About people not in our league
Sushil Ku T
It is the Indian Premier League not the Pakistan Premier League! But, Boy O! Boy, the way the Pakistanis went on the offensive after the IPL franchisees didn’t bang the hammer on the heads of the likes of Shahid Afridi somebody would have thought it was their fundamental right as ‘Indians’ to be part of the cricketing jamboree.
I say downright pathetic if it wasn’t so tragic. Mohammed Ali Jinnah must be squirming in his grave. His two-nation theory just got the boot from the people and government of the country he got his colonial master to carve out of India. The IPL has exposed the Pakistani envy and love for and of all things ‘India’. Partition was a mistake and nobody knows it better than our brothers and sisters the other side of Wagah.
Just for a couple of days at least the people of Pakistan, and that includes those who make up the Pakistani establishment, gave the impression, articulated the view, that they wanted to be Indians, that they would kill to be Indians. The cries of anguish and anger and disappointment gave that feeling away. Never have any country’s people reacted to a sports snub the way Pakistanis reacted to their players’ IPL exclusion, the most vociferous the Government of Pakistan, hurling threats to do this and that to Indians, tit for tat etc, etc…
All because of a game or two of cricket, may be four/five, on Indian soil? Damn right, hurt pride had a lot to do with the clamour to pay India in the same coin but having said that let’s not forget Pakistan has nothing in its chest — except the American F16 and, soon, US drones — to hit at India, or that India/Indians would want from them.
I can’t think of one thing. What does Pakistan have that Indians should envy or covet? They watch our movies, sing our songs and eat no different. Their celebrities get to be real celebrities only after they make it to a celebrity party in Bombay or Delhi. Their stand-up comedians get instant laughs only on Indian TV shows. And, to top it all, their top gunman is incarcerated in India and that true-blood Pakistani boy is ranting and raving that he is an Indian, his Pakistani mama is an Indian and his Pakistani father is an Indian and two days later he tells the court a few of the nine other Pakistanis who made up 26/11 attackers were Indians. If that does not show how much Pakistanis want to be Indians, what does?
They are so much like us, these people of a misguided country, that I can’t but feel a fondness for them. At the same time, I can’t but tell them it’s all their fault not anybody else’ that they are in such dire straits. Instead of the great Islamic republic the former Indians-turned-Pakistanis lead by Jinnah wanted to build, stands a religious-fundamentalist Frankenstein, gorging on its own citizens, strapping explosives round kids and blowing them up with the promise of 72 virgins waiting at someplace called Jannat, without even giving these children some basic sex education. At the rate at which they are blowing them up to smithereens there’s real danger that Jannat will, sooner rather than later, run out of virgins. Then what? No virgins. No suicide bombers! Besides, if all the virgins are up there, at someplace called Jannat, does that mean there are none in Jinnah’s experiment gone awry?
In my travels round the world in six years I’ve met a number of Pakistanis and got to be good friends with some of them. I have hailed cabs with a Pakistani behind the wheel and have been congratulated on my Bahut Saaf Urdu. I’ve sat down to dinner with a Pakistani general manager of a 4-star hotel with an Indian restaurant and chatted with him on everything under the sub-continental sky. I’ve had Pakistani colleagues who cracked the same jokes as Indians. I have also had a couple of nasty run-ins with a couple of real nasty Pakistani roughnecks. Even in these last two, I found a certain envy of things ‘India’ — the feeling that they knew they were not in our league.