What makes The Other Side of the Divide an impressive read is that it combines a literary extraction of experience with years of reading to produce a nonfiction work that has elements of travel, history, conversation, and journalistic observation
Pakistani Parsis are far fewer but much like in India the Parsi community’s achievements are extraordinary also in Pakistan, where they own the only brewery, the oldest shipping firm, and a chain of hotels besides being regarded as makers of the country’s financial hub of Karachi
Pakistan’s Westernized founding fathers and their successors loved to have a drink and sat on the periodic demands of a ban on alcohol until the 1970s when the prohibition—at least on paper—was imposed
Biradari or kinship networks partly rooted in the Hindu caste system impact candidate selection, voter behavior, and election outcomes in Pakistan, particularly in rural areas of Punjab, which sends 55% of lawmakers to the national assembly
Pashtun nationalism, which was among the major challenges Pakistan faced in its infancy before losing its eastern wing with Bangladesh’s creation, lost steam over the decades, with the emergence of Pashtuns as the backbone of the Pakistani state and most notably the military
Cyril Radcliffe drew the India-Pakistan border weeks after arriving in India for the first time in 1947 without knowing much about the regions he divided haphazardly leaving tens of thousands dead and uprooted
Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas wrote an article in 1971 detailing for the first time the scale of suppression in East Pakistan and helped shape the world’s opinion in favour of India’s intervention and Bangladesh’s creation
Buzz over Hindu officers Kailash Kumar and Aneel Kumar’s promotion to the lieutenant colonel rank in February 2022 thrust into the limelight non-Muslims who have held top posts in the Pakistan military
Pakistan’s discriminatory constitution bars non-Muslim citizens from holding the top two political posts but they have quotas in jobs and legislature and Pakistani Hindus have excelled in different spheres of life
The cultural affinity between India and Pakistan is often framed in terms of cross-border Punjabis but there is much more to it with divided mercantile communities such as Gujaratis being a case in point
