Tag: Kashmir


  • The durood were heard from both the local and distant mosques. It sounded as a viscous amalgam of voices to me, in which, if listened with the ears of heart, one could quickly lose himself. It was strange how it awoke me, even though it had never done before. I went to the kitchen where…

  • Very few books can be emotionally as promising as โ€œThe Road to Meccaโ€. Written by a famous and yet obscure author, Muhammad Asad (earlier Leopold Weiss). The book is a memoir, chiefly of his days in Arabiya. Born in Austria to Jewish parents, Asad was introduced in the study of the Torah apart from secular…

  • On the bulge of Amira Kadal, I stare at the fish in their basket, murmuring between themselves about their estrangement from the Jhelum that flows underneath, belligerently. Or, maybe, they are just gasping for a few extra breathsโ€” as many as they canโ€” before it is all over; as all of us try to do…

  • The Murderer and the Murdered I have never found it in my heart,to clean my room.I like it muddy and untidyโ€”the kind of chaos, that accompaniesa frantic search for the passport,just before leaving for the airport. A madness walking naked,turning my walls into New York Subways,where trains leave from one city to anothertravelling through holes…

  • Reclining against the mud-plastered wall, Gull Khanโ€™s soft-natured wife Noor opened the copper lid of the samovar, blew a mouthful of air into its chimney, and after adding a pinch of salt in the tea, she dropped the lid back with a shrill clank. The steam that leapt out spread a milky smell across the…

  • David Barsamian: The legacy of partition lives on in the subcontinent with wars and an arms race and the ever-vexing issue of Kashmir. Eqbal Ahmad: Three wars: 1948, 1965 and then again in 1971-72. Continued conflict over Kashmir, which is costing the Kashmiri people enormously. It’s heartbreaking what their costs are and nobody notices. Continued…

  • Introduction: Eqbal Ahmad was born in the village of Irki in Bihar in 1933.During his early childhood his father was murdered as a result of a land dispute. His father was involved in India’s pre-independence nationalist movement and in the gifting of lands. During the partition of India in 1947, Eqbal Ahmad and his elder…

  • In January 2019, a 21-year-old militant, Syed Rubaan Hussain, lost his life in an encounter along with his two associates in district Budgam. Rubaanโ€™s elder brother, Syed Tajamul Imran, writes about the void his brother has left behind; recounts what his death has brought to him and his family  and the painful memories they have…

  • The notion that an artwork by an artist cannot have a specific monetary value is far too often used against artists in many parts of the world. Conveniently, the idea that one cannot put a price tag on an artwork is employed to justify what cannot be termed as anything else but plain and blatantly…

  • WHILE PROTEST REVERBERATESย on the streets of Chile, Catalonia, Britain, France, Iraq, Lebanon and Hong Kong, and a new generation rages against what has been done to their planet, I hope you will forgive me for speaking about a place where the street has been taken over by something quite different. There was a time when…