[GOTFIVEONIT]

Nehru and Jinnah emgering after talks - Poor relations between Nehru (left) and Jinnah boded ill



Muslim's surrounding a Hindu corpse in Calcutta - Partition saw as many as half a million people killed



Muslim's at Lahore fleeing from Hindu India, August 1947



The national flag of India is hoisted in Delhi, August 15th, 1947 - Britain handed back its Indian territory to a divided people



Sirdan Abdur Rab Nishter signs the document creating Pakistan on August 18th, 1947 - Pakistan went on to challenge India as a regional power

ANNIVERSARY HIGHLIGHTS
The BBC News website's coverage of the anniversary of partition will include personal testimonies from survivors of the massacres, a focus on Muslims in India and on Kashmiri nationhood, and a stocktake of political and social conditions in the three successor nations of British India.

THE PARTITION IN VERSE

...In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided
from Partition by WH Auden
Corpses lie strewn in your [the Punjab's] pastures and the Chenab [river] has turned crimson
from An Ode to Waris Shah by Amrita Pritam
Somewhere the wave of the slow night will meet the shore and somewhere will anchor the boat of the heart's grief
from Freedom's Dawn by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Last Updated: Wednesday, 8 August 2007, 16:11 GMT 17:11 UK

Sixty bitter years after Partition

As the 60th anniversary of Indian Partition approaches, the BBC's Andrew Whitehead looks back at how and why independence from Britain meant the creation of two separate countries, India and Pakistan.

"There can be no question of coercing any large areas in which one community has a majority to live against their will under a government in which another community has a majority. And the only alternative to coercion is partition."

With those words, the last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, announced that Britain would be granting independence not to one nation, but to two. All Britain's attempts to devise a constitutional formula which preserved India's unity while offering safeguards for the large Muslim minority had failed.

Mountbatten's speech was made on 3 June 1947. Just 10 weeks later, he was presiding at twin independence ceremonies.

In Karachi on 14 August, he witnessed the birth of a nation with an explicit Muslim identity, Pakistan. The following day, he was in Delhi for India's independence ceremonies - a country more than three times the population of Pakistan and with a large Hindu majority.

In those hectic weeks between the announcement of partition and the transfer of power, a British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, was brought in to devise the border between India and Pakistan. It meant cutting in half two of India's most powerful and populous provinces, Punjab and Bengal.

Radcliffe had never been to India before and never came again. Whatever line he had devised, tens of millions would have felt aggrieved. The hasty partition of these provinces triggered one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century.

Independence dream

Tens of millions of Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other, found themselves on what they regarded as the wrong side of the boundary line. Amid the tension, the communal clashes and the panicked mass migration, there was huge loss of life. No one knows the exact number.

Historians believe that upwards of half a million people were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped or abducted and more than 10 million people became refugees in a catastrophe which still haunts South Asian politics and diplomacy.

India's demands for self-rule dated back to the previous century, and gained particular force in the 1920s and 1930s under the leadership of the Hindu ascetic and campaigning genius, Mahatma Gandhi.

By 1945, and the end of World War II, it was clear that self-rule for India was imminent. The landslide victory of a radical-minded Labour party in Britain's 1945 elections hastened the process.

The complicating factor was that many in India's large Muslim minority felt they would be at a disadvantage in a mainly Hindu nation.

The Muslim League, led by austere lawyer Mohammed Ali Jinnah, took up this issue.

Religious split

It was as late as 1940 that the Muslim League started demanding a separate nation for the region's Muslims. But the League's strong showing in post-war provincial elections meant that their demand for a separate Pakistan could not be ignored.

The terrible violence between communities which so tarnished independence began in Calcutta a year before the British transferred power and slowly spread.

But it was only after the independence ceremonies - and then, two days later, the announcement of where the boundary would run - that Punjab became engulfed in the worst of the Partition bloodletting.

Punjab was home to a large and influential Sikh population, who dominated much of the region's agriculture but there was hardly anywhere where Sikhs were in a majority and their lands and most important places of worship straddled the new Partition line.

Almost all Sikhs felt more comfortable in India than in Pakistan - hundreds of thousands moved in endless caravans, some 70 miles long, in the monsoon months of 1947. So did many Hindus. Roughly equal numbers of Muslims made their way to Pakistan.

