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.”
