Ignoring voices in Kashmir

“We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,”

one card lying on the

street says, “I want

to be he who pours

blood. To soak your hands.

Or I’ll leave mine in

the cold till the rain

is ink, and my

fingers, at the edge of pain,

are seals all night

to cancel the stamps.”

The mad guide! The

lost speak like this. They haunt

a country when it is ash.

“Everything is finished, nothing remains.”

I must force silence

to be a mirror

to see his voice

again for directions.

Fire runs in waves.

Should I cross that river?

Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver

parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?

Only silence can now trace my letters

to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.

Excerpts

from “A Country

Without A Post Office” by Agha Shahid Ali

Recommended: Ignoring voices in Kashmir | ikners.com

The long way home

The summer of 2011 has been kind to Kashmir. It has spared the Valley the violence that led to the deaths of over a hundred young stone-pelters last summer. The mood in the Valley is turning: tourists are back, the army has largely retreated to its barracks and the necklace of stalls that rings the banks of Dal Lake does brisk business late into the evening. The number of tourists this year (7,54,588) has for the first time surpassed the number in 1988 (7,22,035) – the year before militancy hijacked the Valley.

Exactly seven years ago, in August 2004, on my way to interview the then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed at his heavily guarded Srinagar residence, the roads were deser-ted except for grim-faced armymen with assault rifles. Much has changed for the better in the Valley since. Many shops in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk, shuttered last summer, are now open till midnight. And yet serious problems continue to blight the Valley. The first, much debated, is granting greater autonomy to Kashmir within the elastic boundaries of the Indian Constitution. The second, much ignored, is the question of Kashmir’s exiled Pandits.

Continued at:

The long way home « THE LAWFILE

Kashmir through their eyes

For Indians and Pakistanis, Kashmir is much more than a strategically important valley: it is the crystallisation of a conflict defined by the division of a nation. In the non-Kashmiri imagination, the valley is a battleground not just for the two countries themselves, but for the very ideologies that led to the partition of the subcontinent over 60 years ago.

Al Jazeera spoke with citizens on both sides of the border, and abroad, to try and understand just what place Kashmir has in their collective imaginations.

We asked them four questions:

Q1. What does Kashmir mean to you as an Indian/Pakistani?
Q2. What images does the word ‘Kashmir’ evoke for you?
Q3. Do you think that Pakistan or India have a ‘right’ to Kashmir?
Q4. Where does the Kashmiris’ will figure in your conception of a solution to the dispute?

Continued at :

Kashmir | ikners.com

My story begins

They call it paradise, we call it home. And nothing about home ever seems special until time makes you realize what you have or in much unfortunate cases what you had. Is it not said that we don’t realize the worth of something until we lose it?

Only those who have gone through bad times know how to value the happy little things that happen in life.

Being born in Kashmir, I never knew how special a thing my origin was.

Beautiful EVERYTHING – We have mountains, we have rivers, we have the freshest of airs, we have the loveliest of weathers, we have a rich culture; a fairytale backdrop.

But how can there be a happy ending without all the characters fighting for happiness, love, and freedom? How can we have something without earning it?

Growing up I never knew that we were fighting a war – a war for our own existence. I didn’t know that someday I too would be fighting, fighting for freedom, the freedom to live.

While in Delhi on one of those common trips that we Kashmiris make to Indian cities in winter, I realized that there was something very different about this place. It didn’t have those men in uniform at every corner that I was accustomed to see at home. It made me feel special, like when there is something that you have and the other person doesn’t, it was that moment of joy and pride. Something to show off. I was a happy child oblivious to the fact that they were not there for us, but to watch us because prisoners must have watchers so that they may not dare to dream again. Dream of free existence.

It was dark, it had been so ever since.

But what does one who has never known light know what dark is?

And then the silence was betrayed, the word came out, out loud:

We are not who we are,

Our existence holds a lot more,

Something about which we were never told,

Painful times our fathers never dared to talk about.

But a word once uttered, can never be taken back,

A truth once told can’t be denied.

Knowledge is not of much use until we put it into use. We knew of the prejudiced life we were living but would we do something about it?

In this world there are all kinds of people. There are those who wouldn’t fight, those who would fight to win, those who would fight to prove the other side wrong and those who would fight because they knew that they were being wronged; they would fight for justice.

Allah states, “O My slaves, I have forbidden injustice for Myself and forbade it also for you. So avoid being unjust to one another.” (Saheeh Muslim)

For those who need to know, care to know.

There are a few reasons for me writing this blog. The first being my desire to write, to express and thinking of something to write about what better thought could there be than my own motherland.

Writing about Kashmir brings tears to my eyes, like when you talk about an ailing mother, it is something which has always been there but I failed to realize until time made me encounter my love for my land. Unlike any happy story mine is not a very cheerful one.

Tears for happiness,

Tears for sadness,

For I believe behind every happy moment there is the fear of being sad.

Tears for all those who were martyred

Tears for those moments when we survived

Tears for the unfair world we assume we live in

Tears for FREEDOM

Not necessarily from any dominance,

but the freedom to breathe in a less fearful air.

Life always seemed to be perfect to me until my encounter with a much greater truth. The truth I should’ve known long before, the truth which would change the way I think, the way I express; the truth about my origin. Knowing everything, still there is a need to understand the way it works.

My words may seem confusing, giving away nothing I want to say. This is my isolated existence, looking for words to express but they fail me; part of another one of God’s conspiracy to test us. This is how I look at it. Trials for rewards. Greater trials, greater rewards.

No love for us,

No mercy for us,

If not empathy not even sympathy for us,

Are we the children of a lesser God?

Not coming directly to what I want to say, for what pleasure in knowing the story before knowing how it came about.

But most important of all you should know, this is not my lost fairytale, its more of my experiments with truth, my encounters with truth.

I might seem to be one of those writers who often go off the track, sinking into their own emotions, but what is a story without any emotions?

This is KASHMIR – my love, my reason to write, my reason to fight.

I hope you see the reason too.

I believe I can make you.