It is welcome news that flights are resuming between India and Pakistan, and a pity this did not happen a few months earlier. I had to first fly for nearly four hours to Dubai, and then back three hours to Lahore.

As I gathered my bags in my Delhi apartment to leave for the airport, I must confess to a slight feeling of nervousness mixed with excitement. I was going to Lahore to give a lecture on globalization. An American economist who knows Pakistan well told me not to be too excited about the lecture because only half my audience would be professional economists; the other half a combination of Taliban without beards and CIA agents with.

Lahore International Airport at 2 a.m. does nothing to alleviate one's misgivings. Rundown, with cavernous hallways, the clanking sound of large, rusty luggage trolleys, and a slight medicinal aroma of detergents, it has the air of a police station. The immigration officer takes my passport and the special papers that Indians entering Pakistan are meant to carry, and looks puzzled. She has never ‘handled an Indian case’. and leans over to a colleague. They confer, send for the supervisor, and then in a short while I am out of the airport.

Pearl Continental Hotel, in the heart of the city, is all colonial splendour. When I check in at 4 a.m., a wedding party has just broken up.