Bordering on Friendship.

(Diplomatist plus June 2012) 

Bordering on Friendship

Fifteen members of our family travelled together to Amritsar recently. Among several enjoyable highlights of the trip, including visiting the magnificent Golden Temple, was witnessing the change of guard ceremony. This happens every evening at the Wagah border between Pakistan and India.

For those who have not yet seen the ceremony at the Wagah border, it is quite a big local event! 

Fundamentally, it is a change in shift duty of the guards accompanied by the usual army practice of lowering the national flag at sundown; but it has a lot of tradition, pomp and grandeur built around it. Thick gates separate the Pakistani army barrack from the Indian barrack with a metre of no man’s land in between. A large photograph of Mahatma Gandhi adorns one wall on the Indian side and on the Pakistani side a photo of Mr Jinnah is displayed. Facing the barracks on both sides are wide stone steps where people can sit and watch the ceremony.

People come from near and far to watch the ceremony which takes place daily. The audience starts taking up vantage positions on the stone steps in the early afternoon itself. Patriotic songs blare from microphones two or three hours before the event and really build up the mood. Many from the audience climb down onto the road below and start to dance enthusiastically. At 5 o’clock this party is interrupted by the master of ceremonies. The dance floor goes back to being a road and the revellers remember what they came for in the first place. A relative silence descends as all wait for the more serious business of the ceremony to start.

A powerful command from the guard commander suddenly pierces the silence and heralds the beginning of the event. The commanders on both sides compete to keep their voices as loud as possible and the words stretched out as long as their breath allows, giving us a slight feel of the Opera. Suddenly, the lead pair of soldiers start marching smartly to the gate. On that particular evening, it was heartening to see two young women in uniform take the lead. Thereafter, more soldiers march individually or in small groups to the gate. It is a matter of prestige for the soldiers to be well turned out and to march with such agility that their legs touch their foreheads on the upswing. When they come close to the gate (and consequently face to face with their rivals), they swagger, click their heels smartly, thrust out their chests and adjust their headgear with mock-aggressiveness. All these gestures are meant to convey confidence and intimidate their counterparts on the other side. Throughout the hour-long show, the master of ceremonies, mike in hand, guides the audience on when to clap or shout and when to be (relatively) quiet. At one point, the gates are opened, the soldiers shake hands and the flags of the two sides are lowered in perfect unison. After that all too brief interlude of togetherness, the gates are shut again.

Those thinking that a guard changing ceremony might be a solemn occasion, will find themselves mistaken. It is more along the lines of a boisterous and friendly cricket match. There is a sense of drama and various emotions course through the mind. Though each side fervently encourages their own soldiers with loud shouts and clapping, there is a healthy curiosity for what is happening on the other side of the gate. Everyone keeps looking over to the other side to see how they are faring in the friendly competition of smartness and bravado. There is a desire to wave out to the audience on other side (people often do that) and establish a rapport.

Surely, there is a sense of pride in one’s particular country. But for those who originally belonged to undivided India there is also a deep sense of longing and nostalgia. Their past seems so tantalisingly close and yet so far away. As my mother in law wistfully said “Do you know Lahore is only 31 miles away from where we are sitting now?” Many people of that generation earned their professional degrees in Lahore. Several think about where they were born, where they lived and worked and are engulfed by a curiosity to see what changes time has brought to their old haunts.

What is impressive is the perfect harmony and unison of the so-called rivals when performing the ceremony. Each side keeps a watch on the other and they synchronise their movements perfectly making it look beautiful. Even the flags are lowered simultaneously with hardly an inch of difference between their heights. One can’t help but reflect on how well we work together as a team.

As individuals, many of us have faced the sorrow of a good sound friendship suddenly turning sour. A single incident can spark the unravelling of a relationship and sometimes things come undone at such breakneck speed that all concerned are left a little breathless. We may feel shattered. We may feel a deep sense of loss. There may be anger, bitterness and sorrow but underlying these is a secret longing to go back to the way things were before all hell broke loose.

 
If we extrapolate this to an entire community, one can try and imagine somewhat the collective sense of loss felt after the bloodshed and displacement of the days of partition. No doubt, the minds of many revert back to and relive the months and days of horror when it all came apart. When friendships established over a lifetime were destroyed in one fell swoop.

 
There must be profound regrets on both sides about the process by which a hardworking and close-knit community fell apart into fragments.

I can recall Jagjit Singh’s mellifluous voice reminding us of that moment in which love comes alive “woh pal ki jis mein mohabbat jawan hoti hai”. I wonder how many people across the border feel nostalgic and await that moment when, by some miracle things can come together once more. Can we be friends all over again? It would be so heartening if in our lifetime, the gates are opened and Indians and Pakistanis alike dance to a common tune…for example Ghulam Ali singing “Bichad ke bhi mujhe tujhse….”

An unusual friendship….

  (Middle, The Statesman)

Dr Anjali Mehta




Friendships happen in different ways - a chance meeting with a kind stranger, work colleagues discovering they have even more in common than just their targets or boss, parents whose children attend the same school and so many others….

I reflected on some unusual starts to my friendships :



In our student days, we would sometimes be made to stand in the corridor outside the classroom as a punishment for various little misdeeds . While serving one such sentence, I noticed a skinny, timid looking boy also standing outside another section in the corridor nearby. Feeling rather maternal and wondering how on earth he fell foul of authority, I went across to cheer him up . A half hour later, I was in a mild state of shock - it turned out he was a corridor “regular” and even my mischief paled in comparison to the range, audacity and repertoire of misdeeds recounted by him. Awestruck, I vowed never to judge a book by its cover. Our friendship grew over the next few months as we happened to get punished often together and he became a sort of “naughtiness consultant “ to me in school.



In medical college , we had just begun to form a loose knit study group of girls who used to sit and study together in the hostel balcony at night. To try and enhance our beauty along with our brains, we would apply colorful mud and vegetable face packs. One night, an intruder jumped over the compound wall and we heard his footsteps in the dark below. We all crept to the edge and peeped down. We found ourselves staring into a man’s face. On catching sight of our bizarre facial colouration, his own face drained of all colour …he simply fled in shock (we never saw him again !) The incident led to a lively discussion on topics such as beauty masks, intruders (anything other than medicine) and the ice was beautifully broken amongst us all.



The most unusual for me however, has been a friendship forged from the labour room! Eva (name changed) and I were admitted to the same hospital on the same night for onset of labour pains. Her pains quickened before me and her loud groans attracted the attention of my family members. Feeling fairly underutilized as far as I was concerned, they went to her bed to soothe her . My pains, on the other hand, froze my tongue with shock and no sound emerged. Time passed. Eva continued to cheerfully yell the place down while I remained dazedly silent willing to expend my energy only on bare necessities like breathing. My family was largely focused on comforting Eva, believing her to be in greater pain (though any good medical book and life’s experiences will tell you labour is painful without exception and shouting is an inaccurate barometer, being personality based and not pain based). Meanwhile, her family watched me with increasing awe. They thought I was the epitome of dignified, silent suffering and came over to congratulate my parents on harboring such a seemingly stoic being in the family.

I think in our lucid moments , Eva and I felt cross with each other. I felt she had garnered all the sympathy and she felt I had garnered all the admiration. We delivered within minutes of each other.



Over the next few weeks we met at common vaccination dates. We saw a relatively more glamorous version of each other (a human shape rather than balloon shape) and were exposed to facets of personality other than reaction to pain . It was in these visits that the friendship blossomed….



I have learnt that in any of life’s little twists and turns..there just may be a new friend round the corner…