^
Annamika question as other posters explained was not on the quality of provision of services (which is a valid question and one I can answer since as a college student I interned in Government departments exploring these issues at a time of major reorganisation of these services) but whether such services existed at all (with a further leading and rhetorical question about whether the government “cared”). That is what made it in my mind a “stupid” question, no government of whatever stripe will last the day if it dose not at least attempt to provide services; anyone with an iota of common sence would realise that.
Finally Starving Artist seems to have spent considerable time and thought on his post and has shated with us his feelings on my comments. While he is of course free to do so, my own advise to him would be not to waste his time since I am supremely disinterested in his or anyone elses opinions on that subject.
Quite frankly, AK84, I am offended by your presumptuousness, as well as your continued efforts to creat a division between Pakistanis and Indians where I am attempting to find common ground. For your information, I am Indian by birth…but I am first and foremost, an American.
Here in the States, when I find someone from Pakistan, especially Eastern Pakistan, I am thrilled. I don’t go around telling them they could not possibly understand Hindi because it has different roots or whatever. I don’t attempt to find differences in our people. Pakistan and India were once one. There are still enormous amounts of tension over there, but I believe that the more the people here begin to work together and see each other as human, the better it will get home when people bring the new ideas back. To quibble over Urdu and Hindi is not helpful.
You have now called my question stupid, and implied I do not have any common sense. Both are rather rude and not conducive to good conversation. It is common sense to think a government will provide services to all of its people? Just like Zimbabwe? Or hell, any country that gives services to the majority but has refused services to the disenfranchised minority?
Starving Artist and Jodi, thank you so very much for your support. SA, I should warn you though that I am one of those liberals you feel so strongly about.
It is of course unfortunate if you are offended. If you want to find common ground, that is great. However, I feel that there is no common ground, besides superficial ones and I have given my reasons for that. You have not given any coherent reason why I am wrong besides something about “understanding Urdu” and “were once one” and “bring old ideas back”. If you are thrilled to meet people from Pakistan or Eastern Pakistan great. I personally am delighted to meet people from world over and learn about them, not just Indians or Afghans or Iranians (they all being Pakistans neighbours)
Congrats for successfully hijacking the thread.
Then I find that very, very sad. And I see no good future if that is truly the way many people feel.
I will bow out of your thread, though. I haven’t really felt welcomed from the start. My intention was not to prove that you are wrong, but to tell you that you were rude in responding to my question the way you did.
While your disinterest in anyone else’s opinions comes as no surprise, it appears to have escaped your notice that my comments were intended for you. Rather, they were intended to illustrate why you were wrong, both in arriving at the conclusion that the question was stupid and in expressing that conclusion in an insulting way.
In other words, my post was intended to show why people should not let posters such as yourself inhibit them from asking questions.
I know. (And you’re welcome, btw. :)) I dislike liberalism but I don’t necessarily dislike liberal people. Most of my friends in off-board life are liberals and the people I most enjoy being around are liberals…they’re more fun!
To me, liberals are like school kids who are animated and fun and all over the place in their thinking, whereas conservatives are more like parents or bosses and not as much fun.
Thus I like to hang out socially with people of liberal orientation, but I think the parents and bosses are better suited to being in charge of things.
And on preview:
She didn’t hijack the thread; you did, with your needlessly rude and insulting response to her perfectly reasonable question. Had you not chosen to label her question as stupid, the thread would have continued as it was with no problem for anyone.
She didn’t do that, you did, so go ahead and congratulate yourself. Mika, it would be a shame to let this person chase you out of the thread.
Shakwave, what is the situation in Pakistan for women? We hear it’s pretty unremittingly horrible in Afghanistan but over all pretty good in India. (Gross generalizations in both cases, I know.) Do Pakistani women enjoy equal rights? And if they exercise those rights by working, or participating in the political process, or other means, is there a backlash from some sections of society? Do they have to cover their heads or faces if they don’t want to? Is there social disapproval if they do – or if they do not?
