Wagah Border Closing

Went to see the Wagah border closing between Pakistan and India. Basically every evening the Indians and the Pakistanis draw crowds to see an stylized face offbetween border guards to march around and "hrmph" at each other.

Imagine a blend of Kabuki theater with the Ministry of Funny Walks, observed nightly by hundreds of nationalistic Indians calling for ceremonial blood, and you start to get the idea.

Its really more of a tourist draw at this point than the actual reflection of any sort of open-door policy. There were easily hundreds, if not a few thousand people there, and it quickly adopted the air of highschool pep-rally.

I did find the confirmation of a steriotype to be very funny, however. The steriotype is that Pakistanis, while smaller in number are more organized and so would be able to hold their own against the Indian hordes in an all-out war. In the border closing ceremony, the Pakistanis, even though they were fewer by a factor of 10 were able to out-shout the Indians at times because the Indian loudspeakers kept failing, and the crowd had a hard time staying together on their chants. It was very funny.

I couldn't catch all the chants, but a very common one was: "Hindustan! Zindabad!" which, I think means "India Forever!"