Pluses and Minuses: Cognizance of an Empiricist. [Young Professionals]

Life is a race, and you have to run—no choice! So, it’s better to be willingly a marathoner rather than a forced dragger. My lifelong marathon began in a beautiful village in Jammu and Kashmir, a valley surrounded by the majestic mountains of Pir Panjal, a true heaven on Earth (Figure 1)! My father Khalil Ur-Rehman, a true fighter and my inspiration, became an orphan at the age of 12. Being the eldest in a family of seven siblings with a good level of land ownership, he had to leave the school to earn bread. Despite self-educating himself through all the hardship to keep up with the long family legacy of prominent Islamic scholars, he was truly resentful of not being formally educated in a school. This made him very careful and focused on the education of his four children, resulting in three doctors and one engineer. Life in the mountains of developing nations is difficult with limited resources and infrastructure. However, people truly value education and make efforts to gain it, in its literal meanings. My eldest brother, Habib, used to travel 5 mi to reach his primary school. Although the situation is much better with many more schools now, the struggle is still on. Nevertheless, people in the northern mountainous region have the highest learning rate in the region.