In an alley behind a famous film studio in Mumbai two goats were chewing on a discarded reel of a Hindi potboiler of some vintage. After a few minutes of such vigorous exercise of their mandibles, one goat said: “You know, this film is good.” To which the other goat replied: “Yes, but the book was better!”

Shashi Tharoor is fond of narrating this apocryphal story to elaborate on how India is emerging as a “soft power”- as opposed to military might or “hard power”- through its many advances in science and technology and, more importantly, culture, of which the Indian film industry is a prominent component.

Culture and film may not figure when Sujatha Singh, India’s foreign secretary, and her Pakistani counterpart Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhary, meet next month to pick up the threads -or are they shreds? - of a dialogue between the two nations that had been stalled for nearly two years. Indian Foreign Office sources were quoted as saying this will be a “talk about talks” and nothing more, meaning no major announcements could be expected post the August 25 meeting in Islamabad.

Truth to tell, these on-again-off-again India-Pakistan talks, both at the political and official levels, hold little interest to the man on the street because nothing much has been achieved through these talks in the past six decades. And if it is true in India, one can safely assume it must be true in Pakistan as well. (Nawaz Sharif at Narendra Modi’s inauguration did carry a certain element of novelty, but that was just that.)

This is so because most of these inter-governmental exchanges deal in “hard power”: how to demilitarise the borders, what to do when there is a violation of the ceasefire pact, what is the way out of the Siachen Glacier impasse and, of course the most imponderable, Kashmir. And there has been little tangible progress on any of these issues till date. It has always been one step forward, two steps backward.

Hence the disinterest, if not downright cynicism, in these “talks about talks” or what you will. There is always much fanfare surrounding Indo-Pak talks. But then somebody will shoot somebody else at the border or a bomb will explode somewhere and everything goes back to square one. Hard power on either side has only helped keep the two nations apart, not bring them any closer.

But “soft power” is a different matter altogether. Pakistan may have a long way to go before it can catch up with the Indian IT and other technologically advanced industry. (Revenues of the Indian IT industry, which employs a whopping 20mn people, at last count was $95.2bn a year versus $3bn of Pakistan) But when it comes to culture, especially in the field of performing arts, the give-and-take between India and Pakistan is more or less equal.

This has to be so because the two nations are divided, at least originally, by an imaginary line and, to a large part, there is little to differentiate between them in many of the customs, costumes and cuisines that they have grown with. So, if Dilip Kumar -Mohamed Yusuf Khan, to some - is India’s greatest actor, he is as much a hero in Pakistan where the house in Peshawar in which he was born has been declared a national heritage building by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

The many other Khans of Indian cinema are equally famous household names in Pakistan although the politicians there, thanks to the “hard power exchanges,” have sometimes managed to send their films into the black markets of Karachi and Lahore. But, as the saying goes, time, tide and electronic signals wait for no man! (Okay, the saying has been bent a little to suit the occasion.) If Indian films have been popular in Pakistan, Pakistani TV serials have a huge following in India. So much so that ‘Zindagi’, a new Indian television channel solely dedicated to Pakistani serials, was launched by Zee Entertainment Enterprises last month. From day one, Zindagi has given other more established channels a run for their money.

The reason is not far to find. As noted television critic Shailaja Bajpai wrote in The Indian Express the other day, “The Pakistani serials we see on Zindagi are more open. Two series, Zindagi Gulzar Hai and Aunn Zara, have completed their runs, which is wonderful  - Hindi soaps only end when the lead actors leave, say after a 1,000 episodes.” In short, the Pakistani serials are way shorter and more down-to-earth than their glitzy, rouge-ridden, glycerin-soaked Indian counterparts.

And, true to form, there indeed is a Khan involved in this “soft power invasion,” only this time it is in the reverse direction. Fawad Khan is not entirely unknown to Indian audiences as he had teamed up with Indian veteran Naseeruddin Shah for the Pakistani film Khuda Ke Liye. But his performance in Zindagi Gulzar Hain has caught the imagination of Indian television audiences across the country. Khan, who portrayed the lovable rascal-turned-devoted husband in the series, has received much praise from critics and home-makers alike. And he will appear as the leading man in a Bollywood movie slated for release in September. There is much expectation from the movie, not just for its makers and actors but also for those who wish to see the “soft power” of the two countries succeed. Wonder what Koreans on either side of the 38th Parallel would be thinking!

 

Modi playing
truant?

It has been two months since Narendra Modi shifted his power base from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. Several novel ideas - the unofficial Saarc summit at his inauguration being one - combined with a go-getter’s zeal to make up for lost time have kept all, including the media, on their toes. But what has been conspicuous by its absence is Modi’s famed interaction with the public.

The man who has had an opinion on everything from onion prices to Rahul Gandhi’s ‘kurta’ sleeves has all of a sudden clammed up. Be it the Iraq nurses crisis or the Gaza bombing or, closer home, the judicial dust-storm unleashed by Justice Katju or the less-than-savoury stand of the BJP on the question of the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Narendra Modi is nowhere in the picture.

Not that Indians are not wont to their Prime Minister being absent in times of crises. If anything, ten years of Manmohan Singh have prepared them for much worse! But Modi has always been perceived as made of a different mettle. One can well imagine he is overburdened with the task of putting the Indian economy and its infrastructure back on track after the decade-long mismanagement by the Sonia Gandhi’s UPA.

But a sound-bite here and a statement there, if not a regular White House-like press conference, could help keep the prime minister in touch with the people. More importantly, it will help keep the people in touch with their prime minister. There is little hope though. The prime minister’s press attaché himself plays hard-to-get all the time. So why talk of the prime minister?