There was little pattern to the violence. All communities suffered, all harboured perpetrators. It was vicious - almost unbelievably so. Columns of refugees were attacked, harried and sometimes slaughtered.

Trainloads of migrants were put to death, their bodies sometimes horribly butchered and disfigured. On both sides, women were particular targets for violence and impregnation.

Bad neighbours

The debate about whether Partition was right or wrong, whether it was inevitable or avoidable, has receded over the years.

But historians in South Asia by and large agree that if Britain had sought a less hasty and better prepared transfer of power, much of the bloodshed could have been avoided.

Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, and India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, never got on well. The tension and appalling violence which overshadowed their nations' births made matters much worse. Countries which could have been good neighbours turned out to be enemies right from the start.

The Kashmir issue intensified the sense of conflict. Kashmir lay between India and Pakistan. It had a Muslim majority but a Hindu princely ruler had to make the decision about which country to join.

Pakistan tried to force the issue, encouraging first a local uprising and then an invasion by Pakistani tribesmen. The maharaja pleaded to India for help, and Indian troops airlifted into the Kashmir Valley succeeded in blocking the tribal army's advance.

Within months of independence, India and Pakistan were at war in Kashmir. The dispute has never been resolved. Kashmir has endured its own informal partition with the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heartland of Kashmiri culture, under Indian control but still claimed by Pakistan.

Pakistan had the acute problem of geography. It consisted of two wings, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan, with 1,000 miles of Indian territory in between.

The East had just the larger population - but power and influence lay with the West. In 1971, Indian troops supported Bengali nationalists in prising East Pakistan free of West Pakistan's control, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

Defined by the differences

The wars and rivalry between India and Pakistan have encouraged both countries to build strong armies (in Pakistan, the army has repeatedly overthrown civilian governments) and to develop nuclear arsenals.

Regional co-operation in South Asia has been perpetually frustrated by this rivalry. India still has a large Muslim minority, about one in seven of the population, but the tension with Pakistan has put strain on the Indian tradition of secularism in public life and religious tolerance.

The start of a separatist insurgency in Kashmir from the end of the 1980s further worsened relations between the two countries.

Pakistan insisted it was only giving moral support to the separatists - India was convinced that Pakistan was arming, training and at times organising these Muslim militants.

Some were advocates of jihad who had been supported by Pakistan in fighting Soviet rule in Afghanistan and then turned their attention to Kashmir - and have also trained and encouraged Islamic radicals who have sought targets further afield.

Both India and Pakistan have struggled to escape the shadow of the violence amid which they gained nationhood. Kashmir is only one aspect of the unfinished business of Partition. Both national identities are defined in large part by contrast with the other.

Yet India and Pakistan have - hesitatingly, and sometimes painfully - been struggling towards building better links. If that happens, South Asia will finally have managed to supersede the bitter legacy of 1947.

[GOTFIVEONIT]

Christopher Beaumont was not an admirer of Mountbatten



Muslim's heading to Pakistan from India - It was a time of mass migration, uncertainty and bloodshed



Lord Mountbatten



Robert Beaumont collected his father's papers after his death

Last Updated: Friday, 10 August 2007, 23:29 GMT 00:29 UK

Partitioning India over lunch

Memoirs of a British civil servant never published until now show how much the partition of India was decided by just two men, the BBC's Alastair Lawson reports.

In a quiet village in the northern English county of Yorkshire, Robert Beaumont rifles through his father's archives.

The various and somewhat tatty pieces of paper he unearths are no ordinary collection of paternal memoirs.

They are the thoughts and reflections of his father, Christopher Beaumont, who played a central role in the partition of India in 1947, which resulted in arguably the largest mass migration of peoples the world has ever seen.

After the death in 1989 of Mountbatten's Private Secretary, Sir George Abell, Beaumont was probably not exaggerating when he claimed to be the only person left who "knew the truth about partition".

'Bending the border'

It is estimated that around 14.5 million people moved to Pakistan from India or travelled in the opposite direction from Pakistan to India.

In 1947, Beaumont was private secretary to the senior British judge, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who was chairman of the Indo-Pakistan Boundary Commission.

Radcliffe was responsible for dividing the vast territories of British India into India and Pakistan, separating 400 million people along religious lines.

The family documents show that Beaumont had a stark assessment of the role played by Britain in the last days of the Raj.

