Almost a month ago, young Nasir Sultan, 15, was released from a jail in India and allowed to return to his hometown in Pakistan.
Nasir Sultan returns to Pakistan. © AFP
Young Nasir was guilty of sneaking into India. He idolized Shah Rukh Khan and wished to make a career for himself in Bollywood. When found, he was put in jail, but released quickly because who among us has not been guilty of wanting to meet the King of Bollywood? Most Indians would have been sympathetic towards young Nasir, and nobody wished him anything but a safe return.
Exactly one week later, India woke up to this picture in their newspapers of another young Pakistani who had sneaked into the country.
One of the Mumbai terrorists.
Both pictures show us a confident, young man, dressed like any reasonably well off middle class kid in the subcontinent, and but for the weaponry virtually indistinguishable from one another. One sneaked into India because he was attracted by the glitz of Mumbai, the other, well, apparently for the same reason, but with different motives.
But here’s the kicker. In the future, expect young Nasirs when they are found to be treated with no kindness at all. After all, who’s to say? Any cop who finds an errant Pakistani kid in India will certainly make sure that the kid pays not only for his current sin of being on foreign soil without a permit, but for all the sins of his fellow-countrymen. And that’s the real tragedy. All young Pakistani boys and men suddenly moved into the enemy column. But mostly, they really just want to be Shah Rukh Khan.
I sometimes wonder what it meant that India used to be an economic superpower in the 18th and 19th centuries, India and China used to be the top 2 countries by GDP for the longest time in history. Then you see a temple like the one above and realise that every little town and village used to have one such temple with a grand tower and construction style, and that any country that could spend the kind of resources and labour constructing these behemoths must have been very rich indeed. It’s like a thousand Empire State Buildings all over the country. It’s very likely that the average Indian was quite poor, I have no idea, but the kind of wealth represented by the ancient construction in India is astounding. Think also of how quickly and easily England brought us to our knees and how poor they left us, and we’re forced to confront how poorly our kings planned for various eventualities as also how brutally England plundered us. Perhaps if we had been a democracy back then…
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