At the Airport, I hear the familiar Punjabi language including its flowery sear words. As I come out, its again a familiar sight of a hundred friends and relatives waiting to receive the one passenger who is wading through the crowd.
As I am driven from the airport to the hotel on the dimly lit avenues, I am greeted by hoardings of Pepsi, Coca-cola, ABB…. Even as the Vespa scooters and the three wheelers, the Honda motor cycles and Suzuki 800 pass by.
I settle into the hotel room and switch on the TV only to hear Laloo Prasad Yadav pontificate on housing, followed by a story on HUDCO and the Bombay stock exchange. I change the channel and there is Shah Rukh Khan dancing away and then the star plus and Z cinema with a Madhuri Dixit movie…..
Next day, I go to the meeting. I meet people whose manes are Malik, Chaudary, Kapadia, …I meet the Gills and the Jats… I tell them that Lahore was the ancestral home of my in laws and they tell me about their father/ brother/ sister or some relative or friend living in Delhi, Bombay …We then get down to work and start listing the problems faced by the working people of both the countries. An identical list emerges: lack of proper labour legislation; improper or non implementation of the few laws that exist ; privatisation and industrial sickness, consequent monopolies and closure of units ; problem of minimum wages ; social security, casual/ badli workers, child and bonded labour ; consequences of mechanisation and automation, growing unemployment, corruption and nepotism…
Meeting over, I take out a map of Lahore to plan some site seeing and what do I find - Ram Galli, Lashmi Chowk, Krishan Nagar, Ganga Ram Hospital … ( Later I was told that attempts to change the names did not succeed with the people since they continued to identify the places with the names)
I ask myself, WHERE AM I ? Then I think of the fact that more people were killed in the partition than in the entire Second World War. I think of the enormous suffering my wife’s family had to undergo… that the entire exercise of partition was macabre is evident. But, what about today ?
Here I am, in a foreign country, a hostile country. Both our countries Governments love to hate each other. Both would rather live as enemies and spend vast sums importing arms from the USA and Europe than save millions of their citizens from hunger and destitution.
How long can we allow this humbug of our nations being friends of the Pepsis, the Coca Cola, the Vespas, the Suzukis, the arm merchants of the USA and Europe, whilst, WE the people, are enemies, that too when WE share a common history, culture, language, dress code, cuisine and, in no small measure, even a common language and do not even have a distinct identity that could justify the enemity ? Why should the post partition generation inherit the sins of their parents, why should they not give their children a more purposeful and enriched life by bringing change ? These then are the questions that WE the people, both as individuals and as collectives, must answer on both sides of the barbed wired fence.