Convinced that I would come to no good - a belief for which I can hardly blame him - my father once told me he'd be content if I managed to avoid two places: jail and hospital.
When youthful ardour outstripped discretion, I found myself twice behind bars. (This was during the benign rule of General Ziaul Haq when, despite dictatorship, political activism had still not acquired the useless connotation it has today.) From experience I can therefore say that if I had to choose between the two institutions, I'd rather be in one of the Republic's jails than one of its hospitals.
Jailers have a bad reputation, this being part of the baggage their profession carries. Doctors are supposed to be nobler souls, serving humanity according to the precepts of the Hippocratic Oath. But judged by any standards of honesty, there are more outright scoundrels in the medical profession than in the honour roll of jailers.
Lawyers may be spared on the Day of Judgment, which is to say, consigned to one of the outer circles of purgatory. And perhaps journalists too, provided the Lord, taking a break from the trying task of judging His human creation, is in a good humour. (Why do the monotheistic religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam - attribute every quality to the All High except a sense of humour?) But it takes little imagination to see that doctors will put an unbearable strain on the divine quality of mercy.
The petty kinds of knavery, of the sort lawyers and journalists indulge in, come under the rubric of pardonable sins. But slaughter carried out in the name of virtue and humanity falls in the category of hypocrisy for which, as all the Books tell us, there is no forgiveness.
I have seen people surviving jails and coming out the better for the experience. Passing through Pakistani hospitals, government or private, is a tougher obstacle course. If the care you get doesn't kill you, the medical costs will.
Few sights are more calculated to bemuse than the two faces of the medical profession in this country. The grim and forbidding mask doctors wear when they are on their government jobs in the morning and the ear-to-ear smiles which split their faces when they are raking it in from private (or paying) patients in the evening.
And the plain dishonesty of the profession: interview a medical rep, salesmen who promote the sales of their company's medicines, to gauge the depravity and greed of the Pakistani legatees of the Hippocratic Oath. Asking for small favours like hotel stays, trips abroad and, in some cases, some of the bigger sharks even asking for cars in order to prescribe medicines of a particular brand. The police are maligned disproportionately in Pakistan. Some of the other professions far outstrip the excesses of the policeman.
Are all doctors like this? Heaven forbid. I am only talking of the mess we've made of the medical calling in the Islamic Republic. Health care only for the rich or those cushioned by jobs in the government, certainly not for anything like the poor.
I've seen a team of British surgeons performing upper-lip surgery in Chakwal. They came here for a week to do volunteer work, their tickets paid for by caring Pakistanis in England. How they worked: from morning till late evening, taking just small breaks for tea and sandwiches. As for the surly Pakistani local staff who had to be around while the British doctors worked, nothing less than chicken karahi from the Gulberg Hotel (a local gourmet centre) would do to keep them in good humour.
There is the Christian Eye Hospital in Taxila which must have benefited many people over the years. All for free and no distinction between rich and poor.
At the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation, a part of Dow Medical College in Karachi, all kidney work, from dialysis to transplants, totally free. This is the stuff of redemption and salvation. No wonder some of Karachi's seths, not renowned for being free with their purses, give generously to this Institute.
For those not in the know, dialysis treatment - that is, when your kidneys pack up - doesn't come cheap. It costs around 40 to 50 thousand a month. Now tell me, how can a poor man or even someone from the middle classes afford it? Yet in the Islamic Republic, its rhetoric dedicated to the creation of a welfare state, we expect dialysis patients to look after themselves.
One of Nawaz Sharif's good deeds was to make dialysis treatment free of cost for everyone, a blessing for kidney failures. Come the Musharraf revolution and this was undone, no doubt on the sound principle that anything that Sharif did merited closure.
On the subject of good works, can anyone have been a greater benefactor of Lahore than the great Ganga Ram, the hospital of that name still bearing witness to his charitable deeds and philanthropy? If Lahore's spiritual saint is the great Ali Hajveri, Data Ganj Baksh, whose shrine for centuries past and to this day feeds (literally) the poor and unfed of Lahore, its secular saint is Sir Ganga Ram. Not that we honour him as such. But that's another story.
It is said that two singing ladies of Lahore's famed singing and dancing quarter, the Hira Mandi, left their inheritance, all that their singing had earned, all that they must have got from their admirers, to the Ganga Ram Trust. Muslim ladies, brought up in the faith, no doubt observing the injunction to fast in the holy month of Ramadan, and commemorating during the month of Muharram the martyrdom of Hussain - the women of that quarter being very particular about Muharram - bequeathing their legacy to a Hindu trust.
When the final trumpets sound, who'll be amongst the elect, closest to the Deity? You and me or those two singing ladies from Hira Mandi?
Not surprisingly, what those ladies left benefits the Ganga Ram Trust no more. On last reckoning, it was still in the hands of encroachers and illegal occupiers.
We were supposed to get a new deal at the dawn of the Musharraf revolution. After all, the urgent need to stem the rot, to set things right, and give the nation a new sense of direction were the justifications advanced for this revolution.
Its proponents say this has been a silent revolution, bringing about a quiet change in the life and ways of the Republic. No description could be more accurate. So silent has been this revolution that few of the Republic's inhabitants can claim to have heard its footsteps. So quiet the changes it has wrought that no one, hand-on-heart, can say what they have been.
The foreign exchange reserves are up. There is no escaping this chant. Every time the economy is mentioned the nation gets an earful about these reserves. And with it the magic invocation: takeoff stage. To hear the Generalissimo and his favourite technocrat, Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz, Pakistan is about to take off for the economic stratosphere. Only problem seems to be the engines are just not starting. And foreign devils - with money to spend or invest - are not heeding the good signs. Their moneybags are not finding their way here.
Meanwhile of course, other things - from the traffic on the roads and the plastic shopping bags littering the landscape to the state of the Republic's hospitals and schools - remain as chaotic or non-functional as ever. The only difference is the takeoff stage about which we'll only know something when we are actually in the air.
So my advice to anyone thinking of falling seriously ill is what my father told me years ago: don't. It's not an affordable proposition. Unless you are in the fat cat class or, better still, are with the government.