How’s the weather in Pakistan? Is the air quality good or polluted? Do you have any of those named seasonal winds that each country seems to have one or two of?
I am sure that Shakwave will do an excellent job on what has been accurately been described as his thread. Thus I think it best to bow out too (in anycase the above posters have addressed their questions to him).
** Starving Artist, ** you do not need to fear, people have been asking questions before posters “such as myself” showed up and they will continue to do so long after I and you are gone. So your “public service” is quite unnecessary. But hey, however you get your kicks.
The above threads are the main reason why I was initially a bit hesitant in starting this thread. In almost every online community I’ve been on (Youtube / a couple of guitar tabs forums), whenever something Pakistani or Indian is praised, some guy from ‘the other side’ has to mention how it is inferior to their version. This is also why I went when Kashmir first came up in the thread.
AK84, I have no problem with you answering the questions but you could have been a bit civil about the whole thing. There was absolutely no need to act high handed and snarky in your comments.
Anaamika, Starving Artist and the rest, as far as I am concerned, the only stupid question is the one which is not asked. Please continue to ask whatever you want to. Rest assured, I will try my best to answer it to the best of my ability.
For Shakwave and AK84, how does the average Pakistani feel about the recent Bombay blasts? India has openly accused Pakistan over them. Hell, Manmohan Singh just yesterday said:
So, what’s the opinion on the street about these accusations? (Because it is perfectly possible for people to think that their government could have been involved, and that sometimes governments need to do underhanded things to further their own cause, but it’s just not ‘pleasant’ to come right out and say so. An anonymous forum is the perfect place for such questions.)
As for being thrilled to meet a Pakistani, sure it’s nice and all, but I tend not to deify the experience because, hey, they’re people. It would be good to have unity and peace, but that’s not happening anytime soon. There’s just too much political baggage after six decades of boundary disputes and wars. Since independence, the two countries have gone their separate ways and have evolved differently. My husband and I listen to ghazals all the time, but that doesn’t make me anything like a Pakistani person today. It’s a different mindset, it’s a different lifestyle. About the only thing really in common is the importance both cultures give to the family and extended-family system. But then, most traditional Asian cultures do that.
I suppose I should count the slavish following of Bollywood as another thing in common, but that’s only to be expected. Bollywood is to South Asia what Hollywood is to the world.
I can speak only for India, and only based on what my parents and grandparents have told me, but it seems to have been this way back in the day. Not quite as exaggerated as your colleague mentioned, but pretty bad. Government bureaucracy was pretty awful in the 60s and 70s, and telecom services were nationalised back then. It would take months to get a phone line installed and woe betide you if you ever needed to call a linesman to fix a problem with your phone.
However, things are much more efficient now, and your friend’s experience is fairly antiquated.
StuffLikeThatThere, the guy was exaggerating a bit, it was true that there were long delays (read anything from months to probably an year and a half) to get phone connections until some years ago but the telecommunications structure in Pakistan has improved by leaps and bounds in the last six or seven years. There was only one government-run telecommunications dinosaur called PTCL, which operated mainly fixed lines with a couple of companies running cellular phone services with limited coverage. It was a long, tortuous process to get a phone connection, which could involve bribing the ‘case officers’ who handled the application, then bribing the ‘line man’ to physically set the line up from the exchange to your house (of course, this would be the worst case). Since the government started liberalization of the telecommunications market in 2003, there has been a boom in the number of users of telecommunication services (mostly cellular phones). For some time, Pakistan was the fastest growing mobile market in the world (NameBright - Coming Soon) and I believe has now more than 75 m subscribers. Also, through personal interaction, I feel PTCL is a much more professionally run company than it used to be, and has now got excellent products. I got my DSL connection through PTCL when I was in Pakistan and was pleasantly surprised to find out it took me only a couple of days to get everything up and running from the application date. Even the customer service was top notch.
