Last Train to Pakistan.

I settle down to read Last Train to Pakistan as the sleeper moves out of the station at Amritsar. First published in 1956 it tells of the bitter period during partition when trains left India and Pakistan carrying gifts that the Hindus and Sikhs sent the Muslims and the Muslim sent back - trains full of corpses. It has all the elements of India, the corrupt policemen who make a mistake and arrest an innocent, the magistrate who beds a girl old enough to be his daughter and the hate that divides races in India. But at Mano Majra the peace between Sikhs and Muslims cannot last - it is against the tide in India. As the Muslims flee from Mano Majra to a safer place upstation before moving on to Pakistan , an ambush to stop the train is laid by vicious Sikhs, but as the train nears Mano Majra someone cuts the rope put across to stop the train. It is a budmash named Jugga and he does not do it for any noble aims like multi-racialism but because the Muslim woman he loves and sleeps with is on that train. Indians are suckers for love.

Border.

The continuing saga of all this is the deep resentment that continues to exist between India and Pakistan and I watched this in a movie called " Border."First the Indians shoot some unarmed men they come across in a desert. They are Pakistanis. Some reach for their weapons but it is too late. No Pakistani must be left alive. But further down the movie, in a battle, they capture a Pakistani and the major who earlier shot Pakis at point blank range, even after they were writhing on the ground says, "We always respect POWs"

Someone must have remembered the Geneva Convention.

And the Pakistani commander is portrayed as a sneering imbecile.

Mind you, except for their religion, both people speak a more or less similar language.