India & Pak perspectives

India:

Okay, so I think I'm not the only one here who gets the feeling that Indians are unwilling to appreciate anything Pakistani, and moreover are unwilling to take any criticism from a Pakistani (though they might take the same criticism from anyone else).

I think there's an underlying issue here, of Indian pride.

I think an Indian generally feels that India has taken the harder road, the moral road, the road less travelled by, and got where it has by its own effort, in the face of tremendous odds and no help and little appreciation from abroad (read: esp. the US)

There is a feeling in India, that coming from the same colonial morass, we as a country have fought hard to maintain a democracy, to be secular, to give reasonably equal treatment to religious minorities (some would claim, to the point of having discriminated against the majority), to do everything by the book. While Pakistan, which even the CIA acknowledges has hosted training camps for cross-border militants, which is widely known to have indulged in nuclear proliferation, which has never pretended to be secular, which has instigated multiple wars against us, which has never sustained a democratic polity, STILL manages to be the one getting a larger amount of foreign aid (at least as % of GDP), still has gotten preferential treatment from both China and the US (the latter despite it's claims to be a champion of "democracy"), and basically manages to keep up/get ahead in the world economic and international political race in all manner of ways.

It's a feeling that while we've gotten where we are by blood and sweat, Pakistan has gotten there by cheating, by being in a strategically lucky geopolitical situation.

So while we know we're far from being perfect, we know we have faults, the LAST place we'll take criticism from is Pakistan.

Now i'm sure Pakistanis have a very different view of things. High time we discussed it.

Pakistan:

The things have recently changed I guess. Before two years, i don't think so there were many Pakistanis who were a bit interested in taking any criticism from India. The ideals which exist in India may not necessarily exist in Pakistan.

All the events that happened after independence or even before that, there has been a general idea that Indians are not the well-wishers of Pakistanis, it has been compounded by the examples of all the mishaps that happened in the past 55 years. Plus, many Pakistanis hated India on relegious basis, a war between the Islam and polytheism, a reflection from the pre-islamic times.

When I said, even ideals are different, i mean there are huge number of people who doesn't believe that democracy is the proper mode of governing, they think Caliphate is better, this view may be completely irrational and founded only on relegious basis, but that was there. Secondly, Secularism is equal to Atheism, in minds of many people here. In a state where 94% of people are Muslims, Secularism is not a very good mode they wanted to implement.
Plus, there have been an excess deviation towards overly relegious attitudes after the fall of USSR and rise of Taliban, that have made them to put Shariah in Jinnah's Secular Pakistan. So, even Pakistani don't think that Indians are better than Pakistanis because only because they are a secular democratic state.

So, in a general Pakistani view, Indian pride is an Indian delusion.

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Cool exchange! :-)