Blogging without borders
My piece published by the Walkerly Magazine
The internet has demolished the iron curtain between Pakistan and India almost overnight, writes Pakistani blogger and writer Raza Rumi.
I don’t need to tell you about the multi-billion dollar enterprise that is the animosity between India and Pakistan. Suffice to say that the birth of a new nation-state on the Indo-Pak sub-continent was among the bloodiest of all time, entailing the migration of nearly 10 million of the wretched of the earth who had to find a new home.
Millions of deaths and three wars later, the bitterness refuses to go away and the interaction of the two countries’ populations has been very limited over 60 years. As a result, not all Pakistanis have the privilege of visiting India. I happen to be one of those who, by sheer coincidence, have been visiting India primarily for work or cultural exchange.
My forays into journalism coincided with my alter ego as a blogger. Purely by accident, I discovered the world of blogging, driven by the desire to post my pieces published by The Friday Times (TFT), a weekly Pakistani magazine. Trying to avoid creating a paid website, the blog template came to my rescue.
Within hours of my first blog entry, there was a plethora of comments and hundreds of hits completely out of the blue. I had never imagined the internet to be this boundless universe, traversed by so many from different parts of the globe and with peculiar interests.
Incidentally, my first article published by TFT was about my maiden visit to Delhi, the Indian capital, which left me quite inspired and bedazzled. Contrary to the textbook enemy stereotype, I was fascinated by the discovery of my “Other”. It was almost as if a split-image of my entire identity was scattered all over a manic, dirty and enchanting city with a recorded history of at least a thousand years. And guess what, the thousand years of Delhi’s past are nothing but a testament to how an Indo-Muslim composite identity of sorts evolved, fermented and splintered.
One by one, as if I had a series of long-lost friends and associations, little pieces of my belonging emerged during travels to India and questioned the years of linear history and nationalism. This is why, unlike a lay tourist or a cultural aficionado or a babbling litterateur, my encounters with the enemy territory and environment have been deeply personal. I have to confess there are many across the border who harbour the clichéd renditions of history and the present.
One comes across bands of suspicion-mongers, Islamophobes and jingoists in the slum-istans that constitute Shining India. But there is much to redeem when one is interacting with the Other. To one bigot in India, there are 10 peaceniks and to one fundamentalist, there are perhaps seven secular, inclusive beings. I can confidently state the same about Pakistan.
What is the problem then? Quite honestly, the problem, as Brutus was once told, lies somewhere within the fractured societies we live in. More importantly, the intricate cobwebs of statehood, so painstakingly woven by two centuries of colonial rule, refuse to clear out. If anything, the native elites have only made them firmer and more impregnable, where voices of dissent and peace are often drowned out by outbreaks of jingoistic hysteria.
My blogging experience also confirms this utterly self-destructive trend among the thinking, educated sections of the middle-classes. The typical wardrums beat quite vociferously on the blog comments the moment you challenge any of the notions based on “conventional wisdom”. There is little room, one frustratingly finds, to open the box of history and trash all the baggage and somehow start afresh. However, the paradox cannot be missed either.
For a decades-long iron curtain between the two countries has been demolished rather painlessly by the internet. The nation-states tried very hard to stop people on both sides from communicating, interacting and exploring each other’s similar lives. Increasingly, the blogosphere has provided an arena for a discourse that ought to have happened many years ago.
Straddling the cyber-world to the real encounter with India is also a fascinating experience. The internet, despite its limitless powers, remains confined to the English-speaking and literate section of society, within a particular income-bracket. The real world, on the other hand, comprises countless taxi-drivers, rickshaw-pullers, small-time menials and even the lower-caste cleaners you meet in the northern parts of India.
This is where the true journey begins. On the fateful day of December 27, 2007, when Pakistan’s best-known and much-maligned politician, Benazir Bhutto, was brutally assassinated in Rawalpindi, I was in a small Indian town, Ajmer. When I heard about the murder of Bhutto, I just wanted to be on my own, and left my friend Salman’s home to aimlessly wander in the medieval bylanes of Ajmer. I had thought this little walk would give me a sense of anonymity, a temporary bout of amnesia, but this was not to be.
To my surprise, I noticed that every little kiosk and shop had its TV or radio-set blaring with minute-by-minute updates of the incident. Hundreds of people were crying throughout the bazaars. Such grief over the death of a woman whose father had promised a thousand-year war with India was incredibly comforting. I was in a foreign land, yet I felt at home.
Given the Sufi orientation of my blog and its frequent postings on Sufi lore and poetry, I have been attracting the attention of many spiritualists across the globe. Not surprisingly, a good number from the Indian subcontinent are part of the daily traffic brigade.
Ajmer, Jaipur, Delhi and, recently, Agra are my favourite haunts. There is enmity, affinity, mystery and mundanity all rolled into one fleeting experience. The Pakistani identity crosses over into a South Asian one, sometimes traversing centuries of amity and bitterness.
These bittersweet encounters over half a decade have resulted in my forthcoming travel book, a few semi-finished drafts and tonnes of rambling.
I have been a bureaucrat of a national and international variety, an editor of a magazine and a freelance public policy adviser. I have been switching from one career to another. I know what I will be always: a writer, blogger and a traveller. All else will come and go.
Raza Rumi is a writer and a development professional based in Lahore, Pakistan. He blogs at www.razarumi.com and edits Pak Tea House and Lahore Nama e-zines
All My Posts, Arts & Culture, Blog Babble, Globalization, India, Indo Pak peace, South Asian Art, Travel
[...] Blogging without borders [...]
