Dr Ayaz Qureshi

Coronavirus entered public discussions in Pakistan in January 2020 when Pakistani students in China were barred from travelling back to their country by the Chinese government. There were speculations in the media about how badly they were being treated by the Chinese authorities and how Pakistani government was helpless in coming to their rescue. They were said to be stuck in their dormitories for days without food and medicine. Their parents staged protests in front of government buildings demanding Pakistani government to evacuate their loved ones from Wuhan and Hubei. The government’s response was that these students were better off under the Chinese care in the prevailing circumstances, and that bringing them back was against public health advice on international travel to and from China. The Chinese embassy in Islamabad tweeted: We will take care of them like our own [i] . The Chinese embassy declined Pakistani Health Minister’s request for a visit to China to meet these students...

I preferred travelling 400 miles from Islamabad to my village in DG Khan by car. The journey took around 12 hours when there were no motorways. Now it takes more like 8 hours. We used to do it in daytime for safety and better visibility. Roads were narrow, with lots of potholes and incoming traffic including carts, motorbikes and bicycles.  Sometimes, it was convenient to take a bus which usually ran in the night. Daewoo buses were thought of as a better service because, for the first time in Pakistan, they introduced a ‘hostess’ onboard who offered you a cold drinks and snacks. Some passengers saw them as a source of entertainment, starring at at them for timepass, or trying to be unduly friendly by offering their phone numbers or soliciting unwanted conversations. Others asked for many cup of coke or water just to make themselves feel pampered by a young lady. Some passenger even touched and groped them as they went past their seats in the aisle - yes that is sickening!  The...

1. The young man being described is the video below is employed in the government emergency service Rescue 1122. He brings an infant to A&E in a hospital in small city in Punjab. The child appears to be unconscious, losing vital signs. The man is seen as trying his best to reach professional help to save this child's life. Doing his duty to the best of his abilities. 2. The other video [no longer available] is of a man who recorded himself before going on a killing spree in a small city in Punjab. He was upset about fellow Muslim giving up challenging those who are not on the right path, such as women driving cars! The clerics who preach peace and prayers (namaz) are mistaken and weak, he argued. He appeared upset with the justice system in the country, and about being laughed at for preaching Islam.  He talked about his contempt for this worldly life and his faith for a reward in heavens for what he is about to do.  After uploading the video, he went to the local bazaar w...

The o ngoing COVID-19 pandemic has affected us all in our personal and professional capacities. While we seek ways to minimise the adverse effects of this situation on our own lives, we are aware that some sections of society everywhere are more affected than others and are more vulnerable to the pandemic induced economic lockdown and restrictions. People with underlying health conditions and those with particular demographic, social and economic backgrounds are most affected. Among these are migrant workers as we have witnessed in recent weeks in our region and across the world. With economic activities coming to a near standstill, many daily wagers in urban areas were suddenly off work as were the salaried factory workers laid off without any notice or benefits. Restriction on mobility added to their woes as many, who wanted to travel back home after losing their means of subsistence in the cities, were stranded on roads and humiliated by authorities for breaking the lockdown. Back i...

Village mela  (village fair) was not a new thing but this year Nabla loved  maut ka kuwan very much.  Transgender performers  danced on Bollywood tunes, mixed with  motorcyclists' gravity-defying stunts inside a circular arena of wooden planks - 'the death well'. The onlookers stood on a platform circling the top. From there they could see the action below - the dance of life and death. They whistled and jeered at the dancers, applauded the stuntmen and showered money. Some made lewd gesture to the dancers, others were held in awe of the whole thing or screamed with joy or fright.   Nabla loved it. He was 20 something, not married, one of many siblings, lived with his parents in the village and commuted daily to a nearby town to work in a motor mechanic's workshop.  The mela  lasted three days, the performers packed up and went away. Nabla craved for more. He could not wait for a whole year for the dancers to comes back. With some m...

They got her married to someone who was already married. He was well off financially even if not around most of the year as he worked in UAE, or was it Saudi Arabi. Does that matter! But she fell in love with a Mirasian da munda, a   boy from a different village who worked at a barber shop in the town.  This  Mirasi boy brought her home.  His family accepted her at once. They thought s he was clever and beautiful.   They registered a marriage between these two.  She claimed before a judge that she was divorced from her previous husband.  The husband's family contested this claim.  The court asked for a proof of divorce.  She presented her two sisters and a brother-in-law as witnesses.   Nikha was done with the court's approval but the litigation that followed cost them dearly. The Mirasi family had saved some money by selling an old house to buy a new (bigger) one. This money was now spent on lawyers,  court f...

