IRAN, SILENCE AND WAITING

Iran, Silence, and Waiting

With the sudden and complete cessation of the internet, Iran has fallen into a silence heavier than distance itself. Overnight, I found myself cut off from friends—people whose voices had become part of my daily intellectual and emotional landscape.

One of the reasons I joined HelloTalk was not language practice in the narrow sense, but encounter. I wanted to befriend Iranian intellectuals, to learn from them, and to engage with the layered history of their country and the extraordinary depth of its literature. In the West, Omar Khayyam is often quoted and Rumi widely celebrated, sometimes stripped of context. Those who know Iran more deeply understand that these figures are only the visible peaks of a vast cultural terrain. Iran continues to produce poetry, philosophy, cinema, and art—often under conditions of profound constraint.

Until recently, my friends inside Iran were thoughtful and generous correspondents. Messages arrived daily—reflections on literature, society, family life, and the quiet strategies of endurance people develop under pressure. Since the protests intensified, that correspondence has vanished—not gradually, but completely.

I have known this silence before. And so, once again, I wait.

Waiting is not passive. It is a form of solidarity when action is impossible, and a reminder of asymmetry: that while I wait in comfort, others endure fear, loss, and uncertainty.

My heart is with the thousands of Iranians who have lost a family member—a child, an adolescent, a loved one—to violence and repression.

May the wishes, desires, and dreams of Iranians to live freely come to fruition—sooner rather than later, for them, and for all of us.

THINKING OF MY FRIENDS AND LOVERS IN THE LAND OF FARS

So much has changed in the span of days.

Of all that unfolds around me, the one realm still within my command is my own mind—my response, my interior weather.

Vipassana meditation brings me back to that place of quiet authority. It teaches me to observe, to let thoughts arise and pass without grasping, to return again and again to stillness. I think often of S. N. Goenka, that gentle Burmese teacher who carried this ancient practice across borders and generations, offering it freely, without ornament or dogma.

It is Friday night.

Two candles are lit before me. As midnight approaches, they continue to burn steadily—no wind, no tremor, no flicker. The flame stands upright, composed, almost deliberate.

I take my blood pressure: 119/72.

A respectable number. I smile quietly. It feels less like a clinical reading and more like a reflection of the calm that has settled inside me—a small physiological confirmation that the mind, when steadied, speaks to the body.

And from this stillness, my thoughts travel eastward.

I send my love to my friends—and to all those I have loved and never met—in the land of Fārs. May they know peace in their hearts, even when peace feels distant in their streets. May calm find them in moments of fear, and dignity remain intact when circumstances conspire against it.

Tonight, from far away, I hold them in quiet remembrance.

A steady flame.

An unspoken longing.

And a wish—for peace, for patience, for a gentler dawn.

Empathy, Compassion, and Respect for the Other

Empathy, Compassion, and Respect for the Other

In the span of a single week, events have unfolded with such density that one has the uneasy feeling that the political architecture of our planet has shifted—not through a dramatic collapse, but through a series of cracks that were already there, now widened.

Sham elections in Myanmar.

Maduro’s forced exit from Venezuela.

The slow, grinding approach of complete economic collapse in Cuba.

And in Iran, an ever-growing discontent—often whispered, sometimes coded, always courageous—expressed by people who still dare to hope that the ruling elite may one day join Assad in comfortable exile, far from the consequences of their decisions.

What links these events is not ideology or geography. It is the human cost.

Empathy and compassion

—for the Burmese

—for the Iranians

—for the Venezuelans

—for the Cubans

I write this not as a distant observer relying on news cycles or social media fragments. I hear voices—direct, unmediated, intelligent voices—from all four countries. These are not slogans or statistics; they are lived realities narrated by people who share one fundamental condition: they are governed by regimes that were not freely elected, are not accountable, and no longer represent the will or welfare of their populations.

Despite the cultural, linguistic, and historical differences between these societies, the complaints are strikingly similar:

the absence of adequate food,

the scarcity of essential medications,

the arrogance and indifference of bureaucracies,

and the constant, exhausting awareness of surveillance by state intelligence.

Anthropologically, this repetition is revealing. Different civilizational trajectories, yet the same political structures produce the same patterns of suffering. Authoritarianism, wherever it takes root, seems to erode dignity in predictable ways—by narrowing choice, criminalising dissent, and transforming everyday life into a series of careful calculations.

These four countries are close to my heart. I have lived in some, returned to others repeatedly, and with Iran I remain deeply connected—intellectually, culturally, emotionally—even if geography and politics keep me physically distant.

Empathy and compassion are not sentimental gestures; they are relational acts. They arise from proximity, from listening, from recognising the other not as an abstraction but as a mirror of one’s own vulnerability.

