Aman ki Asha

Aman ki asha… This caption is everywhere these days…. In the newspapers… On the billboards… On the internet…. In TV advertisements…. At first look I thought that this was a movie’s name wherein the hero is Aman and heroine is Asha….. I thought this to be one of those typical Bollywood love stories and sighed… Oh No…not again…!!!!

A couple of days back, I was watching yet another India-Sri Lanka one-day match…This was the 20th ODI between these two teams in the last 19 months…!!!! Too much of anything can be too boring….. Anyways, let’s not transgress from the main point here….
It was the last ball of 43rd over I guess and the match was on an even keel… It was the last ball of the over and suddenly, thanks to Neo Cricket, there was this advertisement…

An elderly Muslim man, standing on a small pedestal, is playing dumb-charades in the middle of the desert and is cheered on by his friends… There is one more chap with binoculars who tries to decipher the name of the movie gesticulated by the old man …. As he finally decodes the name as Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, there is frenetic activity all around…. People shouting around… One of them, asking another to call the radio station…. Then the other man calling up the radio station and making his farmayish
Finally, the good old All India Radio plays a song from the aforementioned movie…. And the entire village ecstatic that their farmayish has been accepted…. !!!!

Even until this point I could not decipher what this advertisement was all about….. Then came the message…. Aman ki asha - An India – Pakistan peace initiative started by the Times of India group of India and the Jang group of Pakistan.

As a proud citizen of India, I am really very happy that something of this kind has been started… Well, this is not the first time that a joint peace initiative has been forged between these two brothers but the sheer magnitude of this exercise is what impresses me this time around…. The biggest news group of India initiating this in association with a leading news group of Pakistan has immense possibility of hope…!!!!

Right from the day I came face to face with the term called ‘Nationalism’, there has been a marked polarity in the way I treated Pakistan… Although no one told me that Pakistan is our enemy but still there was enough going around me which ensured that I hate Pakistan…. This hatred entrenched in me deeply…. Be it a cricket match or a hockey match, I found happiness in Pakistan’s defeat…. I was happier seeing Pakistan lose than India win…. This feeling gradually seeped into me and spread like gangrene all through my body… I am sure my counterpart in Pakistan would have felt exactly the same about India…. !!!!

We in India think that we are always right…. People in Pakistan think that they too are always right…. And this has slowly but steadily put in place rigidity in the stand adopted by both the countries… Yes, politics is to blame partially but then it is pretty easy to blame politics for everything bad that happens…. Before we blame politics for anything, we need to keep in mind that all these politicians were at first common people like us… All the corruption or unaccountability over decisions is somewhere or the other rooted into our system.... So, rather than blaming politics it is better to introspect on whether we are following what we preach…. !!!

I vividly remember an anecdote that I read in my childhood in a children’s magazine called Gokulam.. The story goes like this:
Before independence, there was a small boy who had this habit of eating lots of sugar…His father did not approve of it and wanted his son to shun this habit but somehow his son didn’t leave this… So, he took his son along with him when he went to meet Mahatma Gandhi and told him about his plight… Gandhiji asked the man to come to him after some days…. The man agreed and came back after some days…. Gandhiji went upto the young boy and asked him to stop eating excessive sugar as it was not good for health… The youngster agreed to it and stopped eating sugar excessively from that day onwards…. The boy’s father was surprised that Gandhiji took so much time to tell this small thing to his son…. So, he went to Gandhiji and asked him as to why he took so many days to say this small thing to his son…. At that Gandhiji said that he himself had this habit of eating sugar excessively… So, he had to first control his habit before preaching to the young boy…. !!!!!
This to me is the best example of the saying – “Practice what you preach.”

A start has to be made somewhere… Someone has to take up the initiative… Someone has to walk that extra mile… Only then can long-lasting peace be achieved… India has always accepted artists from Pakistan…. Many of them are thriving in India… They have made big name and money for themselves…. Now, it is time for Pakistan to reciprocate…. I understand that a common man of Pakistan is no different from a common man of India… He is concerned about his Roti, kapda aur makaan rather than the number of nuclear weapons his country possesses… !!!

I think time is now ripe to forget all the bickering of the past and forge an alliance of long-lasting peace and tranquility…. And this initiative Aman ki Asha is a right step in this direction…!!!