In his inaugural speech to the nation on 19 August 2018, newly elected Prime Minister Imran Khan set out his intention to turn around Pakistan’s poor record on human development. Citing a recent report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Prime Minister lamented the fact that Pakistan is one of the top five countries in the world where children die as a result of diarrhoeal diseases spread by contaminated drinking water, one of the countries most hit by maternal mortality, and a country where almost every other child is stunted. He held up brain images to demonstrate the stark differences between the brain development of a healthy two-year-old and that of a stunted child of the same age. Stunting is not only a matter of impaired growth, he said; it also limits children’s intellectual capacities and thwarts the nation’s development. Read more

Issues related to gender and sexual minorities have been historically seen in human rights frameworks instead of international development. Although attitudes towards these minorities have become more accepting in recent times across different cultures (we should remember that many societies tried to cure non-confirming sexual and gender behaviours through the use of medical, behavioural, legal and religious interventions), data on their numbers and other demographic characteristics remains largely absent. Empirical evidence in the form of small scale studies points to the fact that sexual and gender minorities face disparities in many dimensions of development which are the current focus of global development policy and interventions, such as mental health, food security, violence, civic participation. If global development programmes are to be effective they must address these disparities, in addition to meeting development targets for gender and sexual majorities. But how do we do...

The metaphor of threshold is central to understanding life-course changes in anthropology. Scholars such as Van Gennep (2011) and Victor Turner (1967) popularised the idea of rites de passage to account for cross-cultural practices of performing certain rituals to mark one’s transition from on stage in life to the next. A good example of such rites would be the initiation rituals which are usually performed around the time of puberty to mark the transition of an individual into adulthood i.e. the status of a full member of the society. Rituals associated with birth, marriage, death or even graduation are some other examples. Anthropologists have likened life-course to a series of rooms which are connected to each other through doors or portals between them. One enters the next room by leaving the previous room behind. Importantly, crossing the threshold is a moment of great uncertainty because it is at this precise moment that one is neither here, nor there . According to anthropol...

Ghulam Farid was the brightest kid in his year of the village school where I went. All kids have their gifts; his was calligraphy and folklore, especially a poetic rendition of a quarrel between a man's wife and his mother. He used to have the whole school spell-bound when he recited this one. He was equally bright in reading and writing. His favourite pastime was to memorize spellings of long English words which he then challenged the rest of us to match.  His father was a carpenter. Farid couldn't continue his school beyond year 10 (only a few of us were fortunate enough to do that). He became the village ‘painter’, making his living from his calligraphy skills, preparing billboards, banner, posters or simply painting colourful slogans on walls for local politicians. He made a good living out of his hobby and was very well known and respected for that. But then came the ‘panaflex’ – the computerised printing of billboards. Farid was out of work for sometime, then he be...

Sakina did not know her age. She never went to a school. She had been married for three years. Her husband was a labourer. They lived in a joint family with her in-laws in a house which had electricity but no gas connection. They cooked on wood collected from fields adjacent to a canal. The tap water was deemed good for drinking because of the proximity of the canal. They did not boil it before use. The nearest government health facility was about 5km from their home. Sakina described her health and her husband’s health as ‘not the best’. Her husband had hurt his back at work, something that bothered him a lot. Their son, Sanval was just about a year old. He was delivered at a hospital through C-section. Sakina could start breastfeeding him only on the 8 th day of his birth. Before that he was given packaged milk because, she said ‘I was told at the hospital to feed him milkpack’. Sanval was also not weighed at the time of birth but Sakina believes that his weakness was visi...

F lying to Karachi on Monday morning instead of Sunday evening was a bad idea. The morning flight from Islamabad takes off at 8:00. I had hoped to be in PACP office by 10:30 which would mean missing first meeting of day but I had thought that I would be able participate in all important meetings with the health and the planning and development secretaries. The flight PK 365 arrived in Karachi 11:30 instead of 9:55. I hired a radio cab for Sindh AIDS Control Program near Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Center.   Kept searching for the PACP office on Rafiquee Shaheed road but it was nowhere to be found. Eventually, I got out of the taxi in front of the Blood Transfusion Center inside JPMC. Met a guy in the corridor who was wearing his staff ID. He led me to another guy in the lab who was able to described SACP location. It was already 1:30 in the afternoon,  which meant I had missed important meetings of the day. Thank you PIA!  The office of SACP was in a walled comp...