20

As brothers, we must aim to be

good friends, even if its difficult

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

By Fazil Jamili

A chat in New
Delhi with veteran
Indian actor Tom
Alter, a firm
believer of
brotherhood
between India
and Pakistan,
who hopes to visit
Pakistan soon

t was an exciting moment

for me to meet in real life a
person whom I have watched in
different roles on the big and
small screens as a police officer,
a thug, a man of the cloth, a
slick diplomat, a tea planter and
variety of British colonials. His
roles in film, theatre and television have made him familiar to
millions of moviegoers who follow Bollywood in India and
across the border. He is the
one and only Tom Beach
Alter.
Born in 1950 to an
American missionary family in
Mussourie, India, he may look like
a gora, an American visitor, but
Tom is a proud Indian who speaks
Urdu with a pure Lucknawi accent.
His Indian roots reach back to the
turn of the century, when his missionary grandparents traveled
from Ohio to preach, convert and
teach in that part of the Punjab
that is now in Pakistan.
We were both among the speakers at a seminar on The Role of
Media in promoting Peace and
Prosperity in New Delhi, organised by the Jashn-e-Adab at the
India International Centre recently.
In his speech delivered in
Urdu/Hindustani Tom Alter endorsed what I had said about the
need for peace between the two
countries. He added that Aman ki
Asha is a positive initiative for
both India and Pakistan and
strongly demanded the revival of
cricketing ties between India and
Pakistan. He emphasised that both
countries should play cricket on
their home grounds instead of
playing in neutral places.
He attended the mushaira held
later, proving to be a good listener.
He appreciated my poem with the
words, Hum to aap ke zakhmi
darakhton ki shaakhon se jhool
rahe hein.
At the reception after the seminar when someone offered him a
drink, he refused with smile saying, I am a pukka Musalman and
pukka Hindustani
It was good to sit together and

Tom Alter in the lead role in the Urdu play Maulana Azad
chat later with this amazingly
straightforward, down to earth,
multi-faceted man. He told me that
his father was born in Sialkot, and
also became a missionary. He settled in Mussourie, northern India
in 1945 with his wife. Their three
children, including Tom, attended
the famous Woodstock School
there. Many of the other students
were also Americans, children of
missionary parents, diplomats,
business executives and other expats living in India.
I was brought up in Mussoorie,
Rajpur and Dehra Dun, and it was
heaven - blessed -- truly -- my family, my school, and my home, he
said softly, when I asked about his
childhood.
I learnt that besides being an
actor, playwright and director,
Tom Alter is also a sportsman and
a philosopher. I have written
three books: one on cricket and
two novels and all three are about
myself, he told me.
After graduating from Yale University, when he returned to India
seeking a career in the film industry, he renounced his American
passport. Some of his friends

thought he was mad.

Even the embassy thought I
was crazy, but they finally agreed.
He added that it was a difficult decision but one that was inevitable.
''You have to be truly committed to
your homeland, otherwise you

FRIENDS WITHOUT BORDERS:

THE REAL STORY

T
By Saeed Ahmed Rid

A researcher on
India and
Pakistan peace
issues sets the
record straight
about allegations
regarding Friends
Without Borders
funding for
Aman ki Asha

he name of Friends
Without Borders has
resurfaced after Pakistan
Tehrik-e-Insaf
(PTI) chairman, Imran
Khan in his May 11 speech alleged
that Geo TV and Jang Group were
imposing a foreign agenda on Pakistan. Mr Khan indirectly alleged
that Aman ki Asha, a peace initiative launched by Jang Group in
conjunction with the Times of India
in 2010, was receiving massive
funding from Western and Indian
donors.
These allegations had first surfaced in 2013, in a media commission report by Pakistan Electronic
Media Regulatory Authority
(PEMRA) which mentioned that
Aman ki Asha was being funded by
a Norwegian NGO, Friends Without Borders and that the footprints of this funding led to Indian
sponsors, including state television
Doordarshan.
Later, however, PEMRA backtracked and apologised before the
Supreme Court of Pakistan when
television anchors like Hamid Mir
and Absar Alam raised the matter.
When I first read heard about
these allegations, I could only laugh
at their naivety, since I know

Working on the largest love letter in the world: a girl paints on

canvas, Bangalore 2006
THE FIRST STEP
LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK

Feedback, contributions, photos, letters:

