Dramas, not diplomacy bring together Pakistanis, Indians

Pakistani TV veteran Anam is delighted by Indians’ enthusiasm for the country’s serials and the barriers they help erode, says what Bollywood is to India, dramas are to Pakistan.

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Two Pakistani women sit together on a couch, rehearsing their lines while a director scrutinizes them.

Waiting off camera for his scene is the male lead, an actor blessed with “Bachelor” hair and fine bone structure.

Also out of sight: the Islamabad homeowners, who are holed up in a separate room and whose furniture and knick-knacks will be seen by millions of viewers - many from the society that has been their country's neighbour and uneasy sparring partner for much of the past century.

This is the set of the Pakistani drama “Adhi Bewafai,” or “Half Infidelity”—one of what some in other nations would call “soap operas.” But these dramas, it turns out, are not just for Pakistanis.

Realistic settings, natural dialogue and almost workaday plots about families and marriages make Pakistani dramas a hit with viewers at home and abroad - especially in the neighbouring country that split with Pakistan in 1947 and is its nuclear archrival today: India. Television, it seems, is succeeding where diplomacy sometimes can't.

“The governments are very much opposed to each other,” Maheen Shafeeq, a research associate at the Institute of Strategic Studies in Islamabad, says. “They don't agree what they should talk about.”