"The viceroy, Mountbatten, must take the blame - though not the sole blame - for the massacres in the Punjab in which between 500,000 to a million men, women and children perished," he writes.

"The handover of power was done too quickly."

The central theme ever present in Beaumont's historic paperwork is that Mountbatten not only bent the rules when it came to partition - he also bent the border in India's favour.

The documents repeatedly allege that Mountbatten put pressure on Radcliffe to alter the boundary in India's favour.

On one occasion, he complains that he was "deftly excluded" from a lunch between the pair in which a substantial tract of Muslim-majority territory - which should have gone to Pakistan - was instead ceded to India.

Beaumont's papers say that the incident brought "grave discredit on both men".

Punjab 'disaster'

But Beaumont - who later in life was a circuit judge in the UK - is most scathing about how partition affected the Punjab, which was split between India and Pakistan.

"The Punjab partition was a disaster," he writes.

"Geography, canals, railways and roads all argued against dismemberment.

"The trouble was that Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were an integrated population so that it was impossible to make a frontier without widespread dislocation.

"Thousands of people died or were uprooted from their homes in what was in effect a civil war.

"By the end of 1947 there were virtually no Hindus or Sikhs living in west Punjab - now part of Pakistan - and no Muslims in the Indian east.

"The British government and Mountbatten must bear a large part of the blame for this tragedy."

Personality clash

Beaumont goes on to argue that it was "irresponsible" of Lord Mountbatten to insist that Beaumont complete the boundary within a six-week deadline - despite his protests.

On Kashmir, Beaumont argues that it would have been "far more sensible" to have made the flash-point territory a separate country.

According to Beaumont, the "formidably intelligent" Radcliffe "did not get on well" with Mountbatten.

"They could not have been more different," he writes.

"Mountbatten was very good-looking and had a well-deserved history of personal bravery but, to put it mildly, he had few literary tastes.

"Radcliffe... was very quietly civilised. It was a relationship so like chalk and cheese that Lady Mountbatten had to use all her adroitness to keep conversation between them on an even keel."

Beaumont died in 2002 - his son Robert remembers him with great affection.

"He was also a man of supreme honesty, who spoke out on numerous occasions against the official British version of events surrounding partition without in any way being disloyal to his country," Robert Beaumont recalls.

[shsh]

YouTube - Partition of India a Blunder - Altaf Hussain

[shsh]

disclaimer: i do not agree with Altaf Hussain. everything he said is his own opinion.

[GOTFIVEONIT]

well its easy to condmen partition now in modern times - which many Indian writers do, both muslims and hindus alike. But partition in the end was inevitable. If a peaceful partition didnt take place, then a bloody partition would have in a civil war that would have made the bloody partition riots look like a day in the park.

[shsh]

well..the partition wasnt that peaceful after all...a lot of people were tortured whilst trying to get to "Pakistan"..



btw...one more day!!!


then....JASHN E AZADI MUBARUK!!!!

[GOTFIVEONIT]

Originally Posted by shsh

well..the partition wasnt that peaceful after all...a lot of people were tortured whilst trying to get to "Pakistan"..



btw...one more day!!!


then....JASHN E AZADI MUBARUK!!!!

true, but hindu-muslim riots are a very common thing in India and always have been, since the infamous calcutta riots of the early 20th century. However having said that, the reason behind partition was to avoid a civil war. That civil war would have turned the entire sub-continent into a qaugmire. think bosnia on a scale of over a billion people. the irony of it all is, that the hindu elite in Bombay have done a pretty good job of exporting thier culture to pakistan through thier bollywood movies, where movies start out with some bhagwan or geeta and hindu culture is prevalent throughout thier movies. thier values, thier customs, thier culture. from showing 'ma' stick a red paint on her son's forehead, to the despondent lover running to thier temples to plead before idols. what a great propoganda show the hindu elite of India has done to pakistan. The Biggest irony of them all is, while pakistani muslims are busy running after bollywood, it is the Muslim's of India, who enjoy watching Pakistani media, because it displays Muslim culture handed down to us by the Mughals.

