A ‘racqueteer’

Television channels are having a ball. What with Ayesha Siddiqui creating a “racquet” by suddenly surfacing overground with claims of marriage, “physical intimacy” and even a “miscarriage” to Pakistan cricketer Shoaib Malik in the wake of his sudden engagement to Sania Mirza. The marriage is 10 days away and the cricket star is in the Hyderabad police net on charges of cheating and dowry harassment.
Why is it that whenever there is an Indo-Pakistan alliance, matrimonial or otherwise, the spokes are sharpened and then poked on the wheels of some progress? It has been almost 10 years since the alleged marriage between the Hyderabad girl and the Pakistani cricketer. The sudden resurfacing of the controversy springs up a vague suspicion of a “foreign” hand. Is someone instigating Ayesha against the Indo-Pakistani match? Suspicion is what keeps the RAWs and the intelligence agencies working. But the sheer timing of the controversy does not bode well for any positive relationship between the two siblings of colonial parentage. It has been 67 years, and we are yet to grow beyond suspicion and hatred.
As if these are not sufficient, there are saffron gatekeepers “advising” Sania Mirza not to get married to the Pakistani, and if she did, not to play for India in the Olympics. This display of abject patriarchy is nothing new to India, but it is high time we take the country forward progressively without engaging in regressive comments.
In high school mathematics text books, we were given a time and work problem sum about a monkey climbing a tree of a specified height but slipping back to a specified level of the tree. The problem question was how long it would take for the monkey to reach the top. Weak as I was in math, I could never solve this problem. The Indo-Pak ties are like this monkey, we take a few steps forward, and there are people to pull us backward. At this rate, when will we ever reach the pinnacle of positive Indo-Pak ties?