Tehran
Waiting to vote in Iran’s parliamentary election last year, Navid Karimi told me about his plans: to get a well-paid job with his recently acquired engineering degree, go on a road trip in the US and avoid dying fighting in Syria. Fifteen months on, as the country votes in a presidential election, I met him again in Tehran. He is yet to find a job; the road trip, the result of being introduced to Jack Kerouac by an uncle educated in Illinois, is not going to happen anytime soon with the uncertainties surrounding Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban; but he has so far managed to avoid conscription and being sent to Syria. It is the lack of a job which is having the most direct impact on the life of 23-year-old Navid. Many of his friends are in the same situation; two out of the three of them who joined us for chai are unemployed.
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