What devoured glamorous Pakistan?

[Daredevil]

Usually I would highlight important points in an article but this article is worth of highlighting it totally. So, read it all. A very nice deconstruction of how Pakistan lost its glamour based on flash and how India gained respect with substance. Must read for all.

What devoured glamorous Pakistan?

Vir Sanghvi
Express News Service
First Published : 05 Sep 2010 11:12:00 PM IST

I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how much the attitude to Indians had changed in the West. Once we were regarded as losers, people who inhabited a desperately poor country, continually ravaged by famine or drought, incapable of making a single world-class product, and condemned to live forever on foreign aid. Now, we have the world's respect and, more tellingly, the West's envy as more and more jobs are Bangalored away from their high-cost economies and handed over to Indians who perform much better for less money.

That piece was prompted by a visit to London. This one too has been inspired by a trip abroad and by saturation coverage of the Pakistani cricket scandal in the press and on global TV channels. But my concern this week is not with how the West sees India.

It is with the transformation of the image of the global Pakistani.

I was at school and university in England in the Seventies and lived in London in the early 1980s. This was a time when Pakistan was regarded — hard as this may to believe now — as being impossibly glamorous. The star of my first term at Oxford was Benazir Bhutto. In my second term, she became president of the union and was the toast of Oxford. Her father was then prime minister of Pakistan and lucky students vied for the opportunity to visit Karachi or Islamabad as guests of the Bhuttos. They came back with stories of unbelievable hospitality and spoke knowledgeably about Pakistan's feudal structure, about landowners like the Bhuttos, about an autocracy that had reigned for centuries etc.

Even on the other side of the ideological divide, Pakistan was all too visible. He had come down from Oxford nearly eight years before, but a former president of the union, the charismatic Trotskyite Tariq Ali was still the sort of chap who made English girls swoon. For her first debate as president of the Oxford Union, Benazir asked Tariq Ali to speak. He agreed but then, rather inconveniently, he was detained by the police on a visit to Pakistan. No matter. He phoned Benazir who spoke to daddy and — hey presto! — Tariq was out of jail and on a plane to England. Pakistan was that kind of country, the British chortled delightedly.

In those days, us poor Indians hardly ever got a look in. The Pakistanis were dashing, far richer (they spent in a week what we spent in the whole term), always going off to chic parties or nightclubs in London and charming the pants off the British (often, quite literally).

In that era, the Arabs had just emerged on the world stage (following the massive oil-price hikes of 1973/4) and the Pakistanis were almost proprietorial about them. A Pakistani graduate student at my college, even affected Arab dress from time to time and bragged that he had taught Arabs how to fly planes.

My college-mate was merely reprising Z A Bhutto's philosophy: the Arabs were rich but they were camel drivers. They needed Pakistanis to run the world for them and to teach them Western ways. It was this sort of thinking that led to the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the first global Third World bank, run by Pakistanis with Arab money. For most of the 1980s, BCCI was staffed by sharply dressed young Pakistanis who entertained at London (and New York's) best restaurants, hit the casinos after dinner and talked casually about multi-million dollar deals.

Their flamboyant lifestyle was matched by other rich Pakistanis. In his autobiography, Marco Pierre White, the first of the British super-chefs (he was the original bad boy and Gordon Ramsay worked for him), talks about the Pakistanis who were his first regulars. Michel Roux, then England's top chef (three Michelin stars) would fly out to Pakistan to cook at private parties thrown by wealthy individuals. In the late 1980s, a friend of mine went to dinner in Pakistan and was startled to be asked to guess the vintages of three different bottles of Mouton Rothschild, one of the world's most expensive wines.

In that era, Indians knew absolutely nothing about wine or French food and the few Indian millionaires who vacationed in London were vegetarians.

Pakistanis were sex symbols too. The first international cricketing stud was Imran Khan (who finished at Oxford the term before I got there) and his sex appeal was so legendary that even Benazir joked about it. Told that Gen Zia-ul-Haq called him the 'Lion of the Punjab," Benazir said, "Yes but Zia pronounces "Lion as 'Loin' and this is appropriate." Years later when Imran spoke about his love for Pakistan, a British columnist sneered, "His heart may be in Pakistan but his loins are in the King's Road" referring to a trendy (and expensive) London area.

