Desiderata for two nations: what a five-second salute taught us

It lasted five seconds. A Pakistani Ranger, standing at the Attari-Wagah gate in the last light of a border evening, lifted his hand in a crisp, formal salute. Across the white line, an Indian BSF officer answered, not with a salute of his own, but with a nod. That was all. Just two men, in two uniforms, observing a courtesy older than the border itself.

The clip found its way onto Instagram in early August this year and would not stop travelling, would not stop migrating.

It reached commentators, veterans and ordinary scrollers on both sides of a frontier that has spent decades being described in every language except a gentle one.

Among the voices trying to explain why the gesture moved so many, I was captivated by a line from a young Indian Navy veteran, now an entrepreneur. Somehow, I noticed no one else paying attention to this line amid the flood of comments - trolling, saluting, celebrating, embracing, embarrassing, whatever else social media is noisy with. First, the line, which can be paraphrased as: You civilians fight; we, the military, have our protocols and discipline - soldiers do not carry the enmity that civilians are asked to carry.

Whatever its precise origin - and viral videos rarely arrive with tidy footnotes - the sentiment struck a nerve because it named something true: discipline and protocol can hold a decency intact, even where politics insists there should be none.

I desire to waltz with that five-second moment a while. I desire to set it beside a text almost a hundred years its senior in spirit, if not in age: Max Ehrmann's Desiderata, the 1927 prose-poem whose opening line is - go placidly amid the noise and haste. I first heard the words nasri nazm long before I was old enough to understand them, from Qamar Jameel himself, who would later write for a slim collection of my own. Then, somewhere along the way, I walked out of that world of literature, of art, and everything that had once felt beautiful and joyful.

Life, unlike Ehrmann's poem, comes with no manual for that kind of leaving. And then, unasked, an avid and much-revered reader cited Desiderata to me, and something I had spent years trying to forget found its way back in a single line.

Why does that belong here, in a piece about a border and a salute? Because India and Pakistan – bound and estranged at once, in the way – read like a nasri nazm themselves, no meter (behr), no fixed measure, no rhythm anyone agreed on in advance, and yet, somehow, still poetry.

Pakistan and India share a birthday week - August 14 and 15 - born a day and a border apart. Seventy-nine years on, they are still arguing about what that partition and independence mean. For Bangladesh, once a wing of Pakistan, the argument has lasted only fifty-five years, framed instead by liberation or revenge.

The deceptively benign question in the title is, in fact, a troublemaker, for we have yet to agree whether India is our enemy, neighbour, or both. Perhaps the most candid answer is: both - and exhausted by the choosing. But there is a number that neither flag-waving nor hostility can argue away, and it deserves more thoughtfulness on our birthdays than it gets.

India sits solidly in the "medium human development" band, ranked 130th out of 193 countries as per United Nations' reports, and Pakistan, ranked 168th, is in the "low human development" band.

What a mismatch for two nuclear-armed nations, sharing a subcontinent, a language belt and a border ceremony choreographed since 1959, to find themselves in. Neither government should claim its numbers as a victory over the other when both remain, by this measure, among the least developed large economies in Asia.

There is no misdemeanour in lamenting the ruthlessness of 1947, if it is for catharsis, or for generating a constructive dialogue. Can we also dare pay attention to the nakedness of our real selves, fully exposed in the killings, the rapes, the mass displacement, when ordinary people on both sides were suddenly told they were living on the "wrong" side of a line and must leave, not with civility, but with whatever they could carry, and their bodies violated, their families broken, their homes taken before they ever reached the border?

All of this matters only if it teaches us something. So the pertinent question in 2026 should simply be: How long do people go on living with inequality, with injustice, with an elitism so fortified with entitlement on both sides of the border that we have almost stopped spotting it at all?

This is the algebra that should alarm both capitals more than any cross-border insult does. The soldiers at Wagah, oddly, seem to understand something their governments resist admitting: that professional respect costs nothing and threatens no one, while the mutual impoverishment of hostility costs both nations everything they claim to want for their people.

Ehrmann's poem ends by telling its reader that, with all its sham and drudgery and broken dreams, the world is still a beautiful place, and one should strive to be happy.

I wish this desiderata could be adopted by both countries, so that they spend their next seventy-nine years competing over HDI rankings instead.

Desiderata's real power was never in its age. It remains in its insistence that peace is not the absence of noise (read war, conflict...), it is a discipline practised in the middle of that "noise". That is, I think, exactly what the Attari-Wagah salute was: peace as discipline, not as sentiment. Not the peace of treaties or joint statements, but the older, plainer peace of a professional doing their job with dignity even when the two flags behind them are not on speaking terms.

A salute lasts five seconds. Peace not the illusion of it, if we ever let it, could last considerably longer.