Why I believe Pakistanis are the most gracious people in the world
By Harsh Mander for Scroll.In and Dawn.com
My mother was forced to leave behind the city of her birth, Rawalpindi, when she was just 18 because of the tumultuous ruptures of Partition. She had never returned. When she was to turn 75, I thought the best gift I could give her was to take her, if it was at all possible, to the city and to the home in which she was born.
I emailed my friends in Pakistan tentatively with my plan. They were immediately very welcoming.
“Just get her a visa, leave the rest to us,” they said. I applied for visas for my parents and the rest of my family. It seemed then a small miracle that we got these easily. I booked our flight tickets, and before long we were on our way.
A warm welcome
Our flight landed in Lahore, and our friends drove us from the airport to their home in Islamabad. I noticed that my mother was initially a little tense. Maybe it was memories of the violence of her exile; maybe it was just the idea that this was now a foreign land, and for many in India the enemy land.
I watched my mother gradually relax on the road journey to Islamabad, as she delighted in hearing my friends and the car driver speak the Punjabi of her childhood, and as she watched the altered landscape of her journey. Islamabad, of course, did not exist when she lived in the Punjab of her days.
In Islamabad, my friends invited to their homes many of their associates with their parents. They organised evenings of Punjabi poetry and music, which my parents relished. Our friends drove us to Murree, the hill-station in which my mother spent many pleasant summers as a child.
My mother had just one more request. Could she go to see the colony in Rawalpindi where she was born and spent her childhood in? My father also wanted to visit his college, the famous Gordon College in Rawalpindi.
A homecoming
My mother recalled that the name of the residential colony in which she lived as a child was called Gawal Mandi. My friends knew it well; it was now an upmarket upper middle-class enclave.
When we reached there, my mother tried to locate the house of her childhood. It seemed impossible. Everything was new: most of the old houses had been rebuilt and opulent new structures had come up in their place.
She located the building that had housed their gurudwara. It had now been converted into a health centre. But we had almost despaired of actually finding her childhood house. We doubted if it was even standing all these years later.
We were leaving when suddenly my mother pointed to the filigree work on the balconies of one of the old houses. My mother said: âI remember it because my father was very proud of the designs. He said there was none like it in the neighbourhood.”
Taking a chance, we knocked tentatively on the door of the house. A middle-aged man opened it, and asked us who we wanted to meet.
My mother said apologetically, âWe are so sorry to trouble you, and intrude suddenly in this way. But I lived as a child in Gawal Mandi, before Partition, when we had to leave for India. I think this maybe was our home.â
The house ownerâs response was spontaneous and immediate.
“Mataji, why do you say that this was your home? It continues to be your home even today. You are most welcome.â
And he led us all in.
Before long, my mother confirmed that this was indeed her childhood home. She went from room to room, and then to the terrace, almost in a trance, recalling all the while fragments of her childhood memories in various corners of this house.
For months after we returned to Delhi, she would tell me that recollections of the house returned to her in her dreams.
Take a look: Why my heart said Pakistan Zindabad!
Half an hour later, we thanked the house-owners and said that we would be on our way. But they would not hear of it.
We were told: âYou have come to your childhood home, then how can we let you go without you having a meal with us here?â
They overruled all our protestations, and lunch was prepared for around eight members of our party, including not just my family but also our Pakistani hosts. Only when they were sure that we had eaten our fill, and more, did they allow us to leave.
Caravan to Pakistan
After we returned to India, news of our adventure spread quickly among family and friends. The next year, my mother-in-law â a wheel-chair user â requested that we take her to Pakistan to visit her childhood home, this time in Gujranwala.
Given the joys of my parentsâ successful visit, I was more confident. Many elderly aunts and an elderly uncle joined the trip, and in the end my wife and I accompanied six older people to Pakistan.
Our experience was very similar to that of the previous year. The owner of their old ancestral haveli in Gujranwala village took my mother-in-law around the sprawling property on her wheel-chair, and after we had eaten with them asked her: âWould you not like to check out your farm-lands?â
On both visits, wherever my wife visited shops for clothes, footwear or handicrafts, if the shopkeepers recognised her to be Indian, they would invariably insist on a hefty concession on the price. âYou are our guests,” they would say. âHow can we make a profit from our guests?â
As news of these visits travelled further, my associates from an NGO Ashagram working in the small town of Barwani in Madhya Pradesh for the care and rights of persons living with leprosy â with which I have had a long association â demanded that I organise a visit to Pakistan for them too.
