When you're at work and you don't have any work to actually do, and you have at your disposal a high speed internet connection, YouTube often turns out to be your best friend. I sought of this aforementioned best friend some cricket videos involving India and Pakistan about a week ago.
The infamous Sohail-Prasad incident, Sachin playing impeccably and then missing his century for the umpteenth time, and the trio of Wasim, Waqar and Shoaib destroying the Indian batting order were some of the videos YouTube presented before me. I reminisced for a few moments and purposelessly scrolled down to the comments section. That was when a storm of unbridled venom smote me down from my ergonomically flawed chair. I had stumbled onto a virtual India-Pakistan battle that has been raging vehemently since the day these videos were uploaded.
Pakistan supporters were showering heaps of heartfelt hatred upon Indians and the Indian supporters were returning the favour with equal fervour. I came across several gems that made me laugh and stand back in awe at their innovativeness on wading through the ocean of racial abuses, which had very little to do with cricket. All of them are unprintable in a newspaper. A handful of pitiful comments begged the furious parties to stop and focus on cricket in the midst of these racial attacks. And, predictably, both parties silenced the wannabe peacemaker with a fresh batch of invectives involving his entire family tree.
It's remarkable how the antagonism between India and Pakistan is inherited by each generation with so much vigour and enthusiasm. The hostility one witnessed online between Indians and Pakistanis was so vile that for a second one thought one was reading a chat transcript between the Ambani brothers. The participants dabbled in foul language that covered Hindi, English and Urdu. It was an all-out multilingual cuss fest. When we see the rulers of each country appear on TV and talk about constantly improving India-Pakistan relations, we naively tend to believe things might one day be alright between the two countries; when we see an Indian cricketer bantering with a Pakistani cricketer on the field we wrongly assume that a much-awaited friendship between the two countries will blossom in the near future. The truth is that we are far from getting things right, much like
Emraan Hashmi's real estate agent.
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