Wagah Crossing Ceremony: A Sixty-Three Year Old Tradition
The Wagah Crossing along the India-Pakistan border hosts perhaps the most unusual sight on all the earth. It is at this small point on a map, the only border crossing between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, that a daily evening ceremony has been performed for the last sixty-three years and counting. It is the closing of the gate, and as laughable as it is solemn.
Solemn isn’t the word one would first think of when surveying the vociferous crowds on both sides, seated on bleachers waving flags and eating snacks while shouting with babies and children in tow. The evening retreat rite, when official flags on each side of the bitter border are lowered, is a showcase in pomp and ceremony that ends in a handshake.
For all the strutting and chest-thumping, complete with screams and ferocious glares, the occassion has been able to end on a handshake for all these years a quick pro formal one, to be sure, short and machine-like to go with the staccato tempo of the martial parade.
The army tattoo involves what seem to be individual guards breaking ranks to rush at the other side in menacing goose-steps, but they always stop short of an invisible dividing line, leaving uniformed men to glower at one another through thick mustaches and, in the case of the Pakistani Rangers, full-on beards.
The action is generally very fast-paced, until the particular retreat portion when each side takes as much time as practical to withdraw with their flags. Everybody observes this popular rite with a good nature and high spirits, though every few years a slightly ugly event arises, for example the time in 2007 when some Indian spectators roared at a Pakistani passenger bus making its way across just before the gates closed, Stop terrorism! or in 2001 when a Pakistani Ranger targeted his rifle at Indian spectators.
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