Humko maloom hai jannat ki haqeeqat lekin…
Kindle’s issue on Kashmir was long overdue.
But in the present pastiche of images, chaos of rhetoric and utter futility of narratives, which strand does one hold on to, is the pertinent question, which has no easy answers. And yet there are some narratives that we plainly and furiously reject. Th is issue is thus, also a protest to the recent cover story in Open Magazine, titled,‘Sorry, Kashmir is Happy’.
In Kashmir, one’s thoughts always tend to be coloured by emotions. The fragrant, wounded and profound hills have such an air of solitude around them, that an outsider planted in that alien world, finds him/herself struggling to hold on to something, anything… a piece of wood, an apple, a warm cup of kahwa or a hint of a smile. And the people who have inhabited these hills for years, know in the greatest depths of their souls, that there is only that much to hold on to… everything else is as fragile as the silence… which could be broken any moment by the shot of a gun or the crash of a young boy falling dead to the ground… and there is nowhere to run, because even the Gods have run away…
The Gods have given way to the state and its propaganda machinery, which keep on spinning yarn after yarn of falsehood and betrayal. A misplaced sense of history, sheer opportunism, anxiety, jingoism and a sense of neurosis have kept the oppression alive for so long, and have stamped such great ferocity on the life of the valley that all semblance of beauty and mysticism have disappeared from this paradise on earth.
So, we keep hearing, “Kashmir is happy”, “Kashmir is normal”, “Kashmir is bouncing back”, “Kashmir is laughing”, “Kashmir is drinking coffee”, “Kashmir is talking on cell phones” amidst muffled gun shots and gagged voices. One could revel in this empty show of gimmicky verbal acrobatics, or put their ear to the ground, and hear the valley breathing, through its diseased lungs.
As we try and put our ears to the ground, we can just about gather fragments of a long, unfinished song… the only crescendo it has reached is hope, perhaps… happiness is a faraway dream still…
A lost paradise is never regained in a fool’s paradise…
