Indo-Pakistan Cross Fertilisation

The Indo-Pakistan feud keeps South Asia apart, but a criss-crossing media is rapidly bridging the subcontinental gap.
ALIENS from another planet, or at least, strangers from faraway foreign lands. Not quite. But to a large extent that is how a Pakistani visiting India feels. Yet, paradoxically, there is also an inescapable sense of familiarity. It´s like coming home, but being in a strange land, where everything is what you expect it to be, but so very different. The cliches come fast and furious: so near and yet so far… There is the undoubted affinity between the Punjabi-, Sindhi-, Gujrati- and Urdu-speaking people across the border. But for other regions of India, Pakistanis are near-total foreigners. Witness the scene, on a Calcutta street last December when a young journalist from Lahore was stopped and asked for his autograph by a student who couldn´t believe he was actually face to face with a real, living Pakistani.

"The new generation on both sides knows nothing about each other and both sides are demonising each other," wrote columnist I. Hassan, after a visit in March to his alma mater in Dehradun, the Royal Indian Military College. "Younger people who met my wife or myself were surprised that we spoke the same language, wore the same dress and were just ordinary human beings like them. Young cadets wanted to know what the land looked like across the border. When told that the Indo-Gangetic plain was the same all the way from Peshawar to Calcutta, they found that incredible."