It lasted five seconds. A Pakistani Ranger, standing at the Attari-Wagah gate in the last light of a border evening, lifted his hand in a crisp, formal salute. Across the white line, an Indian BSF officer answered, not with a salute of his own, but with a nod. That was all. Just two men, in two uniforms, observing a courtesy older than the border itself.

The clip found its way onto Instagram in early August this year and would not stop travelling, would not stop migrating.

It reached commentators, veterans and ordinary scrollers on both sides of a frontier that has spent decades being described in every language except a gentle one.

Among the voices trying to explain why the gesture moved so many, I was captivated by a line from a young Indian Navy veteran, now an entrepreneur. Somehow, I noticed no one else paying attention to this line amid the flood of comments - trolling, saluting, celebrating, embracing, embarrassing, whatever else social media is noisy with. First, the line, which can be paraphrased as: You civilians fight; we, the military, have our protocols and discipline - soldiers do not carry the enmity that civilians are asked to carry.

Whatever its precise origin - and viral videos rarely arrive with tidy footnotes - the sentiment struck a nerve because it named something true: discipline and protocol can hold a decency intact, even where politics insists there should be none.

I desire to waltz with that........

© The Express Tribune