Email: amankiasha@janggroup.com.pk
Fax: +92-21-3241-8343
Post: aman ki asha c/o The News,
I.I. Chundrigar Road, Karachi

The "World's Largest Love Letter" displayed in Wankhede Stadium,

Mumbai
Friends Without Borders well. It is
neither a Norwegian NGO nor by
any stretch of imagination has it
ever been in a position to provide
foreign funding to any organisation
or group anywhere in the world.
When I met John Silliphant and
Yoo-Mi Lee, two of the co-founders
of Friends Without Borders in
April/May 2006 at the University of
California, Berkeley, USA, they had
just returned after having launched
this initiative, quite by chance, in
India and Pakistan. It is now no
longer active. I interviewed them in
2012 for my PhD thesis on Peopleto-People Contacts between India
and Pakistan.
John and Yoo-Mi, along with
Mark Jacobs, Maria Durana and
Mark Peters, are American citizens.
These five ran FWB along with
thousands of Indian and Pakistani
volunteers who joined them in different activities for some time.
I wonder on what grounds
Friends Without Borders is being
termed as a Norwegian NGO when
none of its members belonged to
Norway, or how it is alleged to fund
Aman ki Asha when its last activity
took place in 2007.
The story of Friends Without
Borders starts with John Silliphant
and Mark Peters, two inspired
American individuals, landing
Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India in

Dil Se Dil logo: musical event

planned in 2007
2005 to work with poor Indian villagers on the issue of sanitation. At
one point, as their Indian visas expired and they were required to
visit Pakistan to get the visas extended.
That is when they got the idea
of collecting letters, greetings and
posters from Indian to take to Pakistani students across the border,
and to continue the process by
bringing back letters and cards
from Pakistani students to India on
their return.
Three other volunteers, Yoo-Mi,
Mark, and Maria later joined them
to enhance this campaign. This ultimately led to the creation of
Friends Without Borders. Thousands of volunteers joined them,
and they received massive media
coverage in India.
Friends Without Borders was
essentially a five-member group,
which cannot really be termed an

don't get respect or acceptability.

It was while working as a
teacher in a small town that he got
hooked into watching Indian films,
and was inspired to switch careers
and go into acting thanks to Rajesh
Khannas performances. In 1972,
he joined the Film Institute in
Pune, where Naseeruddin Shah
was a year junior to him. In 1978,
they, along with Benjamin Gilani
co-founded the Motley Productions theatre group that Shah now
runs.
My father was not a person to
share nostalgia - but I know he
loved the land in which he was
born and grew up - which was neither India or Pakistan, but Hindustan, he said when asked about his
father and Sialkot. He chose to
live in India after freedom but his
heart was always in the Hindustan
where he grew up and as far as
people

go, for me there is no border, never

will be.
Tom is a firm believer of broth
erhood between India and Pakistan. Since we are brothers, it
can often be difficult to be good
friends, but we must aim for that.
About the visa situation be-

NGO as it had no office or funding

resources of its own. In fact, they
themselves needed financial and
volunteer support from NGOs,
media and other sources in India
and Pakistan for their activities.
Most of the FWB activity took
place in India, where these volunteers visited several schools in
cities like Ahmedabad, Mumbai
and Bangalore. They also organised
mega letter-writing events at
venues like the M. Chinnaswamy
cricket stadium in Bangalore, the
Wankhede stadium in Mumbai and
Gandhi Sabarmati Ashram, New
Delhi.
In the process, they collected
about 11,000 letters and put together the worlds largest love letter (360x240 feet) addressed by Indian schoolchildren to children in
Pakistan. The text of the letter,
written in Urdu, English and Hindi,
reads:
Dear Children of Pakistan,
Let's join hearts in friendship.
Together we can make a better
world.
-The Children of India
On April 4, 2006, some of the
FWB volunteers crossed the Wagah
border to deliver Indian students
letters to their counterparts in Pakistani schools. They were seen off
by hundreds of cheering
schoolchildren at Wagah. The same
day a mega response letter writing
ceremony was held at Gadaffi Stadium, Lahore, attended by thousands of school children from Lahore and surrounding areas.
These events attracted large
crowds and massive publicity in
the media in both India and Pakistan. The Friends Without Borders
website includes links to these reports, published in leading newspapers of India and Pakistan
http://www.friendswithoutborders.
org/press.html.
Another major activity planned
was the Dil se Dil (heart to heart)
concert at midnight on August 1415, 2007 at Wagah border to celebrate the joint Independence Days
of India and Pakistan. Many
renowned celebrities from film,
music and politics on both sides
had agreed to participate in this
event. FWB volunteers were in
touch with the highest-level government officials on both sides of
the border regarding the nitty-gritty
details of this event. But, John Silliphant told me, at the last minute,
both governments in Islamabad

