(The below piece was read out at the 75th birthday party of Hari P. Sharma, 14 November 2009)
Hari and I were born in the British colony of India, he on the other side of eastern Punjab where the Hindi-Urdu linguistic community begins and I in the Southern Siraiki speaking belt of Punjab; the land now divided into India and Pakistan. We went to school when the raj was still intact and the Second World War, started by the imperialist powers, was still raging. The Punjabi youth were being enticed to join the British Indian army with musical chants of “bharti ho ja rey recruit.†But we never knew each other until decades later when from different routes we ended up in North America in the 1960s at a time when the winds of change were blowing strong and turbulent.