Of Indians, Pakistanis and desis...

What socks your mind first up when you think of India and Pakistan? War? Kashmir? Astringent diplomatic rivals? Why is it that we always fail to remember the fact that we were once a single country? Why is it that we fail to remember that our ancestors were born and brought up on the same piece of land? Why is it that we forget that we fought together to evacuate the tyrant British from our motherland? We might forget everything but one thing that we cannot do is change the views of the Americans about us.

People who have been to the US must know what my point is. Approach an American and ask him what he feels your native place is. I can bet a thousand bucks that he won’t name a place but will call you a ‘desi’. Go ask an American about some of the differences that we (Indians and Pakistanis) share. I am ready to scotch a vein from my hand at every single difference that he states.

It all started when I came to the US in the year 2006. I had an Indian student with me on the same flight. We had a 4 hour long stay at Doha. Such a long stay can really sting you after you have gone through what the guys at customs have to offer. We sat down together to have a chat. I still remember clutching my bag like he had come to Doha just to take my bag away from me. As we chatted for 30 good minutes, the clutch on my bag started to loosen a bit. I realized that he is exactly like me and makes the same number of grammatical mistakes as I do=). I wasn’t too surprised when he spoke the same thing I had started to feel-“Dude, your psyche is pretty much the same as any Indian teenager. ”

That wasn’t the first time I was interacting with an Indian. I’ve been to India four times and every single time I found them to be exactly like us. But that is how you ought to behave when you are meeting a visitor who has come all the way to your country. That was the first time I was meeting an Indian with absolutely no fear whatsoever of him abusing my country, leaving me behind with my mouth wide open.

That is when I started to realize that regardless of what amount of hatred we have in our hearts for each other, no matter how many borders we draw between each other, we know for sure that we certainly are no different. We share the same ancestry and the borderlines between us are nothing more than a series concerned with provisioning bilateral politics. I don’t want to sound too poignant at the end so I will leave it for you people to decide what to do next in terms of improving two-pronged relations between India and Pakistan.