Lahore: The most intense experience of my life

The most intense experience of my life

Dear friends,

Being in Lahore, Pakistan from the 20^th to the 26^th of March 2004 must rank as one of the most intense and touching events of my life.

An Indian in Lahore! And enjoying himself!

From buying the tickets for the cricket matches between India and Pakistan on the internet, to queuing up at 5 AM for Visas in front of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi, to getting a seat on the Delhi-Lahore bus, to the bus journey itself, crossing the border at Wagah, and spending six memorable days in Lahore with Naseem Saab and so many other friends (all formed during the course of our stay in Lahore). There was also cricket, and with it, a lot of bonhomie, friendship and understanding.

And then, there were emotions unbounded: I managed to track down the respective houses where my father and mother were born. The houses where Kasturi Lal Sapra (on Gurmukh Street, Dev Samaj Road) and Neerja Sapra (nee Mehta)(at 15F, Nisbet Road, near Dyal Singh Library) were born might be nondescript today amongst the sea of houses in Lahore, for me they represented places where my parents would have taken their first steps, played, fallen, walked, talked and learnt to get their first bearings of the world. These would also have been the places where they would have to undergo, as kids of five and two respectively, the trauma of partition in 1947

The six days were about a whole lot of love, affection and building relationships; they were also about realizing the huge gap that exists between perception and reality, on both sides of the Radcliffe line. We are the same people, living on two sides of an artificial divide; we speak the same language, sing the same songs and play the same sports.

Please go through the following links to get a feel of what surely has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience

Deepak and Ipsita

Lahore diary: events, people from boarding the bus at Delhi, to everything in Lahore

Lahore Railway station: Notes, people and impressions

Photo tour of our tour: all images from entry to exit

Photo tour of the Lahore Railway station, where we spent a lot of time and got a good flavour of trains in Pakistan

Press coverage:

In the Pakistan Times (Urdu) newspaper from Lahore, dated 23^rd March 2004

New York Times, dated 28^th March 2004

The Times of India, Hyderabad, dated 1^st April 2004