THE PATRIOT

A couple of days ago I was witness to the flag lowering ceremony at the Wagah-Hussainwalla border between India and Pakistan.

I could see the blood boil among the old and young alike in the crowd because of the slogans shouted. The slogans were not at all of any nature which could demean the other country, they were the ones in which you praise your motherland.

All around me, everyone was shouting at the top of their voices, including my friends. Some even broke into a jig or two at the ‘Patriotic’ songs dished out from the blurting speakers.

A ‘Hair-raising’ experience said many.

I overheard one of them saying later that “It felt as if, the very next moment, if a ‘Pakistani’ came in front of me, I would cut him into two.”

So much for patriotism!

“Didn’t this ‘show’ promote pseudo-patriotism?”, I asked my friends.

Both countries dishing out songs praising themselves, and the crowds on the either side of the “no-man’s land” shouting at the top of their voices to prove their might.

I got various answers.

One said “The whole process was just to encourage the army personnel to go and fight on the border, so they can forget the humanitarian reasons, while shooting down each other.”

Another friend of mine said that it didn’t appear as pseudo patriotism to her, it just appeared as if children from grade II were fighting with each other. Nothing to be thought about, as such.

Ironically though, after becoming “true patriots”, we head for a place, 20 miles away, which was the centre of a separatist movement hardly 20 years ago, “The Golden Temple”.

Just as I sat down in the train for the return journey, I overheard someone say, how “peaceful” it was in the Gurudwara!!

And all agreed, including me.

But just as I said sat down in the train, I remembered a few more instances.

One that of a Tibetan refugee selling some goods in Dharamshala, the seat of the Dalai Lama, and a place oft visited by foreign tourists.

Just as we looked through some things which he had to sell, and asked the prices, we got a shock, we tried to bargain, but to no avail. So we chucked the idea of buying the show piece and walked ahead, and then he murmured “Indians never buy anything!!”

One of my friends, retorted, albeit amongst us, “How can he say that, he lives in India, and abuses Indians?”

Then it suddenly struck me that these were ‘refugees’ in India, who had put up many ‘Anti-Chinese’ slogans and posters all over Dharamshala.

And suddenly my mind came back to the Wagah-Hussainwala border again. Just as the flags were being brought down at sunset with much hullabaloo in the background of human voices, two birds were flying in the sky ignorant of the fact that they had just crossed over from Pakistan to India!