Most rock groups dream of the day when someone takes enough interest in their career to arrange for a professional recording. But for the Pakistani band Junoon, taping sessions are more sinister. After returning from a concert tour last summer in neighboring India, the band suspected that their home telephones were being tapped. Their record company had been visited by Pakistani intelligence officials, and the performers often felt they were under observation when they ventured onto Karachi's streets.

Somebody in the government was clearly not a fan. Junoon, which translates as Frenzy, uses soaring guitar riffs to deliver a Sufi message of mystic harmony. It was Junoon's misfortune to have preached that theme in India soon after that country tested its nuclear bomb. Young Indians loved it and waved posters saying we want cultural fusion, not nuclear fusion at a packed New Delhi concert. Back in Pakistan, news of Junoon's peaceful overtures was heard as treason. Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif's government already disliked the group: after one of its earlier songs took a swipe at corrupt politicians, it banned state television from letting anyone with long hair and jeans perform. This time, concert organizers were effectively bullied into canceling the band's engagements. All they had done was to "denounce the concept of an arms race," says guitarist-songwriter Salman Ahmad. "In Pakistan we don't have clean water, health or employment. How can we afford a nuclear bomb?"

This complaint is heard across the border too. In India, as in Pakistan, young people appear to be less enthusiastic than their elders about the benefits of nuclear status. An informal poll conducted by MTV after the May nuclear tests found that almost all its young viewers supported the bomb. Yet that support has evidently begun to wane among young, middle-class Indians, who have realized that international sanctions make it tougher to get student visas and jobs abroad. Ordinary Indian youth also see the bomb as a downer. "When there is no food, people have no time to worry about war," says Om Singh, a 14-year-old Rajasthani who sleeps on Bombay's sidewalks and earns $70 a month as a lunch delivery boy. Says Sandeep Sen, 31, a telecommunications manager in the southern city of Bangalore: "I keep wondering--if all Europe could unify, why can't India and Pakistan?"

What unifies the younger generation of Indians and Pakistanis is a growing disillusionment with their leaders. After the nuclear tests, these frustrations have deepened. With blinding clarity, the nuclear blasts illuminated the tragedy of how two nations had diverted their undeniable talent and resources toward fratricidal destruction, neglecting the worth of their own people. The older generation--especially politicians in both countries--still carry the scars and ancient prejudices that re-surfaced when the subcontinent was torn apart in 1947. The old hatreds have dimmed, just slightly, and the young today may not want to pursue their elders' vendettas much longer. Satellite TV has freed them from the venomous distortions dished out by the state-run networks in both countries. A powerful curiosity exists about The Other, like twins wrenched apart at birth. At the Wagah border checkpoint in Punjab, picnicking families gather to gape and wave to Pakistanis waving back from the other side of the barbed wire. A Pakistani teenager who had joined the Muslim insurgency in Kashmir was caught by Indian policemen recently after he had infiltrated across the border. His mission: to see a movie with his favorite Bombay star.

In both countries, the rage is still being stoked among youngsters. "Any child in India will associate Pakistan with words like war and enemy," says Teesta Setalvad who runs Khoj (Search), a Bombay program that promotes secular understanding among school children. To combat such notions, Setalvad has found pen pals in Pakistan for her schoolkids. But she has deep-seated sentiment to fight against. "There was never really bad blood between Indian and Pakistani students," says Aditya Kilachand, an Indian who had an opportunity to mix with both while at university in the U.S. "But there was always a subtle thing. They dislike us more than we dislike them."

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