One advice by a Good Samaritan couple has come a long way for me, as an Indian Pakistani. Just a few days after being married, the couple of a similar kind advised, “Don’t quarrel over India or Pakistan; you will not be able to make any country a Heaven, but will make your own home a Hell.”
The exercise was easier said than done, but with few hard lessons, I ultimately decided that instead of acting an all patriotic for one side and holding a dagger against the other, I need to uphold objectivity, and a shield against the emotional daggers hurled from both sides. And this is how I could actually see how similar are both the people and their problems, and that both deserve to be seen with fairness. Hence to empathize with them of both became remained the only option. This is how I found my ‘eighteenth camel’, which to many of my friends is still an impossible option i.e. to love both India and Pakistan as much.
Just to narrate the context of ‘eighteenth camel’, the phrase is based on an Arab parable.
“There was an old Bedouin who had three sons, and all the treasure he had were17 camels. While dying he left a will to give one half of the camels to the oldest son, one third to the second and one-ninth to the third son. After his death, the sons began to quarrel, and since there was no way they could divide 17 camels into half, one third, or one ninth, none of them could have their share from the pie.
They approached a wise woman, and asked her to solve the problem. She was nonplussed too, and thought really hard. She sincerely wanted to solve the problem, even if it meant her sacrificing something from her side. So she decided to give one of her camels to them, so that it becomes `18, and now each one could easily get their share as the number was divisible by all –one half, one third and one ninth.
The sons were very excited and they began the mathematics. The one with half the share took nine camels, the one with a third took six, and the one with a ninth took his two.
To their surprise, they realized that after adding their shares, it was again 17 (9+6+2) and they were left with one camel. Since they were so content with their fair shares and at the generosity of the wise woman, that all of them with consensus decided to return the camel to her and that too with gratitude.”
So obvious from the story, even by finding my eighteenth camel, I did not lose anything.
From the India-Pakistan perspective, if we as common masses consider ourselves as the wise woman, and make an effort to find the eighteenth camel, we too would lose nothing, at all. Our love for our own country cannot in anyway be compromised. Giving a flicker of thought, that instead of harboring a venomous hate for the other side, we need think of them being as human as us– with same rogue elements, and vested interests trying to sabotage the peace process.
It would be unfair to generalize both sides as hate mongers, and I know firsthand that both aspire for peace as much.
But come a conflict, deliberate or accidental, between India and Pakistan, media takes the lead, with magniloquence of the ‘breaking news’. And the TV channels start to balderdash every few minutes, repeatedly beating sensationalism into the eardrums of the masses. And responding to its cries, the sleeping patriotic Bheemas in us suddenly wake up hungry, desperate to chew up the other side. Even before the facts come up, the mainstream media and the individuals on social media throw themselves into convulsions, frothing hatefully.
Haven’t we seen this circus both sides, all too often? Are we not yet fed up of this drama occurring day in and day out, sucking up our positive energies?
Can we as helpless masses be a solution? As above, I repeat, yes, we can be the ‘eighteenth camel’, being the unified voice of peace.
“Secret to peace is us, the humanity.” says an anthropologist Willaim Ury
We on the subcontinent are a billion and a half humanity, out of which two thirds are the youngsters who are or yet to embark on a journey of adulthood, and there lay decades of life ahead for them. Imagine if each day or each week, they simply indulge in barrage of hate waves either in sympathy for a Siachen, or Godra or Mumbai or even Zeeshan Abbasi? How will they be able to grow as productive individuals with such frequent doses of hatred?
Says poet EE Cummings “Hatred bounces.”
Aren’t we seeing it bouncing higher and higher with each incident?
Both sides have their own fair share of problems to wrestle with, and most of them are identical. Name it and we both have them– religious extremism, corruption, poverty, ill-health, ignorance, women abuse, and the list goes on…
Should we not be aligning with each other, and be the unified voice of peace? And with numbers on our side, we can show to the vested interests that we want to live with dignity, with prosperity and with peace, and that our voice matters.
Being eighteenth camels for peace, do we lose anything? No.
We all win, and no one loses.
Blind to Bounds 
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