The Border Show

This is by far the most humid and hot place I’ve been in my entire life. I’ve experienced humid before, but never like this. Even at night it’s so hot. I’m still sweating just lying in my bed underneath the fan. Last night me and Eva felt like we were going to go crazy. I’m even sweating while I bathe. Did I mention how hot it is?

Besides the Golden Temple, the other thing that Amritsar offers is the chance to go see a ridiculously nationalistic ceremony at the Pakistan-Indian border. Attari is the town right before the border and only 26 km from the Golden Temple. We caught a shared taxis to Attari and walked to the border where literally hundreds of Indians come everyday to see the Indian Border Security Police perform the lowering of the flags alongside the Pakistani Border Security Police. The area is packed with vendors trying to sell everything from popcorn, to postcards to DVDs of the ceremony. Every two seconds another guy was in our faces, “Postcard, ok! Indian popcorn?! Only 10 rupees a bag!” There was stadium seating on either side of the border, with each country’s gates and flag in the center. On the Pakistani side, men wore long white tunics and pants typical of Muslim countries, and the women wore bourkas. On the Indian side, men were out of their seats dancing Bollywood style, and women were seated in their sarees and Punjabi suits. It’s hard to believe they used to be united as one country. Before the ceremony began, both sides shouted nationalistic chants back and forth to each other. Then the border police, in their full-fledged uniforms marched one by one, lifting their knees as high as their chests and swinging their arms back and forth, to the border gates they met with an equal number of Pakistani guards and shook hands before lowering their respective flags. The actual ceremony is very formal, but it’s hilarious to see locals go all out in party mode for the event. A huge group of Indian men formed, dancing and throwing water in the air like it was champagne at New Year’s. There were other Indian men running around with the flag. One of them tripped and bit it really hard in front of everyone. Nationalism is a funny thing. The ceremony ended sort of anticlimactically. After the guards took down the flag, people just stopped shouting and dancing, and turned around to walk back to their cars.

That was the end of that, and we headed back to Amritsar.