CHICAGO, Illinois — The tense standoff between India and Pakistan appears to have made very little impression on the relations between immigrants in the United States from the subcontinent. In a heartening contrast to the barbs routinely traded between the leaders of the two countries, Indians and Pakistanis in the U.S. have found common ground and are beginning to see the futility of the seemingly unending conflict.
Away from home, the two communities have begun to reflect and seek out the vast common ground that exists between their people. The fact is, that despite 55 years of intermittent hostility, very few countries in the world have so much in common as India and Pakistan. We speak the same language, eat the same food, and share a passion for cricket and Hindi films produced in “Bollywood” (Bombay) that borders on the fanatical.
Immigration to the U.S. from the subcontinent picked up after the relaxation of U.S. immigration rules in 1965. The new immigrants brought along some historical baggage stemming from the divisions on the subcontinent. But over time their larger South Asian identity, and in some ways the failure of average Americans to distinguish between the two countries, have enabled the two sides see reason. “We are viewed as one, and away from home it’s much easier to be dispassionate and objective about the issues that divide us,” says Abhishek Abaiker, a student at Macalaster College in St Paul, Minnesota.
Lasting relationships are being forged among Indians and Pakistanis on college campuses, at professional work stations and on cricket fields. Plans are even underway to launch a joint Indo-Pak cricket team, comprised mainly of college students, in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. Through small but meaningful gestures, these people have been demonstrating to the world – especially to the leaders in both countries – that Indians and Pakistanis can both live together and be friends.
On a recent hot afternoon in Chicago, tired after a brisk walkabout downtown accompanied by Ikuko Yuge, my World Press Institute colleague from Japan, I made my way into a Subway sandwich shop. I asked a woman working there for two bottles of water. Perhaps it was my accent, or my looks, that prompted her to ask when she delivered the water if I were from Pakistan. “India,” I clarified. I learned that her name was Yasmin and that she was from Pakistan.
We got to talking. She wanted to know what brought me to the U.S. I explained that I was one of nine journalists from all over the world visiting the U.S. as the 2002 WPI fellows. And I mentioned the fact that there was nobody on the program from her country. “How does it matter?” she said. “One representative from the subcontinent is good enough. We are the same stalk, after all.”
It was time to leave and I asked for the bill. “You are from home, let me take care of it,” Yasmin said.
I walked out of the restaurant a little misty eyed, goose pimples all over my body. May there be more like her on the subcontinent.
By Javed Ansari, WPI ’02