Train from Pakistan, 2004: The Return

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You did it again, Veer. Patriotic paki brigrade would be furious :)

Veeresh: You must have taken Chenab Express (slowest train in Pakistan as I remember, stopping at every single village, every single hut, gali, koocha and maidaan along the way).

But seriously, I really enjoy your write-ups and the interaction that follows.

I will read your article in due course and will be looking for any more maruti cars you claim to have seen in Pakistan ....you have been warned. :-)

It makes my head spin to read your litany that goes on and on forever. I think a second or third draft helps in this case. The writing style coupled with your inherent prejudices that you can`t help hide makes it an excrutiating read.

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Vereesh ji, ajjay tusi wapis nai si aaye? hmm...

Oh Boy!
This is going to be a fun thread!

Veeresh,
As I get time I will read it but so far I enjoyed this line I hope others have picked this up too.
``Today, sad to observe, it appears to be a mono-ethnic male-dominated overgrown village. ``

You can say mono-religion but it always was mono-ethnic-male-dominated city. Those who left were Punjabis and those who moved in are Punjabis. Are you implying that you miss a few brits that lived in Lahore before the partition?
One more thing when you call Lahore “an overgrown village” what are you comparing it with? Do all villages in India have over 8 million population or do they all have huge stadiums and tree lined four lane streets.

I was just wondering if India has gone beyond the USA in progress that Lahore for you appears to be a village compared to may be Ghaziabad which may be a big city for you because it has a bus stand! Do you know the train that goes from Delhi to Meerut via Kekhara on small gauge? Why is that just 10 miles outside of Delhi all we have are dirt roads?

Let’s have some fun on this thread! … nobody should take Veeresh seriously please. He is the master comedian of Chowk.

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>>especially the poor and illiterate are the worst victims.

poor and illiterate of south asia don`t know what airport is. it is rich like you and veresh who bitch about it.:)

....... sigh! ... here we go again - spreading pernicious lies about lahore ........... i have heard about penis envy but this is something else !

mohar/001 - sirji, I have tried to write it like I see it. And why should the truly patriotic Pakistani be furious at me? I think any Pakistani who gets furious at me is probably not very patriotic, jingoistic, maybe.

salim & kkkandk/002 - you bhaaloo, me bhaaloo too. Welcome back. How was Corinth?

tahmed32/003 - the only train I took in Pakistan was the Lahore - Wagah - Attari International Express. Also, all cars, trucks and buses being exported to Pakistan from India are now also going to go pre-loaded with bulk bottled mineral water drawn from the Sutlej at Panta Sahib.

urstruly/004 - I don`t have any prejudices. I am sorry your head spun. Take off that turban?

kaurasach/005 - thank you for your kind words, sorry the article was difficult to read. I have been commissioned to make a television serial script based on the article and other inputs, and assure you that it shall be simpler.

HP/06 - by mono-ethnic I mean this impression I got that Lahore was full of male wannabes with wierd Urdu-Punjabi under their belt. Advanced versions spoke English. I am not including the Gulberg/Burger class here.

And there are hardly any females on your Lahore (under-construction) streets now, that is a simple fact. The few that are seem to scurry around with hijabs on. Even the young Pakistani ladies who were on the train from Delhi had changed from jeans and crop-tops into all-enveloping shalwar kameez with heads covered by the time we reached Lahore.

HP, I refuse to accept what you say that Lahore was ``always male dominated``. No Sir, Lahore was very much, pre-1947, a city that was on par or maybe even ahead of other cities on the sub-Continent as far as social / economic / cultural emancipation of women was concerned. Across social classes and communities, I may add. You should have seen Madras or Bangalore in those days to understand what ``male dominated`` meant.

Lahore appears to me to be a sleepy-joe village today because that`s what it appears to me to be. It lives on its past. There are very Lahoris I have met here and otherwise who can talk about anything modern or current day about Lahore, other than a cafe called Cocos or something. The rest is all about the past.

There is none of the dynamic energy I saw in Rawalpindi or Karachi, Ludhiana or Jullundur. Amritsar is now light years ahead. Islamabad and its comparable city in India, Chandigarh, are, ofcourse, a different concept altogether. I think the big change took place in 1971 when the Indian Army marched in unchallenged, and decided to give it back when they figured it wasn`t all that it was made out to be. Today`s Lahore reminds me of Rewari or Narwana or Moradabad, truly.

