PAKISTAN
I'm recently back to my Lahore fixation, which means all of you who wanted food or Punjabi Music will have to wait, even though I think Punjabi Music might figure in this article, depending on whether I have the time.

As those who know me well know full well, I have an obsession with Pakistan and Lahore. The reason for it is slightly weird. Ever since I was born, I knew that my family was originally from Lahore (And Bhera, and Sialkot) which is now in Pakistan. Being a history aficionado from day one, I always listened to stories about Pakistan with great interest. My interest in the partition was however triggered off in Class VII by, of all things, a newspaper report in which I read that Lahore and Amritsar are 29 miles apart, as far as physical distance goes.

That got me thinking. Amritsar is a day-trip from Delhi, a place which has no mystery at all for any of our generation , especially those living in Delhi. Lahore, on the other hand, has an other-wordly quality about it. One that crops up in the connversation of the elderly in my family, in history text-books, and in Punjabi folk music. I'd never actually thought it could have been closer to Delhi than London, let alone Amritsar.

Well, then, being the obsessive-Compulsive freak that I am, I got to reading about the partition. Many volumes later, I realised what really shocked me about the partition, other than the blood and the gore, was its arbitrariness, and its dependence on a series of coincidences. As late as September 1946, it was something that people were able to laugh at. As late as the 17th of August 1947, the results of Radcliffes Boundary Commission were so uncertain that Hindus could believe that Lahore would be a part of India, and Muslims could dream about Calcutta being a part of Pakistan. In a sense, Pakistan was a dream, built up from scratch by one man, who, despite proclaiming himself to be the champion of all Muslims, ate pork, smoked, drank and married a non-Muslim.

The more I read about the country, the more I realise the tragedy of the partition. The main tragedy was not the immediate exodus and the riots, gruesome though they were, it was the problems it threw up. The chaos in Kashmir is wholly a result of the partition, as well as the Genocide in 1970-71 in Bangladesh. The movement for Sindhu-desh, for Pakhtunkhwa (If I spell it properly), for an independent Baluchistan, and closer home in Khalistan, are all as a result of frustation with the partition, and the forces it unleashed in the Indian sub-continent. Another, even sadder aspect of the partition has been the movement of entire religous communities from one part to the other, most notably in the Punjab. While the Indian part of the British province has very few Muslims, West Punjab is almost entirely denuded of its Hindu and Sikh population. All this has resulted in is bitterness, and the loss of a composite culture, which has made both countries the poorer.

What makes it worse is that there is no short-term solution. The Bonhomie we see between the two nations is usually fragile, and all it takes is a mention of Kashmir or 1947 to destroy it. To rescind the partition would be nearly impossible and would be a monumental folly at the present juncture, cnsidering the level of distrust that prevails between the two countries. All that can be done is to reduce hatred, and to stop painting each others as villains .

The night is dark, and my lamp burns low. Goodnight, all.