Alter in Kranti

New Delhi: Tom Alter with

Fazil Jamili (right) and Lahorebased poet Rehman Faris

tween the two countries, he said that people should

be allowed to freely travel to
whichever city they want to visit,
the visa should be for the whole
county not restricted to specific
cities. There should be no police
reporting at all.
He is clearly proud of his father,
who is buried in Mumbai - and not

as a citizen of a particular country.

His tombstone says he was born in
Sialkot, died in Connecticut and
buried in Mumbai.
Tom Alter himself has never
been to Sialkot but he visited
Karachi in 1988 when my older
saala-sahib and his wife were
working at the American school
my visit was full of nostalgia and
mazaa and every day I felt right at
home.
Going there on a police-reporting visa on his Indian passport, he
recalls his visit to a police station to
report his entry in Karachi. A constable recognized me and shouted,
look, Tom is here! I was received
as a guest, offered tea and the officer in charge said, Sir, why did you
take this trouble, you should have
called us, we would have come to
where you were staying.
When I asked him what he
thought about the Indian cinema,
he responded that Indian cinema
was overall on the right track. The
strong point is that now we are
using original and challenging stories.
What about Pakistani cinema? I
know very little about the Pakistani
film industry but two films which I
have seen, Khamosh Pani, and
Khudaa ke Liye, were brilliant, and
influenced me deeply, he replied.
He said films should be a narrative of contemporary times. It is
such factual films that Pakistan will
be recognised through, not by
Achha Gujar type films.
Our discussion took place just
before the formation of a new Indian government. A Modi sarkar is
being formed, and the future is fascinating, he said, adding, but I
firmly believe that religion, any religion, should not be the basis for a
countrs existence.
Tom Alter plans to attend the
Faiz Inernational Peace, Art and
Culture Conference being held by
Bazm e Afkar in Karachi next
month.
This time, he hopes to get a police non-reporting visa.
The writer is a poet and
editor at www.jang.com.pk

Friends Without Borders logo: selected from the artwork of Banshi,

11 years old, of Ugdam School in Ahmedabad, India, 2006.

All images: courtesy, the FWB website

and New Delhi pulled out citing security concerns. This compelled
FWB to cancel the event. They
have not organised any other event
since then.
I believe that the significance of
Friends Without Borders in the
context of Aman Ki Asha mainly
lies in the fact that this initiative
showed how the electronic and
print media in India and Pakistan
could be used on a major scale to
promote peace. Secondly, the
Times of India and Jang/Geo were
media sponsors and gave their activities coverage, as did several

Beena Sarwar, was also unaware

about Friends Without Borders.
I cannot say anything with authority about various allegations
now being leveled at Jang Group
from different directions but I believe it is my ethical responsibility
to share the relevant facts regarding Friends Without Borders that I
learnt during the course of my research.
I know these are testing times
for the Jang Group and Aman ki
Asha but this also shows they were
doing something really meaningful
which has irked their detractors so

Illustration by Karthik S. Nair, age 5, Sr. Kg Podar's Sunbeams Schools,

Mumbai
other media outlets in India and
Pakistan.
When I interviewed John and
Yoo-Mi for my PhD thesis, they told
me they did not know any prominent name in the Jang Group. However, they said they knew some
people in The Times of India. The
Aman ki Asha editor, Jang Group,

much. They are being blamed for

setting national agenda on foreign
funding. I ask what can be the
agenda of Aman ki Asha other than
forging peace between the people
of India and Pakistan? If forging
peace between people of India and
Pakistan is a crime, then Jang and
Geo are really ghaddars (traitors).

The writer is a faculty member at Quaid-i-Azam University

Islamabad, currently pursuing PhD on People-to-People Contacts
between India and Pakistan at the Peace Studies department,
University of Bradford, UK. Email: sarid@bradford.ac.uk

A peace initiative whose time has come...

Destination Peace: A commitment by the Jang Group, Geo and The Times of India Group to
create an enabling environment that brings the people of Pakistan and India closer together,
contributing to genuine and durable peace with honour between our countries.