By August 1971, when George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and friends took the stage at Madison Square Garden to play the Concert for Bangladesh, 10 million East Pakistani refugees had fled over the border into India with scant hope of surviving inevitable hunger and disease.

Up to that point, little public attention had been drawn to the crisis in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Few people outside the region knew how the deadly catastrophe had come to be, or what individuals who cared could do to help relieve the suffering.

The events leading to Pakistan's refugee crisis had started with that nation's birth in 1947 and with the decision by local authorities, and the departing British, to carve the sub-continent's Muslim regions from predominantly Hindu India. The result was the creation of two distinct provincial territories, West and East Pakistan, with more than 1,000 miles of India dividing them.

It wasn't just geography that split Pakistan's two "wings." These two Pakistans could not have been more different, separated also by race, culture, and language. Urdu was the dominant language of West Pakistan. Bengla was spoken in the East. And although the East Bengalis outnumbered the Pakistanis in the west, political and economic power was centered in West Pakistan.