Indo-Pak bonhomie at T2T level

One may tend to think that it is a beautiful triangular love story, truly non-fictional and based on facts. It is, of course; but the story thus far is still in the evolution stage as the principal dramatis personae have gone into different stages of damage control once the story started breaking news on satellite channels in both the countries. It is, as everyone knows by now, unlike any other Indian silver screen love triangle saga in which one of the two glamorous queens has to forget her dream in one way or the other for the lover boy. Or, the tale is twisted in such a grotesque manner that the one with a higher quotient of kindness at heart and compassion in mind would sacrifice her life or forced to do that for better cinematic effect and dramatic end.

As things stand, nobody could hazard a guess what would be the likely outcome of real and platonic love mixed in a crucible called Twitter with thousands of people on either side sending their sweet tweets to the trio through cyber space, proving the universal and eternal fact that true love transcends borders and all barriers put up by villains of peace.

The script, even in the 21st century and Digital Age, is the same; but what adds spice to the content and twists to the storyline is the ever changing tweet-o-logues. The 57-year-old Shashi, once the blue-eyed boy of Congress, who may be hoping to get a ticket from his party to contest Lok Sabha elections in a few months’ time, doesn’t want to be embroiled in a controversy over a foreign affair.

So when the 45-year-old Pak journo opened her heart to the Twitterati how she found Shashi irresistible, particularly his mesmerising voice, the Congress MP had to do what a seasoned politician would do: Circumvent the issue, saying someone hacked his Twitter account and set up an illegal link between Mr Handsome and Ms Beautiful. But once his dear wife Sunanda made public that it was she who had logged into her husband’s account and posted messages that the Lahore-based scribe had sent to Shashi Tharoor, obviously with the intent of ‘exposing’ Mehr how she “is stalking my husband.”

At this point, the scene is straight from one of the Hindi soaps where a woman foists motives on the ‘other woman’ to regain the confidence of her husband and vilify the other who is seen as interfering with her life. Now, move over from soap to reality and, as expected, Mehr has retaliated with full force threatening she would sue Sunanda for her slanderous remarks that Mehr is an ISI agent and “tries to flirt with everyone.”

Meanwhile, flashback: Speaking to a news channel, Sunanda has confirmed that “the Pak scribe wants to have a life-long relationship with Tharoor, not knowing that he is a happily married man. I am sick and was away for three months for treatment. She (Mehr) followed Shashi to an event and fell in obsession… A woman should stay away from a woman’s husband, it’s not morally right.”

Amidst Twitter storm and media frenzy in India and Pakistan, Sunanda and Shashi have professed their mutual love in a statement stressing that the couple had “happily married and intend to remain that way and distressed by the unseemly controversy that has arisen about some unauthorised tweets from our Twitter accounts.”

Their so-called clarification made in the hope of presenting the world that all is well on the marriage front and on the border side has raised more questions than clearing the doubts about their home and foreign affair. For example, Sunanda’s flip-flops on Twitter account hackings, her outburst about her husband’s role (?) in Indian Premier League, public catfight and his alleged extramarital affair with Mehr are all tied in a knot. It is a jigsaw puzzle which the sub-continent people are trying to piece together in as many salacious ways as possible. Not surprisingly, the social media is abuzz with jokes and tweets that rival the extra-marital affair of French President Francoise Hollande with an actress.

Meanwhile, Mehr has become a social media celebrity with over 30,000 followers and more than 40,000 tweeting (their number is going up), most of them from India.

She says in one of her tweets that she is eternally grateful to Indians for morally supporting her. Well, in one go, she has made hundreds her friends on this side of the border. The love triangle may be a cross-border scandal but it has brought people from both sides together, a feat India and Pakistan governments could hardly do!

P S: This article was written a few hours before the death of Sunanda Pushkar has been announced in Delhi.