When Pakistani journalist Abid Shah visited Sri Lanka, everyone wanted to talk to him about the attack on their national cricket team in Lahore, and Shah began to see South Asia’s differences through the prism of the sport. From the National:
Something was wrong. The heat was there, the sun strong; the streets were hustle-bustle, the bazaars too; and clogging the roads were freewheeling three-wheeler taxis which in Pakistan I called rickshaws, but here are called tuc-tucs. Everything told me this was still South Asia, that Colombo was not very different from Lahore, that somehow our regional bond held. Yet, something was very different, and I was struggling to pinpoint it.
On the train, its carriages rattling as it hugged Sri Lanka’s western coast and chugged south, I fell into conversation with the man next to me. Arriva deSilva was a retired medical technician with spectacles, a short-sleeved shirt and wispy hair. He was a man of firm opinions, and he started grilling me about Pakistan with growing indignation.
Why, he asked, were so many Pakistanis illiterate, when Sri Lankans were so educated, when Sri Lanka boasted a literacy rate above 90 per cent? How could a democracy work with so many illiterate people?
It was not, I assured him, because Sri Lankans ate so much fish, but because of Pakistan’s feudal history, because of its unstable dictatorships and its ingrained class system. This was unacceptable to deSilva; no wonder Pakistan was such a mess. More:
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