Home is where the heart is. For Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda [better known as Sam Pitroda, or Uncle Sam if you are part of the Gandhi durbar] that home, it seems, lies across the border. ‘I’ve been to Pakistan, and I must tell you, I felt at home,’ he says with the warmth of a man describing a summer in Simla.
Only Pitroda can take the phrase ghar wapsi so literally and point it westward. While most Indians carry memories of blood, bombs, and beheadings when they think of Pakistan, Pitroda sees warm sofas and welcome drinks. Perhaps Hafiz Saeed was waiting at the door with a garland.
Pakistan’s brand ambassador
In the 1980s, Sam Pitroda gave us yellow PCO booths, rural exchanges and the thrill of an STD line. Four decades later, he is more interested in promoting Islamabad than India. From declaring China is no enemy, to suggesting terrorism is a neighbourhood inconvenience, Pitroda has turned from telecom baba into Pakistan’s unpaid brand ambassador. To him, Pakistan is not a terror state, but a friendly mohalla with occasional firecrackers going off.
This is the same Pitroda who dismissed the 1984 massacre of Sikhs with a casual ‘hua to hua’ [what happened has happened]. For him, tragedies are mere punctuation marks in a long speech. So why should Pulwama, Pahalgam or 26/11 disturb his homely vibes? If Pakistan feels like home, terrorism must feel like room service.
Islamabad National Congress
The BJP calls it anti-national. I call it predictable. When Congress leaders speak of Pakistan, the affection drips thicker than Karachi biryani oil. With Uncle Sam as Rahul Gandhi’s resident philosopher, the party looks less like the Indian National Congress and more like the Islamabad National Congress.
Pitroda even assures us the subcontinent shares a ‘common gene pool’. True, except India evolved a Constitution, while Pakistan evolved Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. A shared gene pool does not mean we must share our suicide bombers.
But then, Uncle Sam has always had a gift; turning history’s gravest wounds into drawing-room banter. From telecom booths to terror truths, he has kept his line clear – always dialling the wrong number and knocking on the wrong door in Pakistan.
