The writer is the recipient of the James A Wechsler Award for International Reporting and a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism
If visiting a graveyard reminds us about the inevitability of death, spending time at a hospital reminds us about the unpredictability of life. And if there’s one thing private hospitals in Pakistan still offer for free, it’s an abundant perspective on life. I unexpectedly benefited from this perspective when I was on night duty to look after an aunt, who was admitted to the emergency room overnight. There’s something about falling sick, which strips life down to its essentials. Down to what really matter versus what we actually worry about all day. It took a night in the emergency room to realise how we live our lives backwards, especially in Pakistan.
Everyone has a Plan ‘A’ for their lives, argued a close friend, after my night at the hospital. Plan ‘A’ is the life we want to live. And then we develop a Plan ‘B’, in case we can’t live the life we want to. In a conformist society like Pakistan, where failure amounts to social suicide, we spend more time thinking and acting on Plan ‘B’ than on Plan ‘A’. Somewhere between our personal fears and social compromises, we find ourselves living our Plan ‘B’, i.e., the back-up life, simply because it requires less risk and effort. Plan ‘B’ for a young man from the middle class goes something like this: graduate from a top-tier university, get a job at a high paying multinational company or join the family business, get married, have children, save enough money to buy a house for the family, get your children educated and married. Fall sick slowly and die.
Perhaps, in Pakistani society, the decision to pursue Plan ‘B’ is actually rational and intelligent because the social opportunity cost of risk and failure is so high. This holds true until you spend some time at the hospital. It’s there that you realise that not taking a risk is the biggest risk in your life. In the hospital, previously able-bodied men and women moan and grieve in pain as they feel their physical capacities diminish, even after living safe, risk-minimising, Plan ‘B’ lives. They could have achieved so much more with their full physical capacity gifted to them by God and now, they watch in pain as these capacities are slowly snatched away. What more could we have done with these gifts while we had them?
This brings us to Plan ‘A’. The lives we should live but are too afraid to live. What are we so afraid of? I recently met Jibran Nasir, the young activist working with civil society members to reclaim Pakistan’s mosques by getting imams to condemn the Peshawar attack. While Jibran has a death threat on his head by militants angry with his campaign, we met without any security arrangements in a busy Karachi cafe. I asked him why he wasn’t afraid for his life and he responded by telling me a story. “Suppose I leave this cafe and someone tries to steal my mobile, shooting me in the process,” says Jibran. “He would sell my mobile for 2,000 rupees. My life is already worth 2,000 rupees. I might as well give some meaning to it by doing some good.”
A week later, I was back at the hospital, this time for a surgery on my father. Two hours after going into the operation theatre, I got a call from his doctor. “Are you the patient’s son? We need you to come inside and see us urgently. Please come quick.” I’ve never run faster. I’ve never been more afraid for a father who never smoked a single cigarette nor indulged in life’s many vices. “Why him?” I thought as I failed thrice in my effort to call my mother while I was running. “There were complications in the surgery,” the doctors told me. “The surgery wasn’t successful as planned but your dad is doing okay and is out of any immediate danger.”
A friend of mine used to joke: if you don’t smoke, drink or womanise, it’s not that you live longer, it just feels longer. On a serious note, here’s what I learned from my time at the hospital: by not taking risks to live the life we want to live, we’re not just living Plan ‘B’ lives. We’re wasting God’s greatest gifts to us — health and youth — before they’re taken away from us.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 15th, 2015.
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Interesting piece of writing. The problem with our people is we dont actually know what we want to do with our lives and what actually we want. I believe a visit to any public hospital reveals many thoughtful aspects of life which we all take forgranted. It is then we realise how blessed we all are by whatever we have as long as one is physically/mentally fit and healthy.
Interesting piece by the way. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live Plan "A". A life that I could have made a "change" with, however, soon after I realized that with Plan "A" comes the greatest responsibilities and of course a a great deal of envy from people who opposes you; I gave up. In this part of the world, the life cycle of a "hero dad" or "heroine mom" is the only life of survival. Do great in your studies, go to some well-known university; get a lucrative job position, earn a lot of money and then die seeing all your grandchildren growing up around you. It's a harsh reality that nobody in Pakistan wants to see his or her daughter to become Malala Yosufzai, or their father to become Salman Taseer and their brother to become Jibran Nasir. We are fighting the war of survival within. A comfortable life in this country is the life of anonymous. A coward is the only brave and fit to survive.
the problem is, a lot of people dont know what they want to do in life...
great article, glad your father was okay!
just a quick note: while plan B lives may feel less fulfilling and interesting compared to 'what could have been' (and this is something i'm not super-convinced about despite the fact that i feel like i'm living a plan B life as well) -- the fact is plan A lives are not possible if we've committed "social suicide" by being "failures" (so to speak).
everything we do and every success we experience (however we define success) personally and professionally is to a surprisingly large extent contingent on our relations with other people, on how well we get along, on how much respect and credibility we have amongst our peers, our employers, our colleagues etc.
and having lived on a few continents over the years, i feel this is true in most societies, not just pakistani society.
so i suggest it may be more practical, though difficult, to lay down the seeds for plan A to blossom eventually while using the low-hanging fruit of plan B labor to feed those plan A seeds (to really torture a metaphor).
I salute people like Jibran Nasir, but if that is plan 'A', I am happy with plan 'B'. Sorry for being a chicken.