[GOTFIVEONIT]

Celebrations in Rawalpindi, late on August 13, 2007 - Pakistanis are celebrating, but face turbulent times ahead



Indian prisoner being released across the border - India is expected to make a reciprocal release soon



Some of the tension between India and Pakistan has dissipated



Refugees at the time of partition

"I'm very happy to come back. Independence has brought real freedom for me" - Tarsem Singh, Former prisoner

Last Updated: Tuesday, 14 August 2007, 03:32 GMT 04:32 UK

Pakistan marks 60th anniversary

Celebrations are under way across Pakistan to mark the 60th anniversary of independence from Britain and the creation of the country.

Fireworks lit up the sky and crowds filled the streets as clocks struck midnight in the capital, Islamabad.

Pakistan is holding celebrations throughout Tuesday, while India marks independence one day later.

The violent partition of 1947 saw 10 million people cross borders in one of history's largest mass migrations.

It was one of the most violent upheavals of the 20th Century as the departing British split the subcontinent with India wedged between West and East Pakistan, which later was to become Bangladesh.

Difficult times

The BBC's Dan Isaacs, in Islamabad, says that at the stroke of midnight, fireworks illuminated the sky above the country's parliament buildings.

Crowds waved flags and set off firecrackers, but spirits were dampened somewhat by a torrential downpour that quickly turned the streets and grass verges into a muddy swamp.

Later in the day there will be a minute of silence to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of people who died in rioting when Pakistan was carved out of British India.

These are difficult times in Pakistan and people attending the celebrations were under no illusions that the months ahead are going to be turbulent, our correspondent adds.

A volatile run-up is expected to presidential and parliamentary elections and there is growing Islamist militant opposition to the rule of the president, General Pervez Musharraf.

Tuesday is a national holiday in Pakistan, which was holding 21-gun salutes and flag-raising ceremonies across the country.

Britain's Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Gordon Brown both congratulated Pakistan on the anniversary.

The Queen sent a personal message to Gen Musharraf, while Mr Brown said the "history, values and hopes" of Pakistan were "permanently intertwined" with those of the UK.

'Real freedom'

To mark the occasion Pakistan has allowed 134 Indian prisoners to return home, officials say, mostly people or fishermen who strayed across the border.

India is set to return more than 100 Pakistanis on Tuesday, to complete the prisoner exchange, Pakistani foreign affairs official Ghulam Muhammad told the AP news agency.

Correspondents say the latest prisoner exchange happened with little fanfare near the city of Lahore at Wagah, the main border crossing between the two countries.

Among those sent back on Monday was 59-year-old Tarsem Singh, who said he had spent the past seven years in a Pakistani prison after straying across the border when he was drunk.

"I'm very happy to come back," he said. "Independence has brought real freedom for me," he told AP.

Fittingly lofty

Partition unleashed an orgy of violence as millions of people moved across the new borders between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

Estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to more than one million.

The words spoken to mark independence were fittingly lofty.

"Long years ago," said India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, "we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge."

Pakistan's leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, used equally stirring language.

"The creation of the new state has placed a tremendous responsibility on the citizens of Pakistan.

"Our object should be peace within and peace without."

But the mass bloodshed in 1947 was only the beginning of bitter hostility between the two South Asian rivals.

After 20 years of independence, they were embroiled in the second of their three wars.

Soon after the 50th anniversary of independence, the two countries came perilously close to nuclear war as each engaged in ***-for-tat nuclear weapons tests.

But correspondents say that with the 60th anniversary, some of the bitterness between the two countries is finally mellowing.

Pakistan is dealing with increased Islamic militancy and questions over how long President Musharraf can remain head of the army and head of his country.

As India races to become an economic powerhouse, analysts say it must also deal with around one-third of its population of one billion people who live on less than one dollar a day.

[GOTFIVEONIT]

'Hyderabad was a Hindu majority state - our lives were threatened'



Abdul Qadri (pictured far left) as a child with aids and ministers of the Nizam of Hyderabad - Abdul's family moved to Hyderabad in 1932, when he was six



A B&W image of university students, Abdul is in the center wearing glasses - Abdul says he did not regret leaving India until his father fell ill

"I have been happy here. My children have done well. My grandchildren are doing even better. But I guess there is a regret lurking in the shadows of my mind" - Abdul Majid Iqbal Qadri

Last Updated: Monday, 13 August 2007, 23:00 GMT 00:00 UK

Memories of a family torn in two

By Ilyas Khan
BBC News, Karachi

Abdul Majid Iqbal Qadri remembers hearing the news of the Partition Plan of June 1947 when he was travelling in Iran.