I am reminded of the Dalai Lama’s simple and disarming wisdom:

If you want to make others happy, be compassionate.

If you want to make yourself happy, be compassionate.

At this moment, I find myself enveloped in compassion—for friends, for interlocutors, for lovers of life and thought, in Burma, Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Compassion does not erase injustice, but it anchors resistance in humanity rather than hatred.

May the coming days bring good news as swiftly as the unsettling surprises of recent days have arrived.

The images 

Dalai Lama

Mathieu Ricard, a buddhist monk.French molecular scientist previously

Sadhguru

Jiddu Krishnamurty 

SN Goenka 

Pablo Neruda 

Wilma Mankiller, ex-chief of the Cherokee Nation

Claude Levi-Strauss

Michel Foucault 

ANTHROPOLOGICAL REFLECTION : MEDICINE WITHOUT WALLS

Anthropological Reflection: Medicine Without Walls

What these images record is not an anecdote, nor an exception. They document an everyday anthropology of care.

Anthropology reminds us that medicine is not born in clinics but in relationships. Long before hospitals, health circulated through food, listening, shared environments, and trust. The photographs move deliberately across these registers: plants carefully tended, water shared with other species, roads that connect camps to towns, food prepared by familiar hands, and finally bodies examined without ritual separation.

The alligator in still water is not a symbol; it is a reminder. Humans do not occupy these landscapes alone. Indigenous communities understand this intuitively: health is relational, ecological, and spatial. Illness does not begin at the cellular level—it begins when relationships fray, when food becomes abstract, when care is displaced into distant institutions.

The restaurant becomes a clinic not by declaration but by consent. No white coat is needed. The stethoscope appears only after conversation. The chef sits because he trusts. The waitress speaks because she is heard. This is medicine stripped of performance, returning to function.

Anthropology also teaches us that borders are administrative, not lived. The road from ancestral land to Marco Lake Drive is not a rupture but a gradient. Indigenous history, migrant labor, global music, handheld ECG devices, and tacos on ceramic plates coexist without contradiction. Modernity is not rejected here; it is domesticated.

These images resist spectacle. Nothing dramatic happens. And that is precisely the point.

Humanitarian medicine is often imagined as crisis work in distant lands. Yet here it unfolds quietly, locally, without banners or NGOs—simply by being present where life happens. This is not “informal medicine.” It is original medicine.

To practice medicine anthropologically is to recognize that care is not a service delivered, but a relationship sustained. Sometimes that relationship begins with coffee. Sometimes with tacos. Sometimes with silence.

FRANCE AND MY INTRODUCTION TO CHAMPAGNE

France and My Introduction to Champagne

In Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom—where I completed my medical and anthropological education—Champagne was always associated with celebration. Birthdays, weddings, academic milestones. I never particularly enjoyed it, perhaps because of my ignorance, and perhaps because what I was often offered was sparkling wine masquerading as Champagne.

France changed all that.

In France, Champagne is not reserved for achievement. Many households keep a bottle on hand, ready to be opened when a friend drops by unexpectedly, or during the late-afternoon apéro, when conversation matters more than occasion. One of the first lessons I learned was that Champagne is a social bond. It marks presence, not success.

There are said to be more than one million bubbles in a single glass. Champagne’s effervescence comes from a second fermentation in the bottle—la prise de mousse—as yeast consumes sugar and releases carbon dioxide into the wine. The bottles are stored upside down for months so that the spent yeast collects at the neck. Even the physics of drinking matters: chilling Champagne reduces the alcohol carried within each bubble.

The BBC once offered practical advice for enjoying Champagne properly: choose a narrow flute to retain CO₂, avoid aggressively washed or perfumed glasses, pour slowly into a tilted glass, and don’t wait for a special vintage—Champagne is alive, and time lets its sparkle escape.

I confess I enjoy the ritual of Champagne served before a long flight. Settling into my seat, I hear:

“Dr Y, would you prefer a blanc or a rosé?”

It is best enjoyed early, before cabin pressure and dry air dull the senses.

I have been associated with France since 2006—nearly two decades of food, drink, and friendship. Among its many gifts to me is a palate shaped not by celebration, but by companionship.

Une flûte, s’il vous plaît.

DARK NIGHT, WHIRLPOOLS, AND THE LIMITS OF CONSOLATION

Dark Night, Whirlpools, and the Limits of Consolation

(after Hafez)

“Things happen for a reason; nothing happens randomly,” say many Native American traditions—it is only that we are not wise enough to understand the reason.

Yesterday, I received a call from a friend I had not seen in some time. Over the years, his messages had grown sparse and heavy. First, the loss of his mother. Then his father. Then his sister. Now, his son is preparing to leave for an Ivy League university far away, the final quiet departure from a home already emptied by grief.

