Long Read: Orion Magazine - The Crows of Karachi

Rafia Zakaria | 15 minutes

It is raining in Karachi as I write this, an ugly, punishing rain that returns with increasing fury every year. This year, as every year, the monsoon is supposed to be the “worst ever,” and, like every year, the city’s flimsy slums and crater-riven roads will collapse with the weight of the rain. On these deadly rainy days, the water that falls from above meets the sewage that bubbles up from below, both equally careless about the location of their union. Some people will lose everything this very day and leave, returning to villages with no opportunity but less despair. Others will arrive in their place. This constant count of coming and going is the beat of Karachi, a city that grew suddenly out of the coastal desert when India’s Muslims needed a place to land in 1947.

Snippets

Nagel claims that the only way we derive meaning is when we simply choose to stop asking questions about it:
“What seems to us to confer meaning, justification, significance, does so in virtue of the fact that we need no more reasons after a certain point.”

- Lawrence Yeo, The Meaning of Life Is Absurd

Having knowledge that no one else has is an excellent way to prevent imitation.
It restricts access to a scarce but needed resource.

- Jerry Neumann, A Taxonomy of Moats

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