Quotable quotes from the India-Pakistan trip
Monday in Surrey, British Columbia and Tuesday in Seattle, I gave early versions of the slide show from the Feb-April six-week trip around India and Pakistan that will provide the narrative spine for my new book.
More on the trip and the book in future posts. As we go along, too, I want to get approximations of the slide show online, for people who aren’t able to see it in person. For now, here are some quotes and dialogue from people we met on the trip. These will be more contextualized in the book, but for now here are they are more or less raw:
Tushar Gandhi, great-grandson of the Mahatma, in Mumbai:
“They [young Pakistanis he has met] told me that, ‘Please don’t turn off our water supply and turn us into a dust bowl.’”
“Not for me, but for a lot of people in Mumbai, you say Pakistani, and they will say terrorist.”
“Was this true before 26 November?” I asked.
“It was. But after 26 November it is even more.”
Mrs Dilnaz Baig in Hyderabad in South India:
“Pakistanis look down on Indian Muslims, because we did not join them.”
“A Pakistani woman does not have a chance of being a woman in her own right.”
“I don’t think they [Pakistanis] have a holistic view, the way we do. They can’t afford to. They just have to focus on their money-making activities. I find them very mercenary. They are very large-hearted, when we go there.”
“I will vote for Congress. I think we all should vote for Congress, because at least it stops the BJP in their tracks. Muslim vote bank, they call us.”
Asad, an Indian Muslim journalist at The Sunday Indian magazine in Delhi:
“The Muslims don’t have a good situation now. They are suspected of terroristic activities, of anti-national activities.”
“Things were different when the BJP was in power. But when Manmohan Singh came in, when Congress came to power, things have changed.”
“For the better?”
“For the better. And I think there’s a realization by the Hindus that they cannot alienate the Muslims. And I think there’s a realization by the Muslims also that if we have to live in India, we have to be patriotic.”
On Pakistan: “It’s a country that, if it blows up, it will bring down a lot of other countries with it.”
“When you talk about Pakistan, there is no middle in India.”
“Everybody’s anti-Pakistan?”
“Yes. That is very unfortunate. And I blame the media for that.”
“And the unfortunate thing is that if you take away Muslims from India, India will be in the same situation as Pakistan. So Muslims are the unifying factor. That is why the RSS uses Muslims as a scapegoat, to unite all the Hindus on one platform.”
Aslam Mughal in Lahore, on the historic “short Long March” of March 15-16, 2009, which he witnessed:
“When the people at large join a movement, it is very difficult to stop it. And that is exactly what happened. It was amazing. People from all walks of life. Children, women, older people. I have never seen anything like it.”
Dr Sattar, a cardiologist who works at a small hospital in Kharian, a town along the Grand Trunk Road between Islamabad and Lahore:
“People here, they don’t know the importance of salad. And the way of cooking here is very bad. They put lot of oil, and lot of chilies, and they cook, cook. And the oil is not destroyed by cooking, but the nutrition of the vegetables is reduced. I tell them, ‘Your weight is not increasing by the chappatis. Your weight is increasing by this curry you are taking. And they are also eating lot of meat.”
Dr Shahnaz Khan, a family practice physician based in Zephyr Hills, Florida, between Tampa and Orlando, with whom we spent a day at a Human Development Foundation site near Lahore:
“What I’m seeing now [in her practice in Florida] is a reflection of the economy. A lot of people losing their jobs, in the past one year. How people are coping with that is, they’re postponing anything that is not an emergency. People are shopping around for cheaper sources for medication. If they don’t have the money to pay the premium, what are they going to do? I had a patient whose wife came to me and said her husband was really depressed. He was a builder, and he had built five houses to sell, and he couldn’t sell them.”
“How do patients relate to you as a Pakistani?”
“I have no problem, really no problem at all. Even after 9/11 and all of this negative publicity. They know my mother lives alone, so they’re always asking about her. They knew when my father passed away. They actually tell me they think of me when they listen to the news. In fact, a lot of them probably didn’t know I was from Pakistan before 9/11, or didn’t even care.”
Mahera Omer, a documentary filmmaker in Karachi:
“When the lawyers’ rally happened here, all the foreign channels were here. And they hire a lot of the local camera people, like me. And others went, but my family went ballistic [because of worries over her personal safety], so I refused.”
“It’s supposed to be a media boom, with more than 80 channels. But us poor documentary filmmakers – nobody is interested in documentaries.”
“Those are the stories that we want to tell, but politics keeps going on. Nobody is interested in the environment, or wildlife, or other creatures that are miserable. These are the things that we want to fix.”
New Facebook fan page
If you’re on Facebook, please join the new Alive and Well in Pakistan page.
Nosheen Abbas: Report from an IDP camp in Islamabad
Here’s a recent column from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn by Nosheen Abbas, a young reporter I met in Islamabad in March:
Dawn column: A whole new trip
I’ve just published the first installment of my new column in the Books & Authors section of Dawn. Here’s a passage from it:
“My premise is that reminding Americans and Pakistanis of our common humanity is a useful thing to do, and something I’m in a position to do, at this fraught and crucial historical moment. Whether it can help forestall the dangers we all fear is another matter.”
Refugee crisis in Pakistan
The refugee crisis in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province is worsening, by all reports. This should worry us all, for both human and political reasons. Human suffering ultimately is more important than anyone’s politics, and if only we Americans injected more concern for others’ suffering into our politics, I think everyone would be better off.
“It is a time of crisis for the people of the NWFP. Their lives have been disrupted by weeks of fighting and before they can go back home to a Taliban free homeland, they need food, shelter, and medicine to make it through. Fighting hasn’t ebbed in weeks and thousands more have fled the battle grounds. Even though assistance in the form of food, medicine, and shelter is being provided, much more needs to be done. This is time for all Pakistani organizations to come together and help the refugees.”
Late May slide show dates: Surrey, BC; Seattle; Portland
TOWN HALL SEATTLE
250 – 13450 – 102 Avenue
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Ambreen Ali: U.S. must help Pakistan provide for its people
My friend Ambreen Ali published a good op-ed in yesterday’s Seattle Times. She writes:
“In Pakistan, the last stable source of jobs is the military. Not incidentally, U.S. aid to Pakistan has long focused on strengthening its military might.
“There’s some truth in the American assertion that Pakistan has been an unwilling partner in the Afghanistan war. Pakistanis see their own national needs as having been pushed aside while their U.S.-backed leaders joined a battle on America’s behalf.”
My own comment is that, reading the comments from readers below the article, I’m reminded of the very wide range that exists in levels of awareness, and of the principle I always try to follow of trying to know what I’m talking about before I write anything. It’s depressing to read, for example, the assertion from one reader that “USA did not create the Taliban”. Well … yes and no. Americans can’t excuse ourselves from responsibility for the situation in Pakistan as easily as that. Read Taliban and/or Descent Into Chaos by Ahmed Rashid, and watch the film Charlie Wilson’s War.
Speaking of Pakistan: Surrey, BC, May 25
I’ll be speaking at the Surrey campus of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia on Monday, May 25. Visit this page for details. I’ll be showing slides from Pete Sabo’s and my recent six-week trip, with the title “Pakistan and India: A Search for Common Humanity.” Many thanks to SFU Ph.D. candidate Arsalan Butt for all his hard work setting up this event.
New Books & Authors column
A bit of blog-related news: I’ve just reached agreement to write a column for the Books & Authors section of the leading Pakistani daily Dawn. If you’re not in Pakistan, look for it online. It will be about 700 words, every two weeks, with the first installment to be published sometime in mid-May.
“If I wasn’t American, what was I?”
