I would say it has to be the media, in our times, we were also taught to hate the other but it was not blaring on the television screens all day long. There is also the fact that direct contact between the two is almost non-existent.
Like I have mentioned many times before, the first time I actually met an Indian, I feared he would kill me.
I was in Bahrain, only 10 at the time, visiting with my family and staying in an expensive hotel with a pool which I decided to go to late in the evening. The guard was just getting ready to call it a day when I came and asked him in english if I and my siblings could swim to which he said yes. As soon as we were about to go to the changing rooms, he spoke up:
Guard: "Aap Pakistan say hain?"
I replied in an affirmative and asked me where exactly asked me about family and then I asked him where he is from, with a faint smile, he said hum aap kay paros main say hain, I thought he meant my city so I asked him, "Pindi?"
He replied "India" and all of a sudden, the life just left me. All I had ever heard about India was how many people they had killed in Kashmir and nothing more and I assumed that they were all cold-blooded killers. I immediately thought that he might try to harm my younger siblings and I shouted for them to leave as it was already getting too late.
The guard asked me if we did not wish to swim, he was willing to stay on for some more time but I just said we wanted to take a look and will come back in the morning, which was an obvious lie.
On the way back from our international trip though, I shared a seat with a really nice Indian lady, she talked with me and my family the entire way, sang dil, dil Pakistan with me and asked me to come to Ludhiana if I am ever in India, then I realized that these are also people like us.
I think more youngsters need to actually meet someone from the other country to start seeing them as people rather than as just the media stereotypes that they are portrayed to be.
Sir, I hope you have been emphasizing this point in your lectures!
The last thing first: I am now getting known as soft on Pakistanis, and soft on Muslims as well, the irony being that my VC, who is my benefactor, is an Aligarh product (also in service there, here on secondment). As for telling the kids that they need to see people as people, not as national stereotypes, at this university, which is a bit of an elite place (they qualify through the Common Law Admission Test, which some 40,000 take, of some 1,400 qualify for seats), they are not too bad, not like the run of the mill colleges. Frankly, I tend to see people who think in a regressive way as abnormal, and I think that it is more accurate to think of ourselves as normal.
I went on to my first Pakistani site after Bombay, to find out who wanted to kill us, and why. That was Professor Adil Najam's All Things Pakistan, and there cannot possibly be a more decent, more civilised introduction to Pakistan. I actually became fast friends with some of them.
That led me to Pak Tea House, where I was taken by some of my new friends, and that was almost home. It still is, in some ways.
Some six of us, three from each country, coincidentally, then formed a private mailing list, when PTH was over-run by Hindutva-vadis and it became too much for our stomachs. That has grown to ten, but will stay very small, because we discuss the most difficult subjects, sometimes get angry with each other, but always make peace at the end of play. We are hoping to get together in the flesh, although there have been some small meetings on the side, for instance, when the remarkable Yasser Latif Hamdani came to Delhi (his account was quite ambiguous; liked Delhi, and some Dilli-wallahs, was quite critical about the condition of Muslims in Delhi, and about some bumptious Indians - which just proves that he is perfectly normal). That meeting sounds too difficult to organise in Lahore, our first wish, or even in Delhi, our second, so it will probably happen in Dubai (so what's new?). Some other side meetings have happened in London.
We have just fought a very bitter war on the Kashmir issue in that list, and one of my closest friends and I were locked in mortal combat for nearly two weeks - truce was declared and peace broke out a few days ago. You will be amused to learn that the range of options there very closely mirrored the options generated here. The only difference is that there was no name-calling there, as there has been here. But that's because we are very close friends there.