WAGAH CROSSING, INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER — If nations rose and fell according to their camp quotient and funny hats, then these rivals would still be locked in a total stalemate.
Most every evening for nearly 60 years, a peculiar ritual has unfolded here on what has been one of the world's hottest borders. As twilight approaches and the gates are about to close between India and Pakistan, the guards on either side face off in an elaborate show of martial bravado and chest-puffing that nonetheless includes that most basic of fraternal gestures: the handshake.
Hundreds of spectators from both countries cheer as their men in uniform strut, goose-step and stamp their feet like impatient bulls. Individual guards on either side break ranks and power-walk toward one another as if to collide head-on, but stop just short of the line dividing their homelands and glower fiercely through their mustaches.
Patriotic songs boom through loudspeakers as the national flags are lowered at exactly the same speed and the gates finally swing shut.
The tightly choreographed ceremony is part colonial pomp, part macho posturing and part Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks. The rowdy tourist crowds eat it up.
"Everything was just perfect," Rajat Kalia, an electrical engineer who lives in Delhi, said after a recent viewing. "It's impressive."
It is also, of course, a manifestation of a very real rivalry that has produced three bloody wars since the twin birth of India and Pakistan in 1947.
For half an hour each evening at sunset, the decades of enmity are sublimated in a mostly good-natured, almost comical competition between the men in black, wearing headgear with fantails of the same color (Pakistan); and the men in khaki, whose hats are adorned with scarlet fantails (India).
The theatrics attract audience members from hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. Grandstands on both sides fill up, turning into a sea of colorful saris, tunics and flags.
Like a warmup act before a sitcom taping, emcees on either side prime the crowd, getting the nationalistic juices flowing by leading chants of "Long live Pakistan!" and "Long live Mother India!"
Even schoolchildren pump their tiny fists.
There can be ugly moments. When a Pakistani passenger bus was allowed to cross the border back onto home turf one evening before the gate-closing ceremony began, some Indian spectators jeered, "Stop terrorism! Stop terrorism!"
