Why hate the other so much?
Language, food, culture, all of these define a people. I live in an area where there is a 247 radio station that sings Bollywood songs. A few years ago I remember a famous Hindi film actress, who was Bengali and converted from Hinduism to Islam, lamenting that Hindi film scripts were written in Urdu before and are no longer. This is not the case with the songs I hear. I hang out with a number of Pakistanis whom I understand Urdu perfectly. It is like the Hindi spoken in northern India. But Bollywood songs contain so many Persian words that I can barely understand the songs. I decided to do an exercise to assess how infused Persian has become in Hindi. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, was delivering a speech. I listened to him carefully. And of course I recognized every fourth or fifth of his words as the one I had heard in Hindi as we speak it in India. So, willy-nilly, we accepted the others language. My father was an Indian army officer and we ate meat. My older brother was very fond of Mughlai food. One day, I asked my mother where this Mughlai food came from. She said the Mughals brought the cuisine to India and mixed it with Indian spices and recipes to create this delicious concoction. So even in the diet, we took a lot of each other. Our sartorial sense is common. Our marriage ceremonies have a lot in common. Our looks are more or less the same. Even our religion has something in common. The other religion promotes a formless form of God. Our religion also has an interpretation of God who is formless. And how many times do our songs sing odes to other Gods. It is attributed to historical animosity. To the misdeeds one side has done to the other over the centuries. Consider France and England. They are white people, but of quite different origins. Their language is very different. Their cuisine has nothing in common. Even the religious sects they follow are different. The English are Protestants; the French are Catholics. There has been enormous animosity between Protestants and Catholics over the past five hundred years. The French are still upset by the treatment that the English have reserved for their beloved Joan of Arc and Napoleon. However, the French and the English fought and won two world wars together and have enveloped themselves in many alliances (UN Permanent Security Council, NATO, G7) that it seems unlikely that they will ever go to war. . The English and the French have strong armies but they are not directed against each other. Both countries have remote outposts that they must protect. The British fought in the Falklands War in 1982 to protect the Falklands from Argentina. Apart from distant threats, France and England have no obvious enemies. But they maintain strong armies to maintain white hegemony over the world. They will have to go. India and Pakistan, which share much more in common than England and France, instead have their triggers ready for each other. Both countries are mired in poverty but spend billions of weapons each year to outdo each other. Just as the French have accepted that the memory of Joan of Arc and Napoleon fades over time, the Indians (and Pakistanis) must also accept that the ghost of Aurangzeb (and various other marauders) has evaporated. with time. These guys are not coming back. So many Indians who subscribe to the right-wing philosophy love Bollywood songs and Mughlai food. The most famous actor in Bollywood once noticed in Pakistan that Urdu had been orphaned in India. He was wrong. Urdu is more alive in India than in Pakistan. Due to their strong Urdu content, if I didnt know in advance that I was listening to songs from Bollywood, I could easily have confused them with songs from Pakistan. And with Orthodox Urdu that Bollywood songs are loaded with, sometimes I wonder if the target audience for these songs is not Indian but Pakistani. So no, Urdu is not dying anytime soon in India. The Hindu right tries to deny the positive influence of the other in our history and our culture. There is no point in denying the undeniable. We have been greatly influenced by the culture of others. And in our turn, we have greatly influenced him. What has emerged is a fusion of cultures. No one in our country seems ready to let go of their love for Bollywood and Mughlai cuisine. Facebook  Twitter  Linkedin  E-mail  Warning The opinions expressed above are those of the author. END OF ARTICLE