I come from an unusual family. My father is from Punjab. My mother hails from the land of Bengal. I happen to be from Hyderabad. The people from my father's family are extreme right wingers, nationalists and religious. So of course, my mother is a complete Marxist, anti nationalist and atheist. The differences are innumerable. However, they have learned how to live with their differences and so have I. Such a background has caused me to come up with my own conclusions rather than agree with one side.
This summer, I like many others, was completely tired of the Hyderabadi heat. Feeling jobless and lonely after a lively year of school had ended, the prospect of going to Chandigarh and then Amritsar really thrilled me. I had never been to the latter ever before. I was supposed to go with my dad, my granddad, my aunt and her two children. All of them except me had been to Amritsar before, so the prospect of visiting the place for them wasn't as exciting as it was for me.
We went to Amritsar via a train from Chandigarh. It was an early morning train. It was all the more tougher for me to adjust as the previous night FC Barcelona had won La Liga and I couldn't miss the celebrations. Three hours of sleep was certainly not enough so I promised myself to sleep during the journey. As we were waiting for the train to come, the idea of making a VLOG crossed my mind. I decided to take small clips and then club it all together later.
A few hours later we reached the beautiful city of Amritsar. Two minutes in and I knew this was an extremely lively place, like all of Punjab. There were people all over. Some were tourists like me. Some were locals who were probably pretty accustomed to see tourists like me. Some were making money by offering rides to tourists like me. They spoke about going to the Golden temple. They spoke about going to Jallianwala bagh. They spoke about going to Wagah border.
I had forgotten all about Wagah. I had seen small videos about Wagah earlier, however I didn't know much about it. All I knew was that it was the border between India and Pakistan. Since our trip was short, we decided to go to Wagah the same day we arrived. As I only had a blurred image of Wagah in my mind, I was pretty keen on giving the place a visit.
The drive from Amritsar to Wagah was a rather long one. We weren't the only ones on the road. It looked like many other people had the same idea for the evening. As the car neared our destination, I could see the Indian flag and the Pakistani flag in the distance. Since we were still a long way, it looked as if the two flags were beside each other ( physics ). Once we reached the place, I could see people selling flags, badges, posters with patriotic phrases and so on. To an extent I was expecting this. I had seen people sell such stuff outside of stadiums. I had seen Flamengo shirts outside of The Maracana and Barca merchandise outside of the Camp Nou. Then I thought about it, wasn't Wagah border a stadium too ? Theoretically yes, but it was more of a Colosseum in my opinion.
I had mixed feelings as I entered the stadium. One part of me said this was going to be interesting and fun. Another said why are you wasting your time on this you stupid boy, data doesn't work here. Anyway, as we were about to take our seats, I got a glimpse of Pakistan. There was a sudden longing inside of me to go there. My grandparents were born in Pakistan. My parents had gone to Pakistan exactly a year before my birth. As for me, it was pretty much impossible to do so due to how terrible the relationship between India and Pakistan had become, making getting a visa to Pakistan was nearly impossible. Accepting this fact, I looked on to the brilliant show which was going to occur in front of my eyes.
Teenagers have a habit of having extreme views. At that point of time, I was a capitalist, a pretty big fan of the United States, anti nationalist and for some reason a big supporter of Hyderabadi politician Asaduddin Owaisi. Right now, I'm an extreme leftist, hate the US for it's exploitation on the working class, anti nationalist and atheist. So the show was pretty crazy in my eyes that time. I believed and still continue to think that nations are just lines and there wasn't really anything separating me and another boy from Pakistan. We share the same features : both of us have certain bodies, we both belong to Homo Sapiens, we both probably hate school. It was with this mindset that I was watching the event. I saw people shout as loud as they could, sing as well as they could, insult the others in the best way they could. With my mindset, it all looked pretty stupid : people spending all their energy, time and money on something like that. Bill Gates once said that he could do something far more productive than religion on a Sunday morning. I felt something like that. Now that I have read the Communist manifesto, it seems all the more stupid to me as according to Karl Marx, the idea of nations be wiped out completely.
While I didn't agree to the idea of the whole thing, I will say that it had me really entertained for an evening and had me thinking for quite a few weeks. It was good seeing people having a fun time ( for all the wrong reasons in my opinion but still ). There were people singing along to the patriotic songs playing on. There were people recording videos. I was doing the same as I needed some content for my video. It's fair to say that the Wagah part made up the more interesting part of my VLOG. Here's the link if you want to watch it https://youtu.be/IQ8aBZ2VGlk .
This was probably one of the most interesting evenings I've ever had. As I spoke about Amritsar to my friends, they told me about how much they didn't like Amritsar because it made up the syllabus for the history exam and they recalled how much the spelling of Jallianwala bagh tortured the Indian youth. It's fair to say that I had the same thought process....... Until this came along
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