- Do India and Pakistan plan to act their age anytime soon?
mol bola woh hum koo’ (He called me a small man) along with deep-thinking picture of Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, has to be the most shared meme in the aftermath of recent India-Pakistan diplomatic exchange. Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote a letter to his Indian counterpart and guess what? You are right, it wasn’t exactly reciprocated in the manner expected. Nothing new here, dear reader. Alas, nothing at all new. The same old circuitous, never ending, always simmering, shenanigans-dominated soap opera where characters remain same while actors playing them differ only in height, complexion and size. This time around they proved that they all are Smol men occupying offices that await greater, more sane, more sagacious men.
Many a brilliant, good willed and upright people both in India and Pakistan of late have come to mistake jingoism for patriotism and narrow, harrowing chauvinism for nationalism. It is pertinent that these folks understand that peaceful co-existence is not a choice, it is the compulsory condition for both states whose populace is in the throes of want, misery and need. With the war-mongering and intense escalation the dream to uplift millions of their inhabitants remains just that — a dream.
Both India and Pakistan run, move, crawl, loiter around in circles as they never bother to catch their breath and ask few simple questions: What is it that makes us tumble every time; why we are quick to form bonds, give assurances, and make tall claims; careless in keeping them whole, reluctant to abide by what we’ve vouched for and pull the plug right before our palates prepare to taste the much-anticipated fruit of peace and prosperity. This is the Sisyphean circle and both septuagenarians plan to perpetuate it.
Fortunately or unfortunately, past is no foreign country where people did things differently. As both of us don’t believe in doing anything differently? Have we learned our lesson? Have we opted a different path to tread upon? We, dearest sirs and ma’ams, just underwent a change of smol men in highest offices, and no change of path or heart. No epiphany dawns upon smol men.
Such incidents, calling other person smol happen when ruthless reciprocity attains the reverence of religious ritual. The practice of returning in the same coin, the tit-for-every-tat has etched so deep in our minds that it has become the rule of thumb that trump all other modes and modalities. Thorough deliberation has given way to I’ll-teach-a-lesson-they’ll-always-remember mindset.
Read the above lines over and over again whenever things go south between Pakistan and India and they will sound fresh as a daisy.
Alas, to the world the ‘letter fiasco’ is just another episode of where we, the Midnight’s Children, are at each other’s throats
Too wise to not realise that one can fight history, but not geography. Too smart to not learn the latest lesson other nations have learned. We, for the lack of better luck, still assume that we live in a dog eat dog world, where three out of four neighbours are utterly ill at ease with us and have on their fingertips all the instances when they were dealt a wrong hand and left in the dark by their now-friend, now-enemy neighbour i.e. Pakistan.
Alas, to the world the ‘letter fiasco’ is just another episode of where we, the Midnight’s Children, are at each other’s throats. Remember the Jhadav fiasco, where both Pakistan and India found another opportunity to teach each other an ‘unforgettable lesson’. Congratulations to the bombastic, tech-savvy, saffron-clad Shri Modi ji and stubble brandishing, serious looking former PM Abbasi for enjoying the ringside view of endless fight that has consumed many ‘Udaas Naslain’ (Weary Generations) with its appetite not even half diminished.
If familiarity breeds contempt on one hand on other the land, people and things you don’t have are always more beautiful, more splendid, more worthy than the land you possess, people you have and things you own. This ‘good old grass is always greener on the other side of fence’ mindset still sways our kind.
Many of us share the fate of our beloved motherlands. We have to put up with misery in all its gory forms because the ‘husbands’ (read leaders) of our land are either posing as mythic Titans or busy in one-upmanship. Pakistan and India have barely lost any opportunity to teach each other ‘lessons’. Now both neighbours revel in a schadenfreude that was cultivated over time and has become so mammoth it’ll take years before Pakistanis and Indians even begin to think of each other as regular human beings, capable of basic human emotions.
Dear reader the big lands governed by smol men have made their people master the art of hating their neighbour. And the people are loving it.
