He was basking in all the adulation that was being showered on him at Peshawar, thousands of miles away from home. Yet in a split second, it looked like all that goodwill would vanish the minute he began speaking in English at a marketplace.
Dr Kishore Chandra Prasad still gets goose pimples when he recalls the hostility he evoked when he spoke in English at a Peshawar market. The otherwise extremely friendly crowd, suddenly giving him cold stares. It immediately dawned on him that English speakers are looked down as American agents in Pakistani countryside.
However, the doctor averted unseemly scenes by switching over to Hindi, invoking his Indian-ness. Within no time, the hostility vanished and he was again the “star” in the eyes of Pathans.
Dr Prasad, Head of the Department of Otolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery at K M C Hospital here, was in Peshawar from October 28 to November 3 as a guest speaker at the 20th National Conference of ORL-HNS organised by the Pakistan Society of Otorhinolaryngology and Head & Neck Surgery at Khyber Medical College there.
Back from Peshawar, Dr Prasad is full of memories of the kindness and generosity of the common people of Peshawar and how they love Indians.
Indians held high
“They didn’t allow me to spend even a paisa from my pocket. Many people wanted to meet me and talk to me only because I am an Indian. They have a very high opinion of Indians,” says Dr Prasad, who received a thundering applause when he was felicitated by the Vice Chancellor of Khyber University.
He explains elaborately how the organisers took him past Afghan border, showed him the Khyber pass and other historic monuments of the region.
Dr Prasad was forced to report at a police station on November 3, the day the emergency was declared in Pakistan, though his visa exempted him from any such formalities. Thanks to the highly influential organisers of the conference and considerate local people (Pathans), he could return home safely to tell his compatriots of his Pakistani experiences.
“The problem is with the politicians and the authorities and not the common people. All Indian TV channels were available in Pakistan before the emergency. People love watching them. But once the emergency was declared, the only channel available was PTV, whose raison d’etre is India bashing.
“They repeatedly telecast visual and news of all the communal riots that have taken place in India and explain how badly India is treating its Muslims. It instigates the common people to take up arms to take revenge on India,” he explains.
