2007, a love story

Romance, or even just a suspicion of it, has the power to bridge so many divides. This is especially so in the subcontinent. Matches amongst royalty the world over have been latticed with statements on social and political comment. But in South Asia romance continues to be so much more than about affection between two individuals. Watch our films, read our books, look at the regressive anger that bubbles out at caste panchayats in north India, and you get a sense of its potent power. So, what does it say about us when we react to rumours about former Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh and Aroosa Alam, a Pakistani journalist?

Singh and Alam plead that they be allowed privacy of an order that has usually kept the private lives of our politicians away from public scrutiny and speculation. Fair enough. Whether they are “good friends” or not, we wish them well. But treasure the idea — the optimism that cross-border affection can bring a happy ending — that’s come in our midst. Sixty years after Partition, Hindi cinema certainly still struggles to tie up neatly the loose ends of an India-Pakistan affair. For instance: released in the rosy aftermath of the Indian cricket team’s “friendship tour” of Pakistan in 2004, Veer Zaara — a big Bombay production — still had to put its characters through strenuous tests of character. The Indian hero and the Pakistani heroine had to suffer endless hardship to show themselves to be above any bad intent against the other’s country. Life, it appears, is less complicated than make-believe. Be happy that the captain and the journalist are bothered by little more than polite questioning.

So, plead for your privacy by all means, we say to Alam and Singh, but know that your story has so much more depth than the voyeuristic follow-ups on Nicolas Sarkozy’s rendezvous with supermodel Carla Bruni. For two countries obsessed with the modalities of people-to-people contact, it has given us much to think about.