Ayaz Qureshi

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 labourer. They lived in a joint family with her in-laws in a house which had electricity but no gas connection. They cooked on fuel wood collected from nearby fields adjacent to a canal. The tap water, according to Sakina was good for drinking because of the proximity of the canal. They did not boil it before use. The nearest government health facility was about 4 to 5 kilometres from their home. Sakina described her health and her husband’s health as ‘not the best’. Her husband had hurt his back at work and that was something that bothered him a lot. Their son, Sanval was just about a year old. He was delivered at a hospital through caesarean section. Sakina could start breastfeeding him only on the 8 th day of his birth. Before that he was given packaged milk (‘milk pack’) because, ‘I was told at the hospital where I went for the operation to feed him milk pack’. S...

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...