He was 21 then. Now he is 81.

"I had gone to Basra, Iraq, with my father on a pilgrimage to the holy sites, and on our way back to India we made a stop at the eastern Iranian city of Zahidan. It was 3 June," he recalls.

When they crossed into Balochistan on a train the next morning, the fever of independence had already gripped the masses.

One scene from that day is permanently imprinted on his mind.

He was at a station in Sindh province where some local Sindhi men bought tea from a Hindu vendor and refused to pay him.

"The men told the poor tea seller, 'this is Pakistan now, no more payments to Hindus'," he remembers.

But the fact that Pakistan was about to be born made no impression on Mr Qadri or his father.

"Our chief consideration at the time was that the Hyderabad state in central India would become independent. We thought we would have our own government, independent of either India, Pakistan or the British," he says.

Hailing from a prominent family of Badaun, in northern India, Mr Qadri's father, Maulana Abdul Qadeer Badauni, had been involved with known rebels like Hasrat Mohani and C.R. Das during the turbulent 1920s.

As pressure from the government grew, he was advised by family and friends to move to the princely state of Hyderabad Deccan, whose ruler had already offered him the job of chief cleric at his court.

The family moved to Hyderabad in 1932, when Mr Qadri was six years old, leaving the family estate and a religious seminary in the care of a cousin.

Mr Qadri grew up amid the courtiers and ministers of Hyderabad Deccan, and completed graduate college from the state's renowned Usmania University.

He was also involved with groups that sought Hyderabad's independence, and when the Indian army moved to annex the state in September 1947, the family advised him to go to Pakistan.

Painful separation

"Hyderabad was a Hindu majority state, and our lives were threatened. But one of my uncles, who had migrated to Pakistan and was at that time visiting Delhi as an official delegate to negotiate the distribution of assets with India, helped me get out," he says.

Mr Qadri flew to Karachi in Pakistan along with a nephew in December 1947. The rest of the family stayed in Hyderabad until 1950, after which they moved back to their ancestral home in Badaun.

Sixty years on, he has still not recovered from the separation from his family.

"I have been happy here. My children have done well. My grandchildren are doing even better. But I guess there is a regret lurking in the shadows of my mind," he says.

The first time he felt that regret was in 1956.

"My father was on his death bed and the Indian embassy wouldn't issue me a visit permit. I decided to use the only option I had," he says. He wrote a letter to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, an important leader of the Congress party and member of the Indian parliament, who was a friend of his father's.

"The permit came home to me, with the instructions that I must see Mr Azad in Delhi before I proceed to Badaun."

He did that, and was given a thorough dressing-down by Mr Azad.

"[He] taunted me of having run away to Pakistan when my father was dying in India. I felt shame inside, but the deed had been done," he says.

Fading link

Earlier, he had been to Badaun in 1949 to get married, and had brought his wife back to Karachi where he had set up a business.

"I tried my hand at several things, but always failed in the end," he says.

But there was wealth in the family, and his wife was working.

After the death of his father, he visited Badaun every year to see his mother. Until 1980, when she too died. Since then, his visits have become few and far between.

"After she was gone, I realised that an essential link had vanished. The strength to keep shuttling between Badaun and Karachi started to fade."

[GOTFIVEONIT]

By Geeta Pandey
BBC News, Delhi

When Sir Cyril Radcliffe joined the dots on a map creating a Muslim Pakistan and a Hindu-majority India, 15 million refugees journeyed across the border to make a new life into the two newly-created nations.

But millions of Muslims refused to let the line eject them from the only home they had ever known - India. We spoke to three generations of one such family.



FAROOQI BEGUM, 85

"If I had tried to run away, God alone knows what could have happened to us"

"We lived in Delhi's Mori Gate area. I had three children - the oldest a five-year-old boy and the youngest a three-month-old girl. My husband owned an ice-cream factory.

In August 1947, the situation was very bad. All my neighbours had moved out to a refugee camp. But I didn't go.

My husband used to say, "It's better to die with dignity then to live a life of insult and abuse in the camp."

At night, the men would patrol the roads and the women would take shelter in a house which had a big iron gate. I would go up to my attic and stay there with my children.

I had full faith in God. I said when our time comes, we will go. But if our time hasn't come, then no bullet will be able to harm us.

