MUMBAI - Webster, Oxford and other dictionary merchants are yet to define "mango diplomacy", but when that day dawns the origins of the term would be sub-continental, with Pakistan and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh featuring as its pioneers.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani sent Manmohan a gift of five crates of mangoes on August 20, marking perhaps the most significant fruit delivery in South Asia. Relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbors had plunged so low that the Pakistani government took over a week to decide whether or not
to accept from India US$5 million of urgently needed aid, despite over 20 million of its people struggling for survival in one of most devastating floods in recent times.
Gilani sent the mangoes hours after Pakistan decided to accept India's helping hand, the fruity exchange serving reminders of how things are not always as bad as they appear to be, and life isn't always as bitter as it sometimes tastes. Like a cup of tea brewing good cheer, a mango offers goodwill and the truth that life, despite all that happened in the past, starts again afresh every moment, with this moment, now.
This is also the case with India-Pakistan relations, so often described, particularly in the Western media, in standard word-fare like "arch-enemies" and "bitterly feuding neighbors". A subtler, warmer subtext bubbles in the sometimes soap opera-like India versus Pakistan fracas, with the occasional testimonies of cordiality underlining the fact of blood being thicker than water, and the possibility of a violent feud over property, like in many Bollywood movies, leading to happier endings.
"Mango diplomacy juices up Indo-Pak knots," declared the Islamabad-based Pakistan Observer in its August 21 edition. The knots include a disputed border in Kashmir, but mangoes have become the latest bearers of the history of India and Pakistan being one in identity, not so long ago, until the two nations were partitioned in 1947.
Thousands of families have close relatives in the other country; political leaders, movie stars, sports persons and academics grew up across the border. Manmohan Singh was born in Gah village, Chakwal district, now in Pakistan, and former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf was born in Delhi, the Indian capital. A few decades of dispute cannot bury a few millennia of sharing a civilization.
In contrast, other sour international relationships, like between Israel and Iran, do not have a deeper people-to-people meaning that transcends political, military, religious and boundary disputes. One cannot imagine the presidents of Cuba and the United States exchanging baskets of fruit.
This is why strange things happen when the peace bomb occasionally explodes between India and Pakistan - when terrorists, military dictators, Western arms merchants and politicians from extreme lunatic fringes have all taken a holiday. One has to read Rahul Bhattacharya's Pundits from Pakistan.
Rashid, an expatriate Pakistani living in the West, also strongly recommended the virtues of mangoes from the Pakistani city of Multan, above all other mango varieties in the planet. But the Mangifera indica L, as botanists call the mango, - whether from Multan or Sind in Pakistan, Banganpalli mangoes from South India or Misridana mango from Bangladesh - holds too many pleasant childhood memories in South Asian consciousness to make much of a difference.
School summer holidays, for instance, are tied to unlawful stones hurled at thin mango stalks in trees holding these fruits from paradise. Or, Tintin, Just William , Billy Bunter and the Five Find-outers paperbacks devoured with thin, green slivers of raw mangoes dunked in red chilli-salt powder. These salivating, ageless memories hold secrets to a mango slice breaking sub-continental ice, in the stormy diplomatic waters of Pakistan and India.
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