Even Pakistan's millionaires were more glamorous than ours. In the Eighties when the Hinduja brothers ("we are strictly vegetarian") first emerged in London, the Pakistanis stole the show with such flamboyant high-profile millionaires in Mahmud Sipra who financed feature films and kept a big yacht in the South of France.

So what went wrong?

It's hard to pin point any single reason but I can think of several contributing factors.

First of all, much of the Pakistani profile was based on flash and fraud. BCCI collapsed amidst allegations that it was a scamster's bank. Mahmud Sipra left England with the Fraud Squad in hot pursuit even as he

declared his innocence from beyond Scotland Yard's jurisdiction. Many big-spending Paksitanis turned out to be heroin smugglers.

Secondly, Indian democracy came to our rescue. The Brits who bragged about Bhutto hospitality and the Pakistan aristocracy missed the obvious point: this was a deeply unequal and therefore unstable society. When Bhutto rigged an election, this led to his downfall.

Thirdly, Pakistan signed its own death warrant by trying to out-Arab the Arabs with a policy of Islamisation. This reached its peak under General Zia who declared a jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and invited Arabs such as Osama bin Laden to come to Pakistan to fight the holy war. Ultimately, fundamentalist Islam devoured what was left of glamorous Pakistan.

Fourthly, the world just moved on. Flash can only get you so far. In the end it is substance that counts. And plodding, boring India came up with the substance.

It is hard to think, when you look at today's Pakistan team, that Pakistani cricketers were such sex symbols in India in the 1980s that Imran Khan was able to brag to an interviewer "Indian actresses are chickens. They just want to get laid" (In all fairness, Imran later said he had been misquoted.)

Get laid by today's team? You must be joking.

Even the Pakistani playboys who are still around no longer seem exciting or glamorous. Poor Imran just looks tired. And the rest look like Asif Zardari — pretty much the archetypal glamorous Pakistani of the Eighties — though perhaps not as disgustingly sleazy.

Of all these factors, two remain the most important. A nation created on the basis of Islam was destroyed by too much Islam. And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because of too much democracy.

 

[Vinod2070]

Hmmm. Triumph of substance over hype and fakeness.

Yes, he is right. It is impossible to link Pakistan with achievement and glamor today. It was all too fake even then.

 

[Vinod2070]

About Imran Khan, I used to like him earlier but later on I saw the kind of duplicitous and fake person he is.

He comes to India to make money and acceptability. Then he goes back and shows how racist he is:


Watch him talk of the Indian skin color here.

When a primitive Pushtunwali tribal like him can ape a Western lifestyle, who can't!

He may have studied in some Oxford college, at heart he is still a primitive Pushtun tribal and that will never change.

That is the true: Kawwa chalaa hans ki chaal...

 

[hit&run]

"A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seemed
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow; though his tongue
Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to noble deeds
Timorous and slothful."
Paradise Lost-John Milton

 

[Vinod2070]

Here is the earlier article he is talking about.

Independence Day reflections from London​

Posted By: Vir Sanghvi | Posted On: 13 Aug 2010 08:47 PM

This column is being written in London. I will be back in India for Independence Day but for all of the last week I have been travelling through Scandinavia and England. The journey has given me the advantage of perspective. As we celebrate Independence Day, I am struck by how differently foreigners now view us from the way in which they have regarded us for years.

The obvious contrast is with England. Over 30 years ago, at roughly this time of year, I came to London to go to school here. At that time, almost every reference to India was negative. The Emergency was treated as proof of the fragility of Indian democracy. We were dismissed as a nation of lazy, quarrelsome people who had no money and lurched from famine to drought.

It did not help that earlier in that decade, Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, had thrown Asians out of his country forcing many of them to seek refuge in Britain. Though the Ugandan Asians were highly qualified and hardworking, their detractors used them to prop up the caricature of Indians as a burden on the societies of the West.

In that era, people were still astonished that Indians could speak English well. At school, I was forever being complimented on the quality of my writing and debating skills. But beneath the compliments lay a tone of amazement: "How come you Johnnies learn to speak our language so well?"

Then, there was the Hindu-Muslim question. Many people said to me, in all seriousness, that Hindus and Muslims were always ready to tear each other's throats out and were entirely incapable of living in peace. Some went so far as to suggest that it was only the stabilising influence of the British Raj that had kept us from massacring each other.

