โI am a citizen of the world.โโย Sylvia Beach In a recent interview, I had put down โidentityโ as an intrinsic part of me, an identity that is devoid of law and religion or other statuses that have the power to affect my identity. I was asked to explain how my identity is bound to law;…
I. why elsewhen elsedo you put our narratives on a weighing scale?exceptwhen there’s your familiar bloodpolitically differentiated from our familiar bloodtogether calling out for help on our streets.(pray ask when has blood ever left my streets?)Quite a time for you to suddenly wake up, no? I heard your reality is throbbing like an inconsolable ache…
Breaking free from hackneyed foreign accounts, Kashmir over the years witnessed the rise of native narratives with fresh and deep insights. A young visual storyteller in this photo story is only trying to capture one such description of Srinagar cityโs not-so-overt shades of life. Life in Sun City is an elegy of its rundown glory…
I. In the language of a city inseminated with fallen teeth and broken bones. I dream in the language of dead. I dream: my mother’s poems resemble the dark blotch on my left temple. a green horse kneels beside the body of a dead boy. a rat nips at my only letter addressed to the…
โWhen the guests started pouring in, I saw them all more like examiners, and the big day like an examination which they would evaluate as per some standard which keeps updating its regulations more frequently than UGC which I was piling my fright about.โ Itโs been almost a month now that the wedding of my…
A Kashmiri Pandit body campaign followed by a recent communiquรฉ from New Delhi has made many believe that the Nastaliq script might go the language way in Kashmir. After blitz and berserk bunch of edicts, brouhaha backed by rightwing lobby has now alarmed Koshur literati circles. The concern stems from the bolstering campaign led by…
โAzadiโ contains several essays in which Roy gives us a powerful but partial look at the situation in Kashmir. Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. is a collection of essays written by Arundhati Roy through the eyes of a novelist. These essays were written between 2018 and 2020, two years that in India have felt like two…
After New Delhiโs last summer step, the loyalist of Kashmirโs grand old party and its โtallest leaderโ felt disheartened, disappointed and deceived. More than a year back, as the valley woke up to the news of abrogation of Article 370, my grandfather Abdul Samad Dar took a routine walk in our sunny- cum-sullen lawn. With…
After successive lockdowns and 2G classes messed up with their classroom routine and learning, Kashmiri students are still clueless about how to appear in the board exam two months later. In his glum room, Salik Nazar, 18, struggles with his โnew normalโ study routine driven by the slow internet speed, hailed as a โsmooth driver…