For three days that August, the situation was so bad, so many bullets were fired, people were dying like popping popcorns.

Many who tried to flee the city were butchered on the way, many lost their arms and legs.

The marauders killed so many children - here is your Pakistan, they said.

But then, if God looks after you, no-one can hurt you. So my family and I came to no harm.

Even in our darkest days, we never thought about moving to Pakistan. My husband said, "We will go home to Rampur (in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh) because all our family is there, that's our home."

On our last night in Delhi, I took a bottle of kerosene with me to the attic. I thought if someone attacked my honour, I would set myself and my children on fire. I thought it would be better to die than lose my honour.

When a little peace returned after a month of carnage, the Nawab of Rampur arranged for us to get back home. It took us 24 hours to do the journey from Delhi to Rampur.

We left a guard at our home, but a Sikh family threw him out and occupied our place. When the guard informed us, my husband returned to Delhi.

There are good people in every community. The occupants of the house were good people. They told my husband - everything is yours and you can take whatever is yours.

But we decided to stay away. We never went back.

My husband moved back to Delhi and revived his ice-cream factory.

A couple of years later when things had settled down, he wanted us to return to Delhi too, but I turned it down. I said to him "Delhi has been plundered so many times, what's the guarantee it will not happen again?" So we stayed on in Rampur.

If I had tried to run away, God alone knows what could have happened to us. So many people were killed in the trains when they tried to escape. Everyone had become crazy.

I understand why it happened - people on both sides had lost their loved ones, and they had been scarred forever.

If someone hurts my children, won't I go crazy too?"

[GOTFIVEONIT]

DR SHAHABUDDIN KHAN, 65

"I was five at the time of partition.

I remember our house was close to the railway station and we could hear people crying and sometimes shouting for help.

The police officer in the area was very friendly to my uncle. One morning he came to our house and said, "Look we are trying our best to protect you, but we have heard there may be an attack on this lane. We think you should shift to a safe house."

My uncle discussed it with my parents. My mother refused to move out. "Whether we live or die, it will be here, in our home," she said.

She said we would not move to the refugee camp because there were rumours that women were being raped and molested there.

Eventually, we moved to our ancestral place Rampur.

I went to a new school there, I made new friends. Children adapt easily to new situations, so I did too.

My parents decided that India was our home and there has never been any question about it.

I've never dreamt about Pakistan. I have no close relatives there so there's no pull for me.

We are much better and more safe here than we could be in Pakistan or anywhere else in the world.

Today I'm proud of India's new achievements, the new generation which is doing so well."

[GOTFIVEONIT]

SHIRAZ KHAN, 27

"The partition happened a long time ago and questions about it seem totally irrelevant to me.

It's only when I talk to my grandmother, and hear her story, I feel the turmoil inside me, I feel her pain and empathise with her. I realise how much pain and struggle she and our country has gone through.

But then I think of the future - everyone is talking about India's progress, how fast it's growing and I feel proud of our country.

My grandparents and my parents had an option before them to leave and go to Pakistan, but they chose to live here.

And I think they chose wisely.

Looking at the present situation of Muslims elsewhere, I see that their condition is far worse in other countries.

If I have a problem here, people of different communities here will come to my aid. But people of my own community will not come and help me in any other country.

Living in India, you share your life with people of different communities and that makes you a lot more liberal - we all may belong to different religions, but from the inside we're all similar.

I have had a very secular upbringing and most of my friends are non-Muslims.

The first time I became aware of my Muslim identity was in 1992, just after the Babri Mosque had been demolished in the northern Indian town of Ayodhya.

I was in fifth (Grade) standard then and one of my friends said, "You are a Mullah".

I didn't know what a Mullah was, so I came home and asked my mother.

She said, "Because you are a practising Muslim, it's just another name for you. You should not feel offended."

To be honest, I did feel a little offended then, but when I grew up I realised that in some areas people from the two communities are polarised, and then it's up to two friends to resolve their issues and work it out.

We resolved our issue and I'm still very close friends with this boy.

In my school and college and now at work, I'm the only Muslim.

Most people say they can't believe I'm a Muslim.

I think it's partly the media which is responsible for this image of Muslims - they are always portraying the hardliners.

During weekends, I go out for dinner or movies and hang out with my friends. I watched Harry Potter and Die Hard. I listen to Metallica, Green Day and Bryan Adams and my favourites."