When India and Pakistan had dinner together

How a simple dinner helped bridge ties between India and Pakistan!

Meet Eric Maddox : The man who introduced the virtual dinner project to solve conflicts between two rival countries. 
Maddox, a documentary film maker, came to India for a little break a few months ago, but unable to put work aside, or resist the urge to facilitate connections wherever he travels, he quickly found opportunities towork on the project with local partners.

He recently organized a virtual dinner between citizens from Bangalore, India and Islamabad, Pakistan and had them discuss critical issues of politics and society on a lighter note. By cleverly merging the two agents, Maddox is trying to resolve the complex issues by getting the participants to break bread over the internet in order to encourage camaraderie and understanding.

Imagine a dinner table that starts in one country and extends into another.

The start
The idea first came to Maddox when he was making a documentary film in Palestine and Israel. He realized that while the larger audience will understand the conflict, the people actually involved in the conflict might not be able to see both sides of the issue.

How it works?

A typical virtual dinner consists of two parts. The first part requires the guests to discuss the recent and most prevalent news of the respective countries. The discussion is moderated and the guests are selected from various universities, NGOs and media centres.

Each community is given a topic by the other one and both the teams are expected to go out on the streets, ask the questions from general public and make a small film for the next dinner, which is organized after two weeks. By this time, both the teams are ready with the short films comprising of interesting responses from the people of one country for another.

The documentaries are later uploaded on the official website and Vimeo to make them accessible to everyone.

The challenges

The biggest challenge is to be sustainable. The lack of funds was a big obstacle which Maddox had to fight in the initial days and still does at times. The project, which requires extensive travel, runs with the help of various grants and donations. Another challenge came with the language barrier which resolved by trying to get people who spoke English and is trying to resolve the problem by providing subtitles in the movie.

As this unique dinner project takes off, it gives a way to clear the misunderstandings between the two nations without resorting to the shellings and threats that seem to be the order of the day. With the success of the India-Pakistan we can’t wait to know about Maddox’s next dinner plans.