A Thin Orange Line Between India and Pakistan

The places between one country and the next can be interesting places. Like with the border between Mexico and the United States, the border between the countries of India and Pakistan is well protected. So well protected in fact that the resulting security measures are visible from the International Space Station about 330 Kilometers away.

A striking feature is the line of lights, with a distinctly orange hue, snaking across the center of the image. It appears to be more continuous and brighter than most highways in the view. This is the fenced and floodlit border zone between India and Pakistan. The fence is designed to discourage smuggling and arms trafficking. A similar fenced zone separates India’s eastern border from Bangladesh (not visible). (NASA Earth Observatory)

Crossing the India Pakistan Border

The India Pakistan border has only one gate where citizens and travelers can legally cross into the other country for travel or to brings goods to market. It is called Wagah and is on the Grand Trunk Road between Lahore, Pakistan and Amritsar, India.

The Wagah border, often called the “Berlin wall of Asia”, is a border crossing on the India–Pakistan Border where each evening there is a retreat ceremony called ‘lowering of the flags’, which has been held since 1959. At that time there is an energetic parade by the Border Security Force (B.S.F) of India and the Pakistan Rangers soldiers. It may appear slightly aggressive and even hostile to foreigners but in fact the paraders are imitating the pride and anger. Troops of each country put on a show in their uniforms with their colorful turbans. Border officials from the two countries sometimes walk over to the offices on the other side for day to day affairs. The happenings at this border post have been a barometer of the India-Pakistan relations over the years. (Wikipedia)

Here’s what the actual border looks like at night from the ground. The two fences are topped with angled barbed wire and separated by a gap which is filled with concertina wire, which is a long coil of wire studded with sharp barbs and razors.

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors?

Here’s a poem for your trouble. The Mending Wall, published by Robert Frost in 1914, is a story about walls, and the people, land and ideas they separate and whether they are worth the trouble.

The Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

-Robert Frost

-Mike

Sources:

• Wikipedia
• NASA Earth Observatory
• The Daily Mail