an itinerant observer

What’s the chance of a bad outcome,lik e 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. Ev...

“Baba, my friends were saying that little kids died in ‘Conticut’ !” Noori, the 1 st grader, was quite charged when she related that to me. I, as usual, was oblivious to that factoid although I work in mainstream America. I mostly work night shifts so when I picked Noori up from school it was technically bedtime for me. Some blame could be laid on the 3 rd flu-like illness I was suffering through in a 5 week period. Being an ER doc in a busy children’s hospital, the frequent colds were the necessary evil I was exposed to. I had loaded myself up on multiple medications to control my symptoms partly in an attempt to survive that night‘s shift in the ER. The 1 st query that arose in the dazed and drugged mind of mine was: “Noori, what or where is Conticut?” The massacre of the children took a back seat for the moment. “I don’t know! But there were lots of guns and blood – Ella said so”. Ella was Noori’s equally excitable and worldly friend. It was then that my mind gained s...