I thought back to those days a couple of weeks ago when David Cameron arrived in India with a delegation of businessmen all eager to sell us their wares. Cameron said all the right things – he even painted Pakistan as an exporter of terrorism – and flattered India so much that it was hard not to like him. But beneath the bonhomie lay a hard, commercial reality: Britain needs India.

Talking to people in London, I am constantly astonished by how completely the perception of India has changed from the negative image that held sway during my school days. In that era, if you mentioned India, people thought of hunger and famine. Now, they talk about a high rate of growth, a booming economy and the software industry. Such great British icons of my school days as British Steel and British Leyland are now owned by Indians. Nobody regards this as at all odd or noteworthy. Nor does anybody find it strange that Britain's richest man is an Indian, L.N. Mittal, raised in Calcutta and still the proud owner of an Indian passport. It is almost as though the Indian ascendency has been a fait accompli.

When I was in school and university, London was in thrall to the Arabs, who were flinging their oil money around. You hardly ever saw Indians in smart restaurants or in the top shops. At such department stores as Selfridges, an Indian walking the floor was likely to be stopped by other shoppers who thought he was a sales assistant. Even in the 1980s, when West End shops hired Indian salespeople, they were gently encouraging if such salespeople dyed their hair brown and spoke in Arab accents.

Now, Indians are London's biggest spenders. Such expensive restaurants as Hakkasan, Nobu and Kai would probably have to shut down if they lost their Indian customers. At the Armani shop on New Bond Street, they brag about the rich Indians who go there. And at nearly every expensive shop in London, salespeople will serve Indians first because they believe we may spend more money than the Brits. (To be fair, the Russians still have the edge over Indians but the Brits hardly get a look in.)

"We never thought that Indians would make such global fortunes that the wealth of Britain would pale in comparison to their assets." What's made the difference?

I think two separate developments have taken place. The first does not really concern us but is worth noting. The East African Asians who were the subject of so much scorn in the 1970s have now established themselves as equal partners in British society. Brits have realised that these were highly intelligent and well-qualified people who had suffered a temporary setback only because of the racism and xenophobia of African politicians. The period of adversity made them work even harder and their rise through the ranks of British society and the meritocracy has been so swift as to be almost unprecedented.

The second development is the rise of India since the 1990s. It is significant that the richest Indians in Britain (the Mittals, the Hindujas, Naresh Goyal, etc.) are not British Asians. They are not people who have made their money in England and many of them (with the possible exception of the Hindujas) have no interest in becoming British citizens.

Their success has turned the conventional wisdom on its head. In the old days, the Brits accepted that there would be some Indians immigrants who would make money in England and rise to the top of the social structure. In fact, that has not really happened. Most British Asian millionaires are strictly second-division. The real money has been made by Indian citizens who have used their business acumen to build up international empires and use London as no more than a professional base. Someone like Sunil Mittal is far richer than any British Asian millionaire and runs a global empire. When he spends time in London (he has a flat here), he does it because he likes the city not because he has any desire to make money out of England.

The other negative perceptions have been tempered by experience. Nobody lectures us on Hindu-Muslim relations any longer given that the UK faces so much difficulty in integrating young Muslims who have been born and brought up in the UK (the tube bombers, for example). Nor is our ability to speak English the subject of much wonder. In fact, it is the cause of considerable annoyance as British jobs get exported to Indian call centres.

When I was at school, we could never have imagined that such a day would come to pass. We never thought that Indians would make such global fortunes that the wealth of Britain would pale in comparison to their assets. Nor did we think it possible that the Made in India label which was regarded with so much derision in those days would become a mark of quality in such areas as computer software. In retrospect, the most amazing thing is how quickly it has all happened. Most changes that are as fundamental as this one take a generation or more. But the effortless rise of India has taken less than two decades.

So, as we take stock of what we have achieved in the decades since Independence, let's recognise that India is still a country with many problems. But let's also acknowledge that what we have achieved is just short of miraculous. We have gone from being a country the West wrote off to becoming the country they all want to suck up to.

Happy Independence Day.

 

[ashdoc]

Get laid by today's team? You must be joking.

Well , ' our ' sania mirza wants to get laid by a pakistani...........:a096:

 

[Rebelkid]

Well , ' our ' sania mirza wants to get laid by a pakistani...........:a096:

There are always exceptions :emot180:

 

[Iamanidiot]

idiocy,stupidity,false prestige,inferiority and superiority complex,imagined enimity with india,bigotry,intolerance,parllel cousin marriages(causes low IQ in progeny),lack of strategy all caused image deficit and will also cause that jerry can structure implode from within.