See: Pakistanis seem to love Indians. Do Indians feel the same way?
Once again, the Pakistan High Commission granted them visas. There was only one catch this time: all of them were vegetarian. They enjoyed greatly the week they spent in Pakistan, except for the food.
Every night they would set out looking for a wayside shop to buy fruit juice. Each night they found a new shop, and each night without exception, the shopkeeper refused to accept any money for the fruit juice. âWe will not charge money from our guests from India,â they would say each time.
This happened for a full week.
I have travelled to many countries around the world in the 60 years of my life. I have never encountered a people as gracious as those in Pakistan.
This declaration is my latest act of sedition.
Pakistan: Between a Rock and A Hard Place
By Yekaterina Kudashkina for The Voice of Russia
Interview with Dr. Theodore Karasik â the Director of Research and Development at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis (INEGMA) in Dubai.
Particularly you have to first understand that the situation in Pakistan is rather icy politically, as well as on the religious scale. Pakistan now finds itself between a rock and a hard place when it comes to how it fits into the US and Western plans to halt fighting in Afghanistan as well as to get rid of terrorist events in the northwest frontier province. So, the Pakistani press is going to be very inflamed though, not only because of the NATO Summit, but also because of the sentencing of the doctor who outed Bin Laden for a sentence of 33 years.
Apparently what happened was that the US had managed to find a Pakistani physician who was able to pinpoint the location of Bin Ladenâs compound and as a result of the leakage of this information in the US and foreign press this doctor was arrested and tried very quickly in Pakistan and sentenced to 33 years in jail for giving up Bin Ladenâs position. This is a political trial where Pakistanis want to make an example of this individual by arguing that he managed to fail the state by giving up the secret of where Bin Laden was hiding.
Do you think that this case is going to further deteriorate the relations between the US and Pakistan or is it just a root in development?
I think it is a bit of both. I think that will embarrass the US-Pakistani relations. I think that will be pressuring the United States of why did the US revealed the identity of this doctor. There is also a discussion about how this relationship with Pakistan and the United States will continue in terms of transport of nonlethal goods to Afghanistan.
Now, talking about that issue. Do I get it right that the negotiations are still under way in Islamabad regarding the transportation routes agreement, the new one?
Yes, the negotiations are still ongoing in Islamabad about transferring nonlethal goods into the Afghan theatre. And Pakistanis are using this episode to put political pressure on US to make concessions, particularly when it comes to military aid or paying of very high prices for use of this supply lines.
Are we talking about concessions in terms of money or in some other aspects?
Itâs a combination of both money and political support for the Zardari Government.
Is the US prepared to offer a political support for Zardari Government in the present circumstances?
At this time I would say that the United States is going to play quite tough with Pakistan. Letâs face it â Pakistan is just barely above a failed state. And the US needs to make sure that Pakistan does not descend in the total chaos while at the same time applying pressure on Pakistan to guarantee that the state remains somewhat coherent together.
The signals of the resumption of negotiations in Islamabad were generally seen as a sign that perhaps they could be ameliorating. And then came Zardariâs visit to Chicago. By the way, why would the Pakistanis be so disappointed with the results of his visit? What were their expectations?
I think that they were expecting to be treated more as an equal and key to solving the Afghan problem as well as to part of trying to help with the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. But instead you had this political issues popup and then you had Zardari acting in a very strange way by missing the key events like the group of progress of all the leaders and so on. I think that they left Chicago messed.
Does the United States want to ameliorate them and what needs to be done if there is a certain desire to make them better?
Clearly a lot of problems need to be discussed and we need to find the right remedies that would help both countries work together in this difficult time. I think it is going to get more difficult as tensions build over what to do with Afghanistan and the withdrawal from Afghanistan of NATO forces. Pakistan has an important role to play in all this because of the supply routes as we talked about previously. So, I think we are going to be entering a period of more jostling for position, negotiation that could get quite ugly at some points.
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