The ambience is ``rural pathetic decay``, not even ``pastoral``. Point on Ghaziabad and rural areas well taken, but what has Ghaziabad or a metre gauge railway line got to do with Lahore? Beyond the fact that the trans-Yamuna part of Delhi was called ``Naveen (New) Shahdara`` at one time, there is no comparision. Incidentally, that particular narrow-gauge line was shut down a while ago, when Martin Burns/Silliman & Co. gave up/got nationalised. Now the linkages are by road or broad gauge.

The Hindu & Sikh Punjabis left after 1947. The Muslim Punjabis either morphed into their Urdu identities or were declared not Muslim enough and left anyways. The Christian Punjabis were relegated. So, who was left?

kaurasach/008 - I don`t think the Pakistan Customs & Immigration behaviour at Wagah had as much to do with religion as with socio-economic status.

When dealing with the poor, I didn`t see them sparing the Muslims either, only difference was that the Pakistani Hindus made a loud song and dance and noise about it because they saw the Indian media watching them, while the Pakistani & Indian Muslims chose to accept their fate at the hands of their saviours in embarrased silence.

The Indian Hindus, on cricket visas, remember, were all middle-class, returning from an innings victory in `Pindi, and that brings out a different strut which the Pakistani Immigration & Customs officers were quite wary about, so they just let us alone, most of the time.

I heard later on that the Indian Sikhs were the best of the lot. At the least provocation they would swing into (3000 strong on trains meant for 900-1100) loud, jubilant and cheerful Bole so Nihals and Raaj Karega Khalsa and other rousing cries with much dancing, waving of swords and hands. Group leaders would distribute gifts and in the exchanges that followed, while thanking each other, get their work done. Impromptu and long multi-verse kirtans were resorted to whenever required. The authorities in Pakistan were quite keen to simply process them and let them through.

Enough has not been written about the groups of stranded IndianSikhs pushed into Pakistan from the Iran border who were quietly spirited back into India by this route, by the way!!

veeresh: here is something to make your jingoistic little Indian heart flutter with joy:


Surgeries, Side Trips for `Medical Tourists`
Affordable Care at India`s Private Hospitals Draws Growing Number of Foreigners

By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page A01

NEW DELHI -- Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.

So he outsourced the job to India.

Howard Staab, who had a life-threatening heart condition requiring surgery, went to India with his partner, Maggi Grace, in search of affordable care.

Taking his cue from cost-cutting U.S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre -- a sleek aluminum-colored building across the street from a bicycle-rickshaw stand -- replaced his balky heart valve with one harvested from a pig. Total bill: about $10,000, including round-trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.

``The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well,`` said Staab, a gentle, ponytailed bicycling enthusiast who was accompanied to India by his partner, Maggi Grace. ``I would do it again.``

Staab is one of a growing number of people known as ``medical tourists`` who are traveling to India in search of First World health care at Third World prices. Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed, a health care specialist at the Confederation of Indian Industries.

Eager to cash in on the trend, posh private hospitals are beginning to offer services tailored for foreign patients, such as airport pickups, Internet-equipped private rooms and package deals that combine, for example, tummy-tuck surgery with several nights in a maharajah`s palace. Some hospitals are pushing treatment regimens that augment standard medicine with yoga and other forms of traditional Indian healing.

The phenomenon is another example of how India is profiting from globalization -- the growing integration of world economies -- just as it has already done in such other service industries as insurance and banking, which are outsourcing an ever-widening assortment of office tasks to the country. A recent study by the McKinsey consulting firm estimated that India`s medical tourist industry could yield as much as $2.2 billion in annual revenue by 2012.

``If we do this right, we can heal the world,`` said Prathap C. Reddy, a physician who founded Apollo Hospitals, a 6,400-bed chain that is headquartered in the coastal city of Chennai and is one of the biggest private health care providers in Asia.

The trend is still in its early stages. Most of the foreigners treated in India come from other developing countries in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, where top-quality hospitals and health professionals are often hard to find. Patients from the United States and Europe still are relatively rare -- not only because of the distance they must travel but also, hospital executives acknowledge, because India continues to suffer from an image of poverty and poor hygiene that discourages many patients.

Taken as a whole, India`s health care system is hardly a model, with barely four doctors for every 10,000 people, compared with 27 in the United States, according to the World Bank. Health care accounts for just 5.1 percent of India`s gross domestic product, against 14 percent in the United States.

