I Miss You....
Posters are the widely used way to express our feelings and emotions in very limited words. So I chose poster. I wasn't that good or creative enough in case of posters but I think I have invested a good span of my time in this assignment.
"Toba Tek Singh" is a short story written by Saadat Hasan Manto and published in 1955. It follows inmates in a Lahore asylum, some of whom are to be transferred to India following the 1947 partition. The story is a "powerful satire" on the relationship between India and Pakistan.
The story is set two or three years after 1947 partition, when the governments of India and Pakistan decided to exchange some Muslim, Hindu and Sikh lunatics, and revolves around Bishan Singh, a Sikh inmate in Lahore, who is from the town of Toba Tek Singh and later on, he himself was known as the same. In the story, whenever Bishan Singh gets irritated he mutters or shouts a mix of Punjabi, Urdu and English which, though nonsensical, is indirectly pejorative of both India and Pakistan. For instance, "Upar di gur gur di annexe di bedhiyana di moong di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey mun", which means: "The inattention of the annexe of the rumbling upstairs of the dal of moong of the Pakistan and India of the go to bloody hell!"
As part of the exchange, Bishan Singh is sent under police escort, to India, but upon being told that his hometown Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan, he refuses to go. The story ends with Bishan lying down in the no man's land between the two barbed fences: "There's behind barbed wire, was Hindustan. Here behind the same kind of barbed wire, was Pakistan. In between, on that piece of ground that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh."
The Partition of India of 1947 was the division of British India into two independent dominion states, India and Pakistan. The Dominion of India is today the Republic of India; the Dominion of Pakistan is today the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the People's Republic of Bangladesh. The partition involved the division of two provinces, Bengal and Punjab, based on district-wise non-Muslim or Muslim majorities.
But now its time for us to analyze whether partition was a right decision or not. Even though its too late, but this story really shames us because the patriotism that the lunatics show, we didn't had at least a bit of it. We were fighting on the basis of religion, caste and superiority. The two-nation theory is the ideology that the primary identity and unifying denominator of Muslims in the Indian subcontinent is their religion, rather than their language or ethnicity, and therefore Indian Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations regardless of commonalities. The two-nation theory was a founding principle of the Pakistan Movement (i.e., the ideology of Pakistan as a Muslim nation-state in South Asia), and the partition of India in 1947.
Lunatics are the people who have lost their mental stage and are behaving as if they were kids. They may not understand why are they exchanged or it may be difficult for them to adopt the new changes. But then too, the common people didn't had any affection or consideration towards them and finally they wre exchanged for the greedy needs of some officials.
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