Guys, AK84 has bought into the Pakistani propaganda that Indians and Pakistanis have no common link - it’s bullshit. What’s the difference between and Indian Muslim Punjabi in Amristar and a Pakistani Muslim Punjabi from Lahore? That’s a distance of 20 miles btw…
My grandmother is also from what is now Pakistan. My father read and wrote Urdu. AK84, Are you saying he never understood it? He once told me that he was sitting on a park bench reading the Daily Jang (a Pakistani Urdu newspaper). The headline had something to do with India. A Pakistani guy came up to my dad, and said,“Those Indians are bastards aren’t they?”. My father said,“I am Indian”. The Pakistani guy got embarrassed and walked off.
The Sikh gurus wrote in Persian btw. There are loads of Persian and Arabic words in Punjabi.
Why are Pakistanis so loathe to admit to their Hindu ancestors? Some will say to you they have none, and that’s obviously crap. They’re only too happy to admit to Arab or Persian ancestry.
Why do Pakistanis emulate Arabs so much? Are you aware that many Arabs wouldn’t piss on a Pakistani if he was burning to death? Are you aware of how Pakistanis are treated in Arab countries?
Yep, I think you may be right. I’m currently working in India, (I class myself as British, but my heritage is obviously from the sub-Continent and I have family in both India and Pakistan, with parts of my family migrating during Partition) and believe me, just because large parts of my family lives in Pakistan really doesn’t mean that my heritage/background is somehow different, my Indian colleagues and I share the same values etc and my British/US colleagues who were over for a conference last year were asking me for explanation of various cultural things… Hardly possible if I had nothing in common now is it?
As for the languages thing, I think AK84 needs to learn a bit more before spouting off. Languages that are so damned close and mutually intelligible to each other do not arise independently! Hindi and Urdu are really just standardised dialects of Hindustani (A language is a dialect with an army, anybody?). Both are descended from Sanskrit (hence the similarities), although Urdu is written in the Persian script and Hindi in the Devanagari. I seem to recall that the primary reason for the difference in script (and hence the label Urdu or Hindi) is down to the source of loanwords – Persian and Arabic for Urdu and Sanksrit for Hindi. Colloquially, apart from the differences in script, Urdu and Hindi are not only mutually intelligible, they’re downright interchangeable.
In a more formal, literary sense, yes there are differences, but that’s down to the choice of loanwords and ultimately extremist politics on both sides of the divide, though given that the major historical centres of Urdu literature are all in modern-day India…
Back to the nukes. With no offense intended, from news coverage it is my perception that the Pakistan / India area is currently the most likely place for a regional nuclear dukeout to occur. What is your opinion of the situation?
What are the odds that the government could become controlled by Islamic fundamentalists in the course of an election? Would the military disobey legally given commands and keep the nukes from being used or delivered to persons who would use them?
It is my understanding that the military acts more or less as an independent arm of the government rather than a servant of the government. And that this is not necessarily a bad thing. What, in your opinion, are the odds of a military coup? Would that make the country more or less secure?
Would you be very concerned about a nuclear armed Iran?
Do you personally keep emergency supplies and/or a bomb shelter?
I am American, and I consider it not unlikely that we will lose a city to a nuclear bomb within a decade. Is this something that you hear discussed as a possibility or concern?
I agree completely. Its is a privilage to meet you.
The accusations are to be expected, the Indian Government ususally blames most ills on Pakistan and the Pakistani goverment responds in kind. Since the arrival of nukes niether side is willing to go to a full fledged war, so proxies are it, Pakistan has been rather more effective at it traditionally (though India did well in what is now Bangladesh), see kashmir and Indian Punjab. India is busy casing havoc in Balochistan though thats now been pacified to an extent.)
I don’t worry about it too much, big picture both countries are not expansionist (people wanting Greater India on your side, or a restoration of Mughal Empire on our are a fringe).
when Kashmir first came up in the thread.