Peace Watch

Trust Deficit and Beyond Will the women group take the lead? PUNCHLINE Z.G. MUHAMMAD Smaller Default Larger   Scepticism and disbelieving about anything coming from New Delhi has largely become our second nature.  This trust deficit is not needless. It has a history. Sixty-five years long history, dating back to first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.  Notwithstanding, my disbelief, I see a recently held one day women convention at Kashmir University by a New Delhi based senior journalist Seema Mustafa as worth noticing. In a way, it was making a history of sorts. Eleven top Indian women activists arrived in the most salubrious and beautiful campus of Kashmir University on Tuesday to express solidarity with the women of Kashmir. The activists representing various women organization of India included Laila Pasha, Doctor Jotyshina Chattergee, TK Raja Lakshmi, Prof. … Read entire article »

  Review of “Torch Bearer”  A Novel by  G.N. Gowhar. By Zahid. G. Muhammad Venu M.D. Taseer Hall, A.S. College, Srinagar   Thank you Gowhar Sahib, for giving me an opportunity to read  your novel and then review  the same. I do not know why? While coming to this place names of Palestine poet Mehmood Darwish, Tawifq  Zayyad and  Fadwa Tuqan persistently knocked my mind…it sounds ironic, why I did not remember any of  the contemporary poets of my mother tongue…the language I love and relish.   Perhaps, I was caught up in a web of dilemmas- should I look at   the Torchbearer merely as a piece of literature and discuss it simply as a genre of literature. Is this novel charged with defiance, does it cascade with pain and agony that people of this land have been undergoing, … Read entire article »

In 2008, Kashmir Was Part of Obama Rhetoric 2012 He has forgotten even name why? Z.G. MUHAMMAD The South Asia will be fulcrum to US policy in Asia has been a general belief with foreign affairs wizards, geo-strategic experts and political pundits in and around Washington. The region would prominently figure in the presidential election campaign and the debate has been part of the belief. Some factors that contributed to this belief have been increasing role of China in the region. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) emerging as an alternative mechanism to fill the vacuum once Western troops depart from Afghanistan. The challenges after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, institutionalization of democracy in the war ravaged country and challenges of militancy in Pakistan. Possibilities of an alliance between three Muslim countries, Iran, Pakistan and … Read entire article »

Torch Bearer” A magnum opus that should be read by everyone PUNCHLINE Z.G. MUHAMMAD Smaller Default Larger Not telling the truth candidly is disappointing. That too, when literati, writers and poets submit to expediency and fail to sing songs of compassion for their compatriots. Of late, I have started believing that the looming clouds of disappointment have started vanishing from our literary scene and we are on threshold of a renaissance – a literary renaissance in our own right.  One, after another book telling the peoples tale are added to ‘Kashmir literature   shelf.’ Some two or three weeks earlier Shafi Ahmed’s novel ‘The Half Widow’, narrating woeful tale of hundreds of Kashmir women whose husbands were subjected enforced disappearance was released in Srinagar. This was second in queue, to internationally acclaimed ‘stunningly poignant’ story of … Read entire article »