PS:Coupled with ethnic superiority complex

 

[roma]

Usually I would highlight important points in an article but this article is worth of highlighting it totally. So, read it all. A very nice deconstruction of how Pakistan lost its glamour based on flash and how India gained respect with substance. Must read for all.

the article is rather exaggerated from my point of view. India has always been known in the uk as a country with castes so the english looked and tried to ascertain which "caste" you came from. They always knew the uppers spoke well and considered them more as "italian" and then there were the unfortunate lot. They considered most indians to be math experts and were surprised if some were not. THe east -african asians were alway held in high esteem for their business acumen and the stereo-type was that they came in with only the shirts on their backs and in a couple of years they owned the supermarket In terms of their view of india however i might agree with the article , it was generally regarded as never to be able to arise out of poverty. I cant agree with his portrayal of pakistan among the british. They were always regarded a non-issue , from my perspective. The fact that there are today many rich folks in the indian community of the uk , both from east africa and elsewhere is not a factor of surprise amont the british people i knew. They always held that it is an intelligent group of peolpe and likened us to the wealthy jews.

 

[ashdoc]

indians have always lacked the flamboyance of the pakistanis.........the performance of indians and pakistanis was like the performance of the respective cricket teams........our team was staid , lacked fast bowlers ,and were losers........while their team was mercurial , had fast bowlers ,and produced winners......

 

[sukhish]

I like the way india is and has always been. all this glamour and flamboyance only lasts for so long. ultimately substance counts. you can't run on empty tank forever.
pakistan lacks substancial substance and the only think they can brag about is their so called past glory and nothing else, because their future will be nothing short of a dissaster.
pakistanis have made a house on an extremly weak foundation and that house is beginiing to clooapse now.

 

[Singh]

This is a very very important article to help understand Pakistanis and where they are coming from.


Roughly, from independence up till the early 90s Pakistan was superior to India in its economic growth, infrastructure and industrialization. Indians living on the borders used to tune into Pakistani TV and radio, Pakistani women magazines were smuggled in for the latest trends, and Pakistan cricket team had many admirers here too. Even the Indian students abroad were awestruck by Pakistani students wealth and liberal outlook. Pakistan having being made for the elite classes had succeeded, the liberal Muhajirs ruled the roost when it came to bureaucracy and military, the feudals/landlords ruled the lands and were the government.

India at the time was going through dark ages, the Rajas had their privy purses snatched away, the Zamindars had their land redistributed, the Industrialists had their industries privatized and bureaucracy had taken over the country. Then there were insurgencies, famines riots and draconian laws. (Hello all Indira G lovers). World had passed its judgement, India was doomed to crash.

---

 

[Singh]

Another article to illustrate my point.

The anger that produced Shah Mehmood Qureshi's press conference lambasting the Indian delegation led by SM Krishna, as Krishna was boarding a plane for New Delhi, comes from a very specific place. It is a place that doesn't exist in the real world anymore, but is still vividly embedded in the minds of some within the Pakistani establishment. In that old place, Pakistan was the nimble and clever fox, and India was the large, clumsy elephant. That place is 1991.

In 1991, India's GDP growth was a sorry 1.06 per cent, while Pakistan was chugging along at an impressive 5.06 per cent. This was not an anomaly, but the usual. Before 1991, Pakistan frequently outpaced India's growth — even though India's was more even, while Pakistan's seemed to be on crack, vacillating wildly. Then in 1991, a bunch of retired and on-vacation IMF and World Bank bureaucrats unofficially took over the Pakistani economy to try to tame the beast, and a sage named Manmohan Singh began to run the Indian economy. Since then, India has enjoyed a sustained era of slow, but meaningful and across-the-board reform, while Pakistan has, outside of its telecom, banking and media sectors, achieved zero reform.

Pakistanis that I spoke to who had access to the goingson during the July 15 summit between Qureshi and Krishna complain of India's monochromatic national narrative —press , government, private sector — all united. They complain that India didn't come to slow dance, but rather to tease and prod. They complain that India's attitude was dismissive, while Pakistan's was earnest. I have no difficulty believing any of these things. But the very act of complaining about these things, rather than having cogent and defensible comebacks, should be a tell-all indicator of how differently positioned India and Pakistan are for the 21st century. Qureshi's press conference is what weaker parties do when confronted with a conundrum. They wail.

