Pakistan an Eye-opener for Many Indians too

Wide roads like the magnificent Lahore-Islamabad motorway, broad avenues like the ones in Islamabad and modern houses with state-of-the-art furnishings as at Mirpur showed Pakistan in a good light.

The encounter opened my eyes to the misconceptions Pakistanis and Indians had about each other, though they had many things in common. When I narrated this incident to Mr Ashfaq Saleem Mirza, a self-confessed Marxist who runs the Islamabad Cultural Forum, he was not surprised.

Back home, do you touch one another?’ innocently asked the stringer of an Islamabad-based Urdu daily at Mirpur in ‘Azad Kashmir’. For a moment, I could not understand him. Sensing my difficulty, the journalist who was combining journalism with studies, elaborated, ‘We have studied that Indians practise untouchability’. He was under the impression that Brahmins and Kshatriyas in India did not touch the lower castes and the Hindu widows perished on the pyres of their husbands…