While on the one hand artistes across the border continue to find it challenging to explore their careers in India, especially Maharashtra, here's one of their own who appears to have lived half his life adoring Marathi cinema. Meet Sarmad Iqbal, a 21-year-old from Lahore whose blog post on his love for Marathi cinema has made him social media's darling. Twitterati has showered him with love and invites to India, and even made pleas to the government to grant him Indian citizenship. Given the volatile sentiments that both countries are often known to reserve for each other, Iqbal is overwhelmed by the warmth. An undergraduate majoring in Economics and Political Science, it took him a while to get vocal about this unconventional passion.

In his own words, he comes from a country where most people don't even know what Maharashtra is. When he was 10, Iqbal was introduced to the state through reality dance shows like Jhalak Dikhlaja and Nach Baliye, where he encountered lavani for the first time. "I also saw bhangra and dance forms of the Dakshin, but I was most enthralled by lavani," he tells us in an email interview, adding, "I loved listening to the lyrics, even though I didn't understand them. I would try to shake a leg sometimes. I think there's no one on this planet who would not be prompted to get up and dance when a peppy Marathi song plays." Copious amounts of Googling led him to "Maharashtra", the Marathas, the Marathi language and so on. He read up on the history of the foreign rule over Maharashtra.