yet, something was off. Not broken. Not dramatic. Just... hollow in places I couldn’t quite name. I was busy, productive, advancing, while feeling, quietly, that the work was losing its soul. Or maybe I was. Around that time, without fully understanding why, I started writing stories for children. Not to teach. Not to intervene. Just to speak plainly and gently about things that had become too loud and technical in adult language. Fear. Illness. Change. Courage. Curiosity. The small, interior weather of a child’s mind that often gets flattened in clinical encounters. That’s where Biloongra – the kitten, the child, the me - came from. It began with a simple instruction. While I was in Houston, wandering through questions of purpose and...
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