Pakistan and India failed to avail yet another opportunity to make serious allegations against each other and walk out without concrete solutions this week, after they canceled high level talks to help resume their broken dialogue.
Here is a timeline of key events in the checkered history of ties between the two nuclear-armed nations:
1942 – Muslim families react strongly to Gandhi’s inappropriate outfit at key political gatherings yet again. “We do not understand why he does not wear clothes,” the historical Civil and Military Gazette quoted a Muslim mother as saying. “We cannot let our children grow up in such a country, where they are subjected to pictures of half naked celebrities in newspapers,” said her husband.
August 1947 – Pakistan begins a spate of victories against India by getting its freedom a day ahead of its south Asian arch-rival.
November 1947 – India annexes the state of Junagarh to evade communal riots in Gujarat, successfully delaying the bloodshed until Narendra Modi’s rise to power in 2002.
1965 – Pakistani scientists discover that Indians are not brave because they do not eat meat. “It was after years of painstaking research by nutritionists and social scientists that we were able to explore the positive correlation between the diet of Indian people and their military capability,” the head of the research team wrote in his book.
December 1971 – India and Pakistan fight a 13-day war, eventually leading to the debut of famous Indian film star Vinod Khanna’s balding son Akshay Khanna in the 1997 Bollywood film Border. The blockbuster war film also won its director JP Dutta a Filmfare award, thus contributing to the mediocre director’s travesty of the Indian legend of Umrao Jaan in a 2006 film.
1982 – Another cheap rerecorded copy of an Indian film leads to a malfunction of the VCR head of a Pakistani family. “We tried to clean the head using nailpolish remover with cotton, an old head cleaner tape, and a piece of an old newspaper, after successfully restoring its function using a brand new one-rupee note,” they told their relatives.
1987 – A Pakistani television play reveals the intricate inner workings of the mind of the Maharaja of Kashmir, Ranjeet Singh, providing a deep psychoanalytical insight into his illogical decision to annex with India. The actor who played Nehru in the play denied service at the local grocery store by patriotic shopkeeper.
1994 – Indian satellite television arrives in Pakistan, proving to Pakistani viewers of soap operas that Indian mothers-in-law are as evil as their Pakistani counterparts.
2002 – Pakistani men wear waistcoats and skullcaps, or Sherwanis and Jinnah caps, with their Shalwar Kameez, and Pakistani women wear Kurtas and Pajamas, in yet another Indian film. They also greet each other saying ‘Aabaab’ and moving their palms towards their foreheads, in the ridiculous alternate reality.
2004 – Unidentified expert gives a long unsolicited lecture on two-nation theory to unsuspecting young students. “We were minding our own business, when the gentleman arrived and began to repeat to us things that we have already memorized for our Pakistan Studies exam,” one of them wrote in his journal, recovered by historians.
November 2007 – Man does nothing all day, sitting on the couch in front of his TV on the pretext that he is watching an India-Pakistan cricket match, but paying no real attention to what is going on in the game.
2009 – Local NGO wastes thousands of donor dollars yet again on a failed project to bring the people of India and Pakistan together, as the people of India and Pakistan get together on the Wagah border to shout jingoistic slogans against each other.
July 2011 – A Birkin bag from Pakistan visits India. According to some reports, Pakistani foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar was also attached to the bag.
January 2013 – A Twitter battle between an Indian user and a Pakistani user ends in a draw after participants fail to make substantive arguments because of the 140-character limit. Politicians and analysts tagged in the posts for no reason breathe a sigh of relief.
August 2015 – Shoaib Malik becomes man of the series in a T20 cricket series, finally getting a trophy that he could place as his first contribution to a room full of cups and awards won by his Indian Tennis star wife Sania Mirza.
25th August 2015 – Pakistani journalist writes a concise people’s history of India-Pakistan ties in The Nation.