One way to try to understand the growing gulf between India and Pakistan is to examine the now infamous interview of the Indian home secretary G K Pillai — which is rightly identified by many Pakistanis as having possibly contaminating the spirit of the July 15 summit. The truth is however, that the interview hardly scratches the surface of what would constitute titillating revelations. Nobody loves intelligence agencies, certainly not one from an "enemy country" .

What really catches the eye in that interview rather is the boldness of Pillai's manner, a civil servant working for India's central government, as he skewers the political and administrative failures of Indian states. A gag order reportedly placed on Pillai may assuage some of the politicians' egos in Delhi and the various state capitals that he rankles, but the home secretary's confidence is unlikely to diminish. Maybe civil servants have no place discussing public policy with the press. Maybe not. But Pillai's selfconfidence speaks to a greater issue.

The Indian Administrative Service's ability to breed such confidence is not a random accident. Good civil servants — like Shiv Shankar Menon and TN Seshan — are cultivated, not discovered. The contemporary history of the IAS in India and its colonial cousin in Pakistan, the District Management Group, is a study in contrasts. India's system of recruiting, retaining, rotating, and sustaining civil servants to serve the state has produced top-shelf talent consistently, despite being ravaged by challenges like corruption and a rigid system of home state allocation.

Despite enjoying a less complicated federal structure, Pakistan's civil servants, on the other hand, while individually brilliant, have experienced a consistent and brutal stripping away of their powers and their ability to contribute to national stability and prosperity. The decay began in 1974, when Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought to democratise the bureaucracy by making civil servants increasingly accountable to politicians. Those reforms effectively ended up bringing to a close the Raj legacy of administrative efficiency on this side of the Wagah border.

A 2007 study of political cycles in IAS postings by Lakshmi Iyer ( Harvard) and Anandi Mani (Warwick) found that the "average probability of a transfer in a given year was 49 per cent... bureaucrats spent an average of 16 months in any given position" . While 16 months falls well short of the global three-year standard (which is also the recommended period in both India and Pakistan), it likely exceeds the average for civil servants in Pakistan. One example of how crazy transfers and postings have become is from the spring of 2009 when the government of Punjab (in Pakistan) saw a number of individual departmental heads experience as many as four postings within a shambolic five-month period (when Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif's government was summarily dismissed, and later, reconstituted).
The differences are vast. India's Pay Commission reports , in epic detail, are available free of cost to anyone (including Pakistanis). Pakistan's Pay and Pensions Committee reports are state-secrets , not available even to parliamentarians and senior bureaucrats.

The Indian delegation of officials and journalists got to know a small morsel of these kinds of details about Pakistan during the July 15 summit. That, and not Qureshi's political tamasha, is what should lie at the heart of this conversation between India and Pakistan: a continuum of humanising the other.

I'd be delighted to watch the next Pakistani delegation visit India and receive a frigid welcome by the Indian ministry for external affairs. Delighted that the next summit is used by both sides to reiterate the centrality of Kashmir versus the centrality of terrorism. Delighted if India and Pakistan continue to agree to disagree. As long as the two countries keep talking, we should all be delighted. The long road to a peaceful South Asia begins by getting to know one another, little by little. The July 15 summit achieved that, and then some.

Failed talks in Islamabad - India - The Times of India

 

[civfanatic]

I have a hard time believing Pakistan was ever this "glamorous". Maybe because it was just before my time.

At any rate all the "glamor" was nothing more than a farce.

 

[Vinod2070]

Singhji, the rot in Pakistan had been set long before the 1990s. Even though it came out in full glory in the last few decades.

Sectarian riots were happening since the 60s and 70s. The boastful claims of a Pakistani Muslim = 10 Indian Hindus were being made in the 1960s. The "22 families" have been controlling Pakistan since the time of it's birth. It has always been feudal, no land reforms, no reforms of any sort. That is not what Pakistan was made for, just to preserve the aristocratic Muslim's and Mullah's power.

Pakistan is meeting it's appointed destiny. It couldn't have been otherwise. A nation created on the basis of narrow sectarianism could only go in this direction. When the minorities were almost completely ethnically cleansed, they turned on the other sects (non Sunni to start with). The next step would be the other Sunni sub sects. That is the only likely way it will go.

