1000 Words: Monsoon Miseries

Adil Najam

Monsoons in South Asia are often associated with the romantic idiom of joy and innocence and prosperity. Often rightly so. It brings relief to a scorched earth baked through the summer. These first three pictures, above, capture that romanticism – even though they are not necessarily joyful – just because of their artistic compositions: a child in Lahore taking a mud bath, and two children in Karachi surrounded by water.

But for the poor monsoon can bring even more misery pouring down. These scenes from Karachi, Bakhtiarabad (Balochistan) and Lahore, testify to that misery as no mere words could.

This last set of four photographs from Lahore show how it is the simplest chores of life that can become the greatest challenges in ways that so many of us cannot even begin to comprehend.

(Pictures from Reuters and AFP)