Article is very well written
Allah apko nazar bad se bachayay your picture is also very nice.
well write post sir.
*written
Great post.
I had some similar experiences when I was in India last year. I had the opportunity to stay with Sikh, Hindu, Jain, and Muslim friends and found them all to be quite hospitable and friendly. As expected, they were intrigued about us and asked us many questions about Pakistan. It was fascination to find ties between the two countries even though they have been separated for so long. I stayed at a sikh friend’s house whose father was born in Peshawar and was still able to read and write urdu. Other people knew the streets of bazaars in Pakistan better than I did. In Delhi there were shops named after Pakistani cities. The surprising thing to me was that people treated us so warmly even though we went only a few weeks after the Mumbai attacks. Though we still come across certain individuals who seem to be prejudiced against Pakistanis and Islamophobic most from the other side seemed to be genuinely friendly. The xenophobes generally tend to belong to the religious communities or some tend to have a jingoistic animosity toward Pakistan.
I did notice that the media and government in India seemed to be obsessed with Pakistan in a very negative way. Every time I turned on the TV each news channel was discussing Pakistan, terrorism and the possibility of war. Hopefully that will change one day.
Blogging has not limit and specially world has become a global village now, whereas Internet has performed very important role:) Good stuff
@ Cubano: I don’t know how to react to your post. Think of it, if it were Indians who visited Pakistan after an attack in Karachi by some fanatic Indians, how would you have treated those Indians? I don’t think most Pakistanis would have been hospitable to Indians either. I don’t know why Pakistanis expect love from Indians when they go on bashing India, Indians and their religion openly to an extent where one doesn’t even feel the need to see a Pakistani, let alone speak to a Pakistani.
@ Raza Rumi: well, if you choose to visit Delhi’s filthy ghettos you can’t call the whole city as ‘dirty’. Old Delhi’s ghettos are known to be filthy like huge parts of Lahore. On the whole, Delhi is developing rapidly and isn’t as dirty as Lahore though as I have been to Lahore. My mother’s father and my sister-in-law’s whole family are originally from Lahore. Lahore seemed to me like a Muslim area in an Indian city, there was no diversity and the food seemed yucky as all we could eat was ”gosht”. It wasn’t a pleasant experience although some people were pretending to be nice. If I wrote an article about Pakistani cities, I would be honest in my comparisons with Indian cities. IMO Indian people and cities in general are ahead in time than most Pakistani cities. The development which is taking place in Indian cities right now will be more visible next 10-15 years.
Raza, reading this post gives me a peculiar sense of deja vu. I was in Lahore at the very moment you were wandering in Ajmer! Visitng Lahore was seeing the ”the other”. A gentler, safer, more hospitable, more cultured version of Delhi. A city where all I encountered was boundless friendship and warmth. Travelling on work, I was made to stay at PC, but I don’t think I ever ate at the hotel. My friends made sure I had ”ghar ka khaana” every single night.
There was the Rafi Peer festival, for qawwali programmes, impromptu mushairas in the suburbs and for mandatory trips to Gowal Mandi for amazing food, the kinds which I’d never sampled in India. Wandering around Anarkali, visitng the grave of the late, great Faiz, trying (and failing!) to meet my childhood heartthrob Imran Khan (and the mirth this caused my Pakistani colleagues), “your” Shalimar Garden, and the grave of “our” Jehangir and Noorjehan – after a while, the differences felt very pointless.
Unlike colleagues from other countries, I felt right at home, revelling in all the similarities and attempting (and failing) to find the ”other-ness”.
Will I go back if I get a chance? In a shot.
[...] article written in 2009 -Blogging without bordersQuote:To one bigot in India, there are 10 peaceniks and to one fundamentalist, there are perhaps [...]
@raza your strange comparison of pak with India (to 1 fundamentalist 7 secular) does not stand if you could notice the number of minorities in Pak! They are invisible now, still migrating to India. How many minorities went to pak, even though it is an exclusively muslim country? Indians are ‘jingoistic Islamophobes’!!wrong. Indians are at best pakistanphobe. Since its pak who threaten India daily with its nukes, sits pretty under its umbrella to commit heinous crime like 26/11, fund wahabi madrasa, lure young muslim youth into terrorism, take away land inciting local muslims colluding with china. And, all that in name of religion. Indians felt sad for BB, because they are not vengeful(or islamophobe) by nature. They knew about her intentions, still felt bad(even myself) because she was a woman leader and a human being. I guess pakistanis lost all moral right to judge india, because if there is hate and mistrust in india its due to the contribution of pak. The truth is Indian muslims also dislike pak because of obvious reasons. Indians see the blasphemy related horror in pakistan and guess what is the percentage of secular inclusive people(may be 30 in the whole country), no matter how hard you people try to cover paks hardcore islamic fundamentalist society.
For a nation that pretended to be different than India, why do Pakistani’s spend so much time writing about the “other”? This is an unhealthy fascination. Perhaps, they need to assure themselves that they didn’t make a mistake.
You have impressive thought process. I think its high time we overcome shadow of hate and suspicion. Its a relation where you can Hate or Love the other but cant be indifferent. And How can a country progress if it continue to hate another country which share half of its international Border. I think its time we messengers of Love overrun these Hate Mongers on both sides.. Pen is our Sword !!