Even the example given in the OP are mostly about a very small minority of Pakistan. The likes of Imran Khan and Bhutto were the small aristocracy of Pakistan. They don't represent the reality of the 180 million poor and desperate Pakistanis.

 

[Tshering22]

The answer is pretty simple; till USA was there to handle and keep Pakistani economy in cradle, it was going fine by the feudal lords. Once that was over and the work was handed back to Pakistan, they didn't know what to make of it and have been crammed with troubles due to their own self-obsession.

 

[Rebelkid]

Economy: on the verge of collapse?

Finance Minister Hafeez Sheikh's warning to officials of the state, delivered in a sombre meeting late last month, could not be clearer: the government, federal and provincial, is on the verge of financial collapse. So dire is the state of affairs that the government may not have money to pay salaries in a few months. Lest this be dismissed as hyperbole, Mr Sheikh's comments have been echoed privately by many economists and experts familiar with state finances in recent weeks. In fact, if anything the finance minister's comments are on the more optimistic side of dire.



The basic problem is clear: the Pakistani state, all tiers of government, spends twice as much as revenue generated, while neither is expenditure being curtailed nor are revenues being meaningfully increased. At the level of the citizenry, the immediate impact is felt in the form of rising inflation (sustained budget deficits of the kind Pakistan has had over the last few years are highly inflationary in nature) while in the long term it will be felt in terms of debt servicing crowding out investments in development and infrastructure.

The blame must be shared by everyone. At the federal level, the government has been disastrously uninterested in reforming the tax system or trimming the fat in the budget. Public-sector enterprises blow a Rs250bn hole in the budget each year, but restructuring is something that is only promised, never initiated. On the revenue side, the government has been unable to even resolve the objections of some provinces to the 'revised' General Sales Tax, aka the Value Added Tax. Now, the president has suggested widening the tax net with a 'one-time' imposition of tax on unaffected farmers and on urban property, but it remains to be seen if the idea leads to anything concrete.



Meanwhile, the government appears content to keep on borrowing from private banks (which crowds out private investment) and the State Bank (which turbo-charges inflationary pressures) — Finance Minister Sheikh has warned that State Bank borrowing is 'no longer an option' but that has been the case for the last several years. The armed forces, meanwhile, are engaged in necessary operations to fight militancy, but they have shown little interest in belt-tightening. Experts familiar with military expenditures and budgets suggest that more transparency would slash many unnecessary and bloated expenses.

The provinces, too, are to blame, arguing for and getting more autonomy through the 18th Amendment and more resources under the latest NFC award but showing little interest in expanding their own revenue bases. Responsible spending appears to be a concept Pakistani policymakers do not understand.

DAWN.COM | Editorial | Economy: on the verge of collapse?

-----------------------
How long can they really continue borrowing money ? IS there any economic limit or something ? AM no economist ! Not like u can run forever with increasing Debt...

 

[thakur_ritesh]

this article takes me back to the times when every little news that used to trickle down to india about pakistan was one to glamorize about and possibly only fantasize about. their cars, their roads, their economy, their elites, their women, their mags, their channels, their music, back then it was almost all about them and this "about them and how good they were" continued well into the early 90s when the world around us started to change and pakistan caught on with the downward spiral, times changed, and from "about them" it changed to "about india" in pakistan, where now in pakistan all the talk is about how stunningly india have taken these huge economic strides, of how successful india is in almost every sphere and in comparison how they have lost it somewhere.

its been a spectacular journey from being have nots where people despised the indians to where today every other world leader and country wants india on its side. what a remarkable journey it has been, and what a proud moment it is when one looks back, india achieved a lot and yet a lot more needs to be achieved. it is also funny to see the young in their teens and 20s who seem to suggest india achieved nothing, they should have been born in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s to understand where india was and where we stand today.

 

[Ray]

Parts of Pakistan is beautiful, especially the Northern Areas and Swat.

But it requires people who appreciate beauty to nurture it.

Beauty does not grow from the barrel of a gun or through the cloud of perpetually burning hate!

 

[Vinod2070]

Well, you remind me of a directive to BBC reporters few decades back.

Supposedly, they were not to let the news of any monkey in Delhi pass. That is all they wanted to cover about India!