Familiarity & Contempt

Amit is serving delicious slices of Pakistan on India Uncut.

His are stories of familiar people in familiar places. The subliminal point, we think, is that Pakistanis are not the devils Indians may imagine -- rather, people very much like us.

This is what our peace process through people-to-people contact hopes for. Illusions are dispelled, familiarity is restored and, as Amit might quip, "fun even comes".

Almost too easy, isn't it?

Pakistan is indeed familiar, as though India in a looking glass. Things are similar, but not quite. Here, life writes itself right to left -- small but deliberate mutinies against inherited history and culture subtly clarify one isn't in Kanpur anymore.

These small mutinies are like still-smouldering dust from our own mutual big bang, the partition.

We are amused by the idea that peace will emerge from a renewed familiarity between our people. As though, Amit's slices of Pakistan are an astonishing revelation to most Indians who, inspired by Bollywood kitsch, will revise their rage into a melodramatic epiphany of familiarity.

Unfortunately, reality is reverse. Familiarity with Pakistan is hardly news to Indians and should only generate contempt.

Indians have forever understood our commonality with Pakistanis -- it's Pakistan's birth pangs that denied this. Indian nationalism sought to hold the family together -- it's Pakistan's that sought divorce.

All this inspite of a thousand years of shared spatial and cultural identity.

We were stabbed in the back by our own -- this evil arose amidst our mundane familiarity. It always does, doesn't it, lulling one's senses then beheading our idealism. Yet, Amit desperately seeks normalcy in Karachi as perhaps Daniel Pearl once did -- reminding us of Mirza Ghalib:

humko maaloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat lekin
dil ko khush rakhne ko 'Ghalib' ye khayaal achcha hai

We are being asked to believe a few cricket matches, kababs, and qawwalis will numb our memory of betrayal. Please. This memory is all we've got to protect us from being lulled as some of our best minds evidently are.

The entirely familiar Pakistan stands astride the suffering of the millions dead and displaced by partition. Our problem is hardly a lack of familiarity, rather an acute understanding of the separatist evil that slouched from Karachi, the 1947 capital of the infant Pakistan.

Update: Amit hears from Nitin as well.