Why My Father Hated India

By AATISH TASEER
Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship.

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September.

Awesomeee Shit.. I cudn't help but steal it from a frnds profile :D by Priya Noronha

I never quite figured out why the sexual urge of men and women differ so much. And I never have figured out the whole Venus and Mars thing. I have never figured out why men think with their head and women with their heart.



FOR EXAMPLE:



One evening last week, my girlfriend and I were getting into bed.Well, the passion starts to heat up, and she eventually says, 'I don't feel like it,I just want you to hold me.'



I said, 'WHAT??!! What was that?!'



So she says the words that every boyfriend on the planet dreads to hear...



'You're just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enoughfor me to satisfy your physical needs as a man.'



She responded to my puzzled look by saying,'Can't you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you in the bedroom?'



Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night, I went to sleep.



The very next day I opted to take the day off of work to spend time with her.We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big, big unnamed department store.I walked around with her while she tried on several different very expensive outfits.She couldn't decide which one to take, so I told her we'd just buy them all.She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said, 'Lets get a pair for each outfit.'



We went on to the jewelry department where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings.Let me tell you... she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck.I started to think she was testing me because she asked for a tennis braceletwhen she doesn't even know how to play tennis.



I think I threw her for a loop when I said, 'That's fine, honey.'She was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement.Smiling with excited anticipation, she finally said, 'I think this is alldear, let's go to the cashier.'



I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, 'No honey, I don't feel like it.'



Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled, 'WHAT?'



I then said, 'Honey! I just want you to HOLD this stuff for a while.You're just not in touch with my financial needs as a man enoughfor me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman.'



And just when she had this look like she was going to kill me, I added,'Why can't you just love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?'



Apparently I'm not having sex tonight either....but at least the bitch knows I'm smarter than her.

" Love is experiencing life moment to moment, in its totality " -S.K.

Attention seeking, expectation, lust, possessiveness, jealousy, along with other dependency is what we call love. It all boils down to the attention that they give us.

The whole idea of love is nothing but getting the attention of the other in some ways. To transcend both love and hatred, we first need to drop expectations. We are taught that we can only love ourselves if we have a reason. Usually when others show love to us, we feel guilty or unworthy because we don't feel worthy being loved. If we perform well, we love ourselves. If we fail, we hate ourselves ( due to the conditioning's related to reward and punishment ) . We apply the same logic to others. We love them only because of something, never without a cause or a reason.

Expectation is the first enemy of love. We should not expect any benefit from the relationship . Only then will we understand the word 'love'. Our original nature is blissful aloneness. We always place our attention in the wrong space and miss the truth. We misunderstand that the excitement and joy of love happens because of the object. We don't understand that the excitement or joy of love happens not because of the object but because of an energy that happens in us. If you get back in touch with that, you will deeply settle down within yourself with peace and love. When your nervous system is cleaned by peace, bliss will explode.

The whole of Existence is in a deep romance with itself. You are a part of it. Love is experiencing life moment to moment, in its totality. It is not about two people or any object.

love yet again !!!!

OH My dear god, it cant be love again this is the umpteenth time i have been diagnosed by this illness, go please do save me .....

but how do we classify that this is love or i cant love anymore , maybe i have developed some kind of tolerance to it . need to increase the dosage and give IV stat ..... lol ...

enough of the jokes , its time to get serious, how do we understand what is love, and if we have been in love more than once then, what was love that one , this one or none of them ,

in the present situation i am pretty sure i love her and feel like i have loved no one else but her but then what do i say about my previous thoughts, what were they , were they just emotional flip flops and these are the main feelings ????? i need answers .... gottta think deep ,,,,, lol