When he spoke, he sounded devastated—fog-bound, unmoored—like a boat that has lost its rudder. The erudite professor I once knew was still there, but obscured, submerged beneath cumulative loss.

As a physician trained also in cultural anthropology—and shaped early on by close work with psychologists in Havana—I have learned that, in such moments, the most meaningful offering is rarely an explanation. It is presence. Attentive listening. The humility to sit beside suffering without trying to rescue it too quickly with words.

Yet as I listened, I found myself wondering: what would Hafez have made of this moment? I did not open the divan for a formal fāl-e Hafez, yet almost unbidden, a verse arrived—as if carried across distance from Shiraz by way of Tehran.

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The verse (classical Persian, common recension)

شبِ تاریک و بیمِ موج و گردابی چنین هایل

کجا دانند حالِ ما، سبکبارانِ ساحل‌ها

Shab-e târik o bīm-e mowj o gardābi chenīn hāyel

Kojā dānand hāl-e mā, sabok-bārān-e sāhel-hā

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Literal sense

A dark night, fear of the waves, and such a terrifying whirlpool—

How could those lightly burdened on the shore know our condition?

In two lines, Hafez draws a sharp moral and epistemic boundary: experience versus safety, immersion versus distance.

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Reading the verse alongside grief

The speaker is not observing the sea; he is in it. Darkness, waves, and whirlpools are not metaphors about danger—they are danger itself. Those on the shore are not cruel or indifferent; they are simply uninitiated.

Hafez reminds us that there are states of human experience that cannot be grasped without exposure, without risk. This is not an attack on compassion, but a warning against easy counsel, tidy explanations, and reassurance delivered from the dry safety of the shore.

In Sufi terms, the sea is Truth, the whirlpool the annihilation of the self (fanā’), and the dark night a state of bewilderment (ḥayrat). Those who remain lightly burdened—secure, rational, unshaken—may speak fluently, even wisely. But they have not drowned. They have not lost their footing.

Ethically, the verse feels almost anthropological in its precision. It critiques moralism without proximity, judgment without vulnerability, advice without shared risk. The shore is comfortable, and comfort breeds certainty. Hafez does not accuse those on shore of malice—only of epistemic innocence.

Psychologically, the whirlpool is not only external. It is grief layered upon grief; love made fragile by loss; devotion that continues even when retreat would be easier. From this angle, the verse sounds strikingly modern:

Only those inside the storm truly understand the storm.

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What the verse offered in that moment

As I listened to my friend, Hafez did not give me an answer to offer him. He gave me something more valuable: permission not to pretend I understood fully, and reassurance that my role was not to pull him toward shore, but to acknowledge the waters he was already navigating.

In that sense, the coincidence between the verse and the counselling moment did not feel accidental. It felt congruous—an old voice articulating, with unsurpassed economy, a truth clinicians, anthropologists, and mourners eventually learn the hard way.

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One distilled sentence, Hafez at his sharpest:

Do not expect understanding from those who have never risked drowning

For a friend standing where loss has accumulated faster than meaning, the most ethical advice is not instruction but orientation. Among the Persian masters, three ghazals (or quatrain clusters) speak without condescension—they do not rush grief, nor spiritualize it away.

Below are three precise, time-tested choices, each offering a different kind of counsel. If I had to choose one, I would choose Hafez.

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🌊 

Hafez — the ethics of staying afloat

Hafez

Ghazal (anchor verse):

Shab-e târik o bīm-e mowj o gardābi chenīn hāyel…

(A dark night, fear of waves, and such a whirlpool…)

Why this is right for your friend:

This ghazal does not ask for optimism, endurance, or transcendence. It legitimizes being overwhelmed. Its advice is implicit:

You are not failing. You are at sea.

Hafez’s counsel is moral rather than practical:

Do not accept judgment—from yourself or others—while you are still in the storm.

This is the most humane advice for cumulative grief.

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🔥 

Rumi — grief as an initiatory fire

Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Ghazal (well-known counsel):

Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.

Why this helps (but only after Hafez):

Rumi speaks from after the breaking. His advice is transformative, not consoling. He suggests that loss is not meaningless—but he assumes the listener can already breathe.

This ghazal is best offered later, when your friend can hear possibility without feeling erased by it.

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🍷 

Omar Khayyam — mercy through realism

Omar Khayyam

Rubāʿī cluster (paraphrased):

Be gentle—life passes quickly, and the rules were never explained.

Why Khayyam matters here:

Khayyam offers permission to stop making sense. His advice is almost clinical in its compassion:

Do not moralize suffering. Do not force coherence where none is promised.

For some mourners, this is the most relieving voice of all.

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🕊️ 

If you offer only one text

Give your friend Hafez’s sea ghazal, and say nothing more than:

This is not advice. It is recognition.