n June 1952, my grandfather Faiz Ahmed Faiz, arrested and imprisoned for four years for alleged treason, wrote to my grandmother Alys Faiz: “I know what all of you must be going through. I see Lahore’s temperature in the newspaper and my heart aches. Then I imagine you in the oven-like office, sweating. The girls walking home in the afternoon heat and the long hot evenings crushing mind and body like a weight.”

Pakistan faces yet another crisis not of its own making and perhaps the most serious since Covid-19. A war next door, looming austerity for a people already crushed by inflation and unemployment; and an uncertain future. As a nation, we are used to asking for handouts. Some nights back, a rider who had dropped off some food at our house for iftari kept calling and messaging me late into the night and early morning asking for money. I skimmed through some of the texts that talked about his desperation. He had no petrol in his motorcycle; no money to eat; and no money for the fare home to be with his family for Eid.

I felt bad but I have learned to ration my charitable impulses in Pakistan. This is both for obvious economic reasons as well as the fact that appeals for charity can sometimes hide mischief. I did not communicate back with the rider but my wife and I do all we can to help those around us.

As a comfortably middle-class family in Lahore, we have been relatively insulated from the crushing inflation and economic devastation inflicted on millions of people in Pakistan over the last few years. This, I feel, obligates us to help everyone we can, although my wife complains constantly about our household staff asking for money and other favours: money for their children’s education; for medical bills; for incidental expenses. At my work place, Pakistan’s largest public hospital, we constantly ask friends and well wishers for charity, in Pakistan and abroad, to keep our hospital running.

At my university, economic scarcity and austerity are lived realities for thousands of our brilliant, high achieving students. As a public university, we recruit some of the brightest young minds from all over the country. They come from all kinds of families. Children of school teachers and office workers but also shopkeepers and day labourers. A few years ago, I felt this painful reality when a thin, bespectacled young man appearing before our scholarship committee for a small government scholarship rather shamefacedly admitted during the interview that he never ate breakfast. He only had money for one small meal a day. He was not selected for a scholarship but everyone on the committee volunteered to put up the money for a scholarship for him.

At my university, economic scarcity and austerity are lived realities for thousands of our brilliant, high achieving students. As a public university, we recruit some of the brightest young minds from all over the country. They come from all kinds of families.

This sense of community and of being responsible for each other is a basic factor of our resilience as a nation.

So, what does the future hold?

This is not an abstract question for our young people, who make up the majority of our population and see little on the horizon to justify hope.

A few weeks ago, while taking a class on behaviour and mental health for our newly inducted first year medical students, I was welcomed to class with a thunderous round of applause. During class, I asked them what it was about. Among other things, the young people, most of them 18-20 years of age, volunteered that they felt that I got them; that I was trying to actually understand their feelings and communicate with them rather than just talking at them.

Later, that same evening, during a conversation with my 19-year-old daughter, I posed the same question to her: How can I, and by extension, my generation, on the cusp of old age, reach out and connect with Pakistan’s huge cohort of young people, hungry for change and alternatively, despondent and angry about a future in which they see little hope? Her answer was deceptively simple and very instructive: “Baba, just talk.”

If Faiz were around today, what would he say? The same thing he wrote to Alys in 1952; it may as well have been written today to the hard-working people of Pakistan: “I know the demands being made of you, alone, for which there is no immediate relief and rest. I know this and I have no words to console you except every journey eventually ends, and if life remains, so does a future.”

The writer is a psychiatrist and faculty member at King Edward Medical University. His latest book is Secrets: Stories of Psychiatry from America and Pakistan (Sang-e-Meel Publishers).