INDIA/PAKISTAN:Novelist Kamila Shamsiereflects from London on how fellow Pakistanis perceive the new India
Earlier this year, while in Delhi for a writers' conference, I met one of my compatriots from across the border. "It's such a relief, isn't it?" he said. "Coming to India and discovering that, despite the hype of the past couple of years, it's still just another inefficient, dirty, third-world country like ours."
The subtext was clear: a truly shining India would make Pakistan feel very dim by comparison. But whatever the consolations of India's inefficiency, it's impossible to ignore the fact that Pakistan's position in the world centres around its murky role in the "war on terror", while India's centres around economics.
'Twas not always thus. Pakistan has long been in the habit of feeling superior to India in economic terms. At the start of the 1990s when I was, bafflingly, taking A-level economics in Karachi, our teacher taught us all we needed to know about India's protectionist economy with the sentence: "The only part of Indian cars which doesn't make a noise is the horn."
What, then, is the impact of the reversal of fortunes of the past decade? Nayyara Rahman, a business student, told me she envies the Indians "because their growth is not frothy like ours; it's more sustainable, because it includes the wider spheres of the population, and not just the fringed elite".
Ameena Saiyid, the managing director of Oxford University Press, Pakistan, also admits to envy - particularly over India's refusal to allow "its cows and elephants and other religious symbols and beliefs to impede their march to economic growth, while we have got totally entangled in our burkas and beards".
But for a number of Pakistanis there remains doubt about whether the reversal of India's fortunes is real or just a giant bubble of hype. The Nation columnist Amina Jilani says: "Pakistan is loath to admit India even might be a growing power."
When I pushed another Pakistani for evidence that, deep down, Pakistan hasn't accepted its economically weaker position, he responded: "The arms race. They test a missile, we test a missile." Perhaps it's apt, in a tragic-satirical way, that the arms race is one of the few areas in which Pakistan and India's economic muscles grapple with each other.
In most other areas, trade with India has always been severely restricted. Change is under way, but Pakistan continues to link economic progress to "forward movement on all fronts", which everyone recognises as a reference to Kashmir.
There are dissenters to this "keep India out" view. They include film-maker Hasan Zaidi. Pakistani cinemas are banned from showing Bollywood films, although they are available on pirated DVDs. Zaidi says the Pakistani film industry is in "a death spiral", that there's much to be gained by bringing across Indian films, and that India is a huge market that Pakistani film-makers can take advantage of. It's not just goods that have a hard time crossing borders. Visa restrictions mean that people, too, have a difficult time witnessing life on the other side. That might change when - and if - India's economic growth allows it to make the one claim that remains elusive: that its poverty rates are lower than Pakistan's.
That eventuality may well mark the point when Pakistan's labour force turns its eyes away from the Gulf and Europe to dream of earning a livelihood in a country where language and custom are not barriers.
For the moment, though, India and Pakistan exist primarily in each other's imaginations, and our reactions to each other continue to be based on old psychological wounds.
Kamila Shamsie grew up in Karachi, which is the setting of her most recent novel, Broken Verses.