an itinerant observer

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...

That the protagonist of today’s narrative happens to be dad doesn't really surprise me. You see he’s been quite unwell recently. He’s elderly - almost eighty, I believe, if you go by the date of birth on his passport. “My date of birth is inaccurate on that passport”, dad told me several years ago, which basically meant he didn’t know his exact birth year. Neither did others around him. “In those times, exact dates of birth were imprecisely documented”, the others said. Regardless of his actual age, and semantics aside, dad is whom you would call ‘geriatric’ - very elderly, in simple English.  “But he’s been unwell before, so what’s different now”, you ask. Well, dad is losing his grip on reality faster than I had anticipated. Several years of slowly progressive dementia most likely has created an individual unable to recall day-to-day routine. Long-term memory seems to be intact as I’ve gauged that periodically. But it’s short term memory that is questionabl...

Photo-credit: Saniya Kamal, AKU MBBS '18 We're doctors. 'Be strong, ' they tell us. 'Always be professional,' they add.  'You must never get emotionally attached to a patient, ' they insist. But then, once in a while, you come across someone who makes you break all those rules; all the boundaries that you had set for yourself. The water breaks through the dam, pushes out and finds the life it belongs to. And by water, I mean actual waterworks. So I met a patient in the ward today. And I realize that because of the Hippocratic Oath, I am not allowed to say who, what, when or where (but whatever, who needs those anyway); a story can still teach us the most important lesson ever learnt, without mentioning any of those insignificant details. One, of human values: respect for the most basic thing - the human relationship. She was an 86-year-old lady (see how I avoided the 'who' - demographics don't matter), suffering from a s...

The economy class of the domestic flight from New York was stifling, cramped and nauseating. Luckily I was in the aisle seat. On boarding I made myself as comfortable as I could and had resumed reading the mystery that Adelia was trying to solve. Adelia happened to be a ‘doctor of the dead’ (likely a pathologist) in twelfth century Cambridge, hot in pursuit of a psychopath killing children in that rustic part of England. The gruesome manner in which the kids were being massacred is a story for another day. “Aha!” that was Adelia about to make a crucial discovery.   “Arrrghhh”…hmmm, that sounded a bit off. That was not in the book. I looked up and saw an elderly white man approaching my seat. “Arrrghhh”, that was him clearing his throat. “Great!” I thought to myself, quite unkindly, “I’ll have to share the space next to me with this sick man”. I didn’t want to catch the flu, swine or otherwise, on a domestic flight. Not that catching it on an international flight would...