On the other hand, India offers a growing number of private ``centers of excellence`` where the quality of care is as good or better than that of big-city hospitals in the United States or Europe, asserted Naresh Trehan, a self-assured cardiovascular surgeon who runs Escorts and performed the operation on Staab.

Trehan said, for example, that the death rate for coronary bypass patients at Escorts is 0.8 percent. By contrast, the 1999 death rate for the same procedure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where former president Bill Clinton recently underwent bypass surgery, was 2.35 percent, according to a 2002 study by the New York State Health Department.

Escorts is one of only a handful of treatment facilities worldwide that specialize in robotic surgery, which is less invasive than conventional surgery because it relies on tiny, remote-controlled instruments that are inserted through a small incision.

``Our surgeons are much better,`` boasted Trehan, 58, a former assistant professor at New York University Medical School, who said he earned nearly $2 million a year from his Manhattan practice before returning to India to found Escorts in 1988.

Is this girl mad ? Is she the same one who earlier just came to the Lahore Railway Station and delivered a bitter thesis about Lahore ? This time it seemed she reached as far as GOR but why is she always trying to make a fool of herself and why does she expend so much energy on trying to put Lahore down ? Silly girl. But I think sillier are the people who try to respond to her by ``logical`` argument. The woman is crazy guys...something obviously happened to her or her family long ago in Lahore...or connected with Lahore. I think she gets it out by writing these boring train to Pakistan things. Why else would anyone write those things. Aik paragraph say zyaada parrhna mushkil hai ? This one to khair I read kay daikhoon what she is again saying about Lahore. But I think just ignore her. Btw...read Akaar Patel`s article. Thats from a guy who is not insecure about his own city, Mumbai and it seems he came to enjoy Lahore not to be bitter about it like this Vereesh girl. Its on this: http://web.mid-day.com/smd/go/2004/april/81905.htm

Ab daikhna kaisay sarr kay jawab likhay gi yeh. Kayee ghantay laga day gi saabit karnay main kay Lahore kitna ganda village hai aur yeh kay yeh kitna achha samajhti hai har cheez ko. Phir issay thorra sakoon milay ga. LOL.

Veeresh,
``HP, I refuse to accept what you say that Lahore was ``always male dominated``. No Sir, Lahore was very much, pre-1947, a city that was on par or maybe even ahead of other cities on the sub-Continent as far as social / economic / cultural emancipation of women was concerned. Across social classes and communities, I may add. You should have seen Madras or Bangalore in those days to understand what ``male dominated`` meant.”

First off, obviously you have not seen pre-partition Lahore or Bangalore or Madras yourself so what you base your judgment is nothing more than hearsay. But I give you that what you are saying is more or less accurate. You don’t see very many women in Lahore or any other cosmopolitan cities in Pakistan. At least my recollection of Delhi, Meerut Lakhnow, Agra and Allahabad tells me that certainly more women were visible in those Indian cities.

I assume you have lived all your life in Delhi and a vast majority of Muslims in Muslim dominated areas in Delhi are conservative as far as I recall from more than two decades ago now. This is also true that majority of Muslims in India are certainly more conservative than Muslims in Pakistan tend to be. You are also aware that mostly Muslim women all over the subcontinent don’t enjoy the kind of freedom that women of other communities in India take for granted.

Now my question is: how many Muslim girls in Chandni Chowk or Ballimarran have you seen that regularly ride bicycles? I don’t recall names of all Muslim dominated areas of Old Delhi but certainly the areas that I visited were full of Burqa to the point of annoyance.

Lahore before partition was a Muslim dominated city and conservative like the Muslims you have in Delhi, Agra, Meerut, allahbad and also Aligarh to a name a few cities in UP that have significant Muslim Population.
Old Lahore had a significant Non Muslim population but the Muslims dominated the old city and I don’t see the likelihood of even Hindu or Sikh girls enjoying the kind of freedom that they enjoyed in Amritsar then and now.
Once you understand that the Muslims are more conservative everywhere and Muslim women regrettably don’t have the freedom that they deserve, chances of Lahore being a liberal or a women friendly city before the partition don’t look exactly obvious.
I agree that most of the Pakistani cities are male-dominated. It doesn`t matter now, but 20-25 years ago it was really annoying!

I should not speak too much on Lahore’s behalf as in the last two decades I have been there only once for an overnight stay in Gulberg, but It certainly looked a whole lot better city than what it was in the early 80s.

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