Fareed Zakaria: evaluation

Transcript context

…Even that you grew up speaking Urdu, your connection with Singh, who was born in what is now Pakistan — how much, if at all, do you have an aesthetic longing for what used to be called historic India? I don’t mean in an imperialistic kind of way, but just, there was something proper about the fact that it was all connected. Is that in your thought much at all? Yes, it’s funny. I don’t think I’ve ever written this, so I’m not quite sure how you picked that up, but absolutely. I’ll give you a simple example. Look, I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India. If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich. I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city. You feel Mumbai is still the most cosmopolitan part of current India?…

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