an itinerant observer

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...

Illustration / Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal Every story has a beginning, middle and an end. This is my story - a story which had a happy, energetic beginning…a beginning which was to blossom into a vivacious and thriving middle, but was soon ravaged by a chronic disease. A beginning which soon plummeted to its precarious end.  This is the story of a doctor who knew the symptoms and complications of a chronic illness in her patients, but in a cruel twist of fate became the one suffering from that illness. This is the story of a newlywed 24 year old woman who had to face the questions written on the faces of people in terror.  This is the story of a pregnant mother, who was desperate to salvage her story for her future son. It began while I was a house officer in the medicine ward of a large federal government tertiary care hospital. I used to work for 36 hours straight, due to my passion for medicine and my dedicated, devoted personality. The head of my department laude...

Pink Floyd in the 70s in the epic album ‘the wall’ came out with the famous lyrics sung by children ‘we don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.’ Delving a bit into the lyrics and the history of Roger Waters, the lead vocalist of the band, one realizes that this was a protest song pushing for social reform along the schooling domain. It was antagonistic towards rigid schooling prevalent in the Western hemisphere, primarily in the U.K. and the U.S. The deromanticizing of education was made all the more potent by reference to tyrannical teachers and pedantic pedagogy. Considering that education was merely ‘another brick in the wall’, the poignant lyrics of the song should have been an obvious reminder to educationists the world over. Intriguingly, also in the 70s, an energizing and exciting discourse on the deschooling of society was ongoing in Latin America. This was led by Ivan Illich (1926-2002) an Austrian by birth, who obtained formal training in philosophy...