I was a graduate student at Stanford University in the early 1990s when a fellow student, a year junior to me, asked to buy my used books. I had grown up in India; he was from Pakistan, but we both shared the re-purpose, re-use, thrift ethic.
When he came to collect the books, he heard me speak to my mother in Sindhi. He shocked me by joining the conversation in fluent Sindhi. During the 1947 Partition, both my parents and all four grandparents migrated to India from Sindh, which had become part of Pakistan. My mother and her siblings, who were from Sukkur in Sindh, had shared stories about the Partition’s impact. From being children of luxury, living in a mansion and travelling by family car and a horse-drawn tonga, they became refugees attending tent schools on the edge of the Ridge in Delhi.
With his friends, my civil engineer grandfather Sugnumal Keswani, rebuilt small two-room refugee quarters in what became Rajinder Nagar. In Sindh, he had been a senior engineer for the Sukkur Barrage.
I had no way of knowing that many Sindhis who were Muslim continued to live in Pakistan. My mother’s family prayed at the Gurdwara and my paternal family at the Hindu temples. In 2020, while hosting multilingual poets in Silicon Valley as the founder of Poetry of Diaspora, the poet Abhay Shetty introduced me to the powerful poetry of Shah Abdul Latif. Researching it online helped me reconnect with cultural roots lost through my ancestors’ migration. I learned that my ancestral land was also the land of Sufi saints, where song and dance are a way of worship. Even today, at Udero in Sindh, Hindus and Muslims worship at the same shrine of Udero Lal, known as Lal Sai to Hindu Sindhis and Sheikh Tahir to Muslims.
That same affinity is reflected in the friendship formed by three Stanford undergraduate students in 2026: Luv Jawahrani, a fellow Sindhi from India, and Aimen Ejaz and Ahmad Zafar from Pakistan discovered the bond of shared cultural roots – similar food, music, attire, aesthetics, language, movies, and cricket, like many in Silicon Valley. They launched the Dosti project to encourage friendships between Indians and Pakistanis.
While Pakistanis and Indians have built successful partnerships, marriages, cultural ties, and friendships outside their nations, like me, the three friends grew up in their home countries against a political context dominated by contested maps, terrorist attacks, and a history of war. The Dosti project is based on the premise that If these communities can build trust in places like Silicon Valley, Dubai, Toronto, and London, then it should be possible to create that same sense of “dosti” back home.
The Indo- Pak relationship oscillates between hostility and affection, yet cross-border families and friendships, artistic and cultural exchanges, collaborations, friendly delegations, train routes, and popular displays at the Wagah border continue to thrive. The Dosti project gives space to people on both sides who seek affinity between India and Pakistan.
It reminded me of the India-Pakistan Friendship Society of the 1990s, inspired by Gandhian values, and founded by Mahendra and Meera Mehta. Their daughter, Kala Mehta, described meetings hosted at their home, attended by over 200 artists from the two countries.
The two-day Dosti conference at Stanford between March 31 and April 1, 2026. featured an impressive lineup of speakers, including diplomats, ambassadors, tech-leaders, venture capitalists, company founders, nonprofits, innovation labs, faith leaders, creators of online communities and platforms, architects, authors, and even the former Prime Ministers of Ireland and Scotland.
The students showed leadership and vision in creating a unique public space to foster candid conversations on difficult topics and engaging discourse on peace-building, truth, understanding, empathy, and building bridges. In the era of Dhurandhar, it was nice to discover a film called Ramchand Pakistani..
Speakers included pioneers such as Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Emmy and Oscar-winning Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Vivek Ranadive who owns NBA team Sacramento Kings, Sohaib Abbasi, the first South Asian to join Oracle when it was still a start-up, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Javed Jabbar, Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail, Sumaiya Balbale, Vikramaditya Prakash, and Malika Junaid, among others.
For me, what was unique about this conference was listening to speakers spontaneously address concerns shared by South Asians, such as the critical importance of family influence and social expectations of ‘log kya kahenge’ (what will people say?), while recognising that navigating between individuality and the community requires nurturing our roots, and the grounding provided by family and community.
Khan Academy’s Sal Khan remarked that, when he quit his job in 2009, his mother worried as he launched a non-profit with no experience. Tabarak Rehman’s father, who was worried for his safety, joined him on the first day of a 1600km run across Pakistan. Even former Prime Minister of Ireland, Leo Varadkar, became a medical doctor because his parents wanted him to, and he understood ‘safety’ as a next-gen immigrant.
Leo Varadkar envisioned the potential of an India–Pakistan alliance if both move beyond their colonial-era rivalry. He drew parallels with Ireland and the United Kingdom, where older generations once saw no peaceful resolution. Similarly, after repeated conflicts, Germany and France overcame their hostility to become influential allies.
Former Scottish Prime Minister Humza Yousaf sang a few lines from the classic Sholay song “Yeh Dosti Hum Nahin Chhodenge” (“We will not abandon this friendship”) before highlighting the large youth populations in India and Pakistan. He contrasted how much each country spends on the military with what could be invested in education, jobs, and opportunities for young people. Yousaf argued that a stronger friendship between the two nations would allow limited resources to be redirected toward priorities such as healthcare, clean air, and tackling climate change.
The Dosti project reignites hope about the many bonds the two countries share.
A speaker at the conference reminded us how the most patriotic song in India for decades, “Sare jahan se accha hindustan humara,” was actually written by a Muslim poet, Iqbal. It reminded me of the Sufi anthem from Sehwan, Sindh, in praise of Lal Qalandar; of unknown authorship, often linked to Amir Khusrow with later additions by Bulleh Shah, and composed as a popular qawwali by Ashiq Hussain. Sung for centuries, it remains widely loved through performances by artists such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Asha Bhosle, Runa Laila, the Nooran Sisters, and Shafqat Amanat Ali across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh.
