A very interesting read!
**A group of Indian students discovered a Pakistan totally different from the one they had in mind when they boarded the Lahore-bound train at Amritsar. **
“We didn’t find the Pakistan we were looking for,” said the student from
India. He was among the dozen history students from Ramjas College (one of Delhi University’s 70 colleges) who visited Pakistan for one freezing cold and foggy week this month on their annual college excursion, having got permission to visit Lahore, Islamabad, Taxila and Peshawar.
Young Madhuresh Kumar, whose family lives in Patna, Bihar, explained his enigmatic statement thus: “Lahore is just like Delhi, and Islamabad, as someone rightly put it, is twenty minutes from Pakistan, while Peshawar is more like Afghanistan. We couldnt find the Pakistan that lies, as imagined, in 90 per cent of the Indians’ minds, courtesy the media and governments of both countries.”
But Madhuresh and his fellow travellers werent disappointed at the
Pakistan they did find. “One thing was common: people were kindly and the response was amazing when they heard we were from India. The love and affection we received made me feel ashamed of what our brethren think of Pakistan in their mental darkness.”
Apparently, the overall gloomy picture about Pakistan does not dampen the desire of Indians to visit this country, as the Ramjas College history
department found, during a meeting in September 1999, held to decide the destination of the departments annual winter excursion. When Mukul
Mangalik, the history teacher who accompanies students on these annual
trips, suggested Pakistan, he was amazed at the response. There was great enthusiasm at the idea – despite the fact that the tensions that had
arisen during the Kargil affair still prevailed, and the whole episode was
a not-so-distant memory.
Forty hands shot up to be included in the trip, an annual affair in which
the different classes have an opportunity to mix instead of being
segregated in their own years. As word spread about the history
departments intentions, other departments asked to join the trip, and then other colleges. Things were threatening to get out of hand when the
October 12 coup happened, effectively dampening some of the enthusiasm.
The Pakistan High Commission had already been applied to for permission by then, but no one at Ramjas thought it would be granted. Miraculously, after weeks of silence, it came through.
Mukul Mangalik received the Ramjas College principals official go-ahead on December 24 – the day Indian Airlines plane was hijacked. As news about the hijacking hogged the headlines, and tension between India and Pakistan heightened, many students and their parents began having second thoughts.
From the original group of twenty that had signed up, the number dwindled down to a brave dozen, all male, who were allowed by their families to go, and finally seen off by friends and relatives on Jan 5 from Delhi with some trepidation.
Most of them had come to Ramjas from all over India and represent a
diversity of backgrounds, cultures, religions, languages and experiences,
from Assam in the north-east (one from Majuli, the largest river island in the world), and Kerala in the south. Only two were Dilli-wallas. And there was Iftikhar Hussain, amazingly from Kargil – yes, Kargil. Relieved at the warmth with which they were met by total strangers, they related some of
the reactions back home to their trip.
One student has a five-year old niece, who asked what he would say if asked where he was from. “From Hindustan,” he replied. “No, no, don’t,” she pleaded. “Say you’re from Pakistan, or they will kill you”. The students who stayed behind gave them a little going-off ceremony with “Acha zindagi rahi to milenge” kind of jokes being bandied around not so jokingly. All of this, of course, bears testimony to the kind of tension created by governments and increased by media in its projection of issues. The reality the students encountered here was quite different from what they
had expected.
Besides not finding the Pakistan they had envisioned, they were overwhelmed at the warmth and hospitality they encountered. Many stereotypes were shattered and misconceptions cleared in their encounters with ordinary people, as they travelled about on a shoe-string budget – upper limit Rs 2,500 for the entire week, including travel, lodging, food and shopping. They stayed in hostels, travelled by bus, on foot or crammed in Suzuki
pickups.
In this they were aided by their teachers dedicated efforts to save them
money. At an informal dinner at Naheed Siddiqui’s (the famous Kathak dancer) on Jan 12, the night before they departed for Delhi, Mitual Baruah, a lively student from
Assam, had everyone, including Mukul Mangalik, laughing with his imitation of the teacher striding up "to the ticket-collector or whoever is at the gate of the place we want to go to. He goes up and greets them, then introduces himself like this (flinging his arms out): “Dekhiey janab, I am a history teacher from Hindustan. These are my students. I can pay
whatever your ticket is, but the students are after all students. We are
your guests. Its up to you. No one refused him!”
That would have been difficult. Mukul is after all from Lucknow, legendary for its manners. “They are lucky to have a teacher like him,” commented a Pakistani student who met them. “I dont know any teachers here who would rough it out with their students on buses and trains every year. They respect him, but it’s also a friendly relationship which gives them enough room to clown around.”
There was no fixed itinerary, no programme; just a couple of contacts here, though which a booking was made at the youth hostel in Lahore. The Samjhota Express steamed into the Lahore station late on the night of Jan 6, and they spilled out into the cold, bundled up in overcoats, hats and scarves, lugging a piece of baggage each. The cold and the well-meaning warnings of
their friends and families were temporarily forgotten in the excitement of
actually being here, their spirits undampened by spending all day at
Attari on the Indian side of the border. “A learning experience,” said
Mukul Mangalik good humouredly. “Theyre a sporting lot,” he added. “I
really believe that all this is a crucial part of their education.”
The students possibly hadn’t bargained that having to ‘fast’ would be part of
their education this time round. Having arrived during Ramzan, they
uncomplainingly respected the local norms and abstained from eating and drinking all day while sight-seeing, led by someone they had never met, Arif Usmani, a
young history teacher from Government College who dedicatedly showed them
around when asked for his help by Pakistani historian Dr Mubarik Ali.
Their original programme would have landed them here in the middle of
Ramzan instead of at the end, and they had wanted to spend New Years Eve
here. Many people, here and back home, thought they were mad on both
counts. But as the students explained it, this was one country they had
intensely wanted to visit, “and what better time to be here than for the
millennium,” as one of them put it. But by the time the programme was
finalised and the logistics worked out, it was too late and they had to
make do with the last week of their vacation, missing a couple of days of
college which was to re-open a couple of days before they returned.
There were comic moments as the two Assamese students in the group, and Iftikhar Hussain from Kargil, found themselves being mistaken for Thai, Uzbek or Filipino. For Iftikhar, it was perhaps a more intense experience
than for the others, since he had spent the summer with his family in
Kargil town dodging the shelling and bullets coming from across the
border. They had to evacuate their homes more than once, and he remembers
thinking “what kind of people they are who trouble us”.
“I used to hate them,” he admits candidly, “but after coming here and
travelling about, I am quite confused in my thinking, wondering whom I
should blame. The people here are so nice and hospitable. And really, I
didnt feel any sort of alienness here,” he added. Karan Singh Bagal, a
second year student, had similar misgivings “due to the media propaganda.
But to my surprise the environment I found was very homely, familiar,
similar faces, living conditions. I didnt feel myself alienated. The
people greeted us more than their relatives and made us comfortable in
every way.”
Other students too placed the blame for the misconceptions they had about
Pakistan on the media.
“Wonderful” and “amazing” is how Gagan Kumar, another second year student
described his experience. “Wonderful because of the variety of people and
things I have been able to experience, and amazing because of the warmth
and hospitality of the people towards us here.”
