Guest Column: Pakistani Men are Studs (by Saad Shafqat from "The Herald"

An Indian woman once said that I looked like Mohsin Khan. This is a true story. She was standing in a supermarket checkout line and I was a couple of spaces behind her. Our eyes met and she smiled. This was Durham, North Carolina in the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student. In this especially sleepy portion of the American Bible Belt, South Asian faces were not too common. I smiled back.

As we walked out to the parking lot, she asked me where I was from and I told her. Then she made the Mohsin Khan remark. It was a bizarre way to open a conversation, even for a fellow desi. I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly.

“You mean Mohsin Hasan Khan, the cricketer?” I enquired politely. “Yes,” she said, nodding her head, utterly matter-of-fact, as if there could be no other Mohsin Khan in the world. I couldn’t get over it. “Wow,” I said, “that’s some comparison. He made a double-hundred at Lord’s.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she responded. “He’s the one who married Reena Roy.”

I was already married and that was that, but the experience remains an anomaly. Certainly, no Pakistani woman has ever compared my looks to Mohsin Khan (or to any other heart-throb). Evidently, this Indian girl spotted something that my own compatriots have missed.

But don’t just take my word for it. Look at what has been happening between genders across the border. Indian tennis ace Sania Mirza falling for Pakistani all-rounder Shoaib Malik is the latest show in town, but it is not the only one. Sushmita Sen, a former Miss Universe and contemporary Bollywood celebrity, has been showing interest in Wasim Akram. In days gone by, Zeenat Aman, the vanguard of Bollywood sex symbols, dated Imran Khan. And you already heard about Mohsin and Reena.

Nor is the phenomenon limited to our neck of the woods. Britney Spears, a global pop icon, had a Pakistani boyfriend. She had met Adnan Ghalib through his work as a celebrity photographer and a simple Google search reveals many pictures of them having a good time together. I showed them to my wife but she was unenthusiastic. “Oh, please,” she groaned. “He looks like your average guy loafing around in Park Towers.”

And then, of course, we have the remarkable example of Princess Diana. She could have had any man in the world, but the one she desired was a Pakistani cardiac surgeon named Hasnat Khan. Media speculation about the nature of their relationship finally ended in January 2008, when Dr Khan gave an interview to the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph. He was not a fling but, according to credible sources, the “love of her life”. He even brought her to Jhelum once to meet his family; in Pakistani romance, that’s a huge gesture.

The data, then, is hard to ignore: there is something about Pakistani men. What exactly, and why, remain open questions. A recent report in Times of India implied that the Pakistani identity adds a forbidden element that Indian women find irresistible and that Indian men can’t compete with. Other observations in the Indian media are more flattering. Pakistani men are seen as suave, cultivated and at home with Urdu, the language of poetry and love. Even the likes of Asif Ali Zardari, Nawaz Sharif and Pervez Musharraf make the cut, according to journalist Smita Prakash, who has written a widely-circulated article that calls Pakistan a “chick magnet”. Admittedly, the bar is not set very high.

In the Pakistani heartland the mood, naturally, is buoyant. We are trying not to flatter ourselves too much, but facts are facts. Few countries are as ethnically diverse, have as rich and ancient a heritage and are as much a geographic and cultural nexus as Pakistan. Surely this is at least partly responsible for the sex appeal of the Pakistani male and for his becoming an export commodity.

The appeal extends not just to countries in our region but increasingly to the West. If this trend continues, Pakistani men could well become one of the major beneficiaries of globalisation. For the moment, the only women who appear unenthusiastic about Pakistani men are Pakistani women.

But that’s another debate.