Rasul Saab Kashmir’s Own Sir Syed
It was the day. The day, I and my peers waited for months together. It was a loveable wait, as loveable as lover’s legendry longing for beloved in classical love stories. The wait for the day started, as I remember from the day the school opened after long winter vacations. I very vividly remember the preparation for the founder’s day —- the Rasul Sahib’s day as it was popularly known started immediately after the annual examinations would be finished. Those days’ annual examinations would be conducted in the month of March. The sword of examinations and tests did not hang on children’s head for the complete year- tests did not make children psychological wrecks, these were biannual affair “shashmahi” and “salana” examinations. The shashmahi examinations did not get on children’s nerves. … Read entire article »
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Report Just Meant For Trashcan
For the past couple of days a strong sense of penitence has overtaken me. This sense sharpened, after the GoI publicized report prepared by its three appointees. I confess before my readers. ‘In 1972, as a student of Kashmir University with all my skepticism about the role played by Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah at the crucial junctures of our history like many other boys, I was also his supporter, not an ardent one. In 1973, the Plebiscite … Read entire article »
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Leadership Paradox: You have Right To Disagree
In eighties, I was swayed!So where hundreds of thousands on watching the documentary hosted by Orson Welles, ‘The Man Who Saw Tomorrow’ based on the predictions by sixteenth century French astrologer Michel de Nostredame, Nostradamus. The man is ‘credited with having’ predicted many major events in the world. The film projecting Nostradamus as seer and sage with immense power that enabled him to foresee and predict had a slant, as someone has said, ‘rather slanted to the projection that affect the United States and its allies directly at the time of the films inception.’ Somehow, word had travelled across the valley that the film predicts the resolution of the Kashmir dispute. People copied cassette of the film, circulated from home to home, and watched in groups and batches. The viewers identified … Read entire article »
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Street Child Rembers Legendaries
Turbaned Legendary Looking back is not being weirdo-it is not being crazy. It is cathartic. Allow me the liberty, to say nostalgia is an ‘elixir that heals the hearts’ and soothes the fatigued nerves. It is loveable. Passing through the lanes that cradled us is loveable even today. They resonate with lullabies and sing songs of love, “That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude.” The skyline of my birth burg makes me tizzy and tipsy. If you ask me why, I will fumble for an answer-, it is inexplicable. The shimmering golden spires of the minarets sometimes make me trance and mysteriously take me on a spiritual voyage and everything around in rapture sings hymns like “whirling Dervishes” of Egypt. On every visit the quartet minarets of Jamia Masjid, open up for me … Read entire article »
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Hurriyat Conference’s Battle Within
It was a storm in teacup. That is how I looked at the ripples caused within a faction of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHCM) by the statement of its former Chairman Abdul Gani Bhat. He had stated that the United Nations resolutions on Kashmir ‘were not practically applicable in the present time’. He also asked the multi-party forum to join hands with the National Conference and the PDP and drafting a common minimum program … Read entire article »
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Untold Tales of Kashmir
It was time of change. As, I was leaving my mother’s lap, that warm hug, where evil could not harm me and learning to waddle with watangour- walker, toddling and stumbling at every step, lots of changes were taking place– changes that were bringing down the towers of Ilium, hubris and hegemony. It was a period of paradoxes and power. I do not know if these changes could be compared to the changes during the Victorian period for criss-crossing of ideologies, politics, duality and duplicity. It was a period of what social scientists would call as ‘paradigmatic change in the socio-economic structure.’ Panting for breaths the centuries old order and practices was dying – feudalism was dying, the brutal institution of moneylenders was gasping for breaths, and peasantry was discovering … Read entire article »
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Kashmir Muslim Society New Challanges
I want to have a frank talk with ‘the pulpit’. My belief is that I will not be committing any blasphemy in stating my mind to the preachers and sermonizers in my part of the world. Like overwhelming majority, I am born, and brought up in a Muslim family and have not received any formal education in Deen. I have not been a student of any seminary or theological school. Conscious of my limitations and … Read entire article »
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