white noise

They say that you can change your friends but you can’t change your neighbor. Like most clichés, this too has a kernel of truth but that only applies if you are an individual. What happens when you are not a person but a country? Then you don’t have an option of moving away. You have to live with your neighbor and do the best you can. What can one say or add more to India-Pakistan relations that has already not been done, except that I believe it is a zero sum game; a classic dialogue of the deaf where what I say you can’t hear and what you say I can barely understand and this absurd pantomime goes on. Death by a thousand cuts and we are afraid to even complain forcefully lest they kill us! It is pretty hopeless situation borne out of frailty of mind of reasonable men who set too much store by the mind of reasonable men and women. Like a grave mistake was made by a moment but the price will be paid by eternity and now there is only white noise of words like Kashmir, Loc, free trade, people to people contact, 26/11, terrorism, samjhauta express blast, Hafiz Sayid, it is like drowning in so many words and symbols without achieving any clarity. Indo-Pak relations have become like one ghost chasing another ghost. So many lives lost, so many opportunities squandered away, unbelievable amount of resources on both sides chucked down the drain for this one-upmanship   where these could have been employed for the betterment of the desperately poor people in both countries. Earlier I used to delude myself that we are somehow a superior society than them, that we are more self assured as a people and as a nation than them but no more. I think we are almost an exact mirror image of each other. What we do is reflected in the other, we both are neck deep in shit and the funny thing is, we are not unduly bothered by the stink. In a nutshell, I am quite pessimistic about future scenario of this relationship with Pakistan. My only hope is that the future generations of both people will be more enlightened to find a common ground and that they will not be encumbered by the burden of too much history. They will have the advantage of having lived in a globalized world to be able to make an informed decision. Out of box thinking will not be just a corporate jargon but something that will bring about clarity of purpose. It is time to bury the ghosts and move ahead.