Now that brand India is done with celebrating 60 years of its hard earned freedom, I just want to add a bit more about Kashmir. It’s in fact October 2007 that marks 60 years of Kashmir’s stay with India. It was September and October 60 years back, when certain communities were displaced from Kashmir in a history that remains forgotten.
It also marks 2 years since a major earthquake struck the region.
Sensibility says, let status quo be please, don’t keep redefining boundaries, displacing generations. You’ve given us enough bloodshed and confusion to live with. Don’t make it worse.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
The puzzle called Kashmir
Kashmir, to me, is a puzzle which gets more convoluted with each passing day as the post 1989 generations come of age and struggle to find their feet within this country and the world on the whole. And I am not distinguishing on the basis of religion. This generation, which seems to have grown mostly outside Kashmir, feels a need to know what its responsibilities are and how much freedom it has to follow their dreams. Kashmiris are naturally emotional people and here you live out of a place where you live each day surrounded with more news of death than life. It could either numb you towards the simple joys of life or make you drastically fearless. Both are not ‘normal’ circumstances.
Ambition what it might mean for someone living in Jammu and Kashmir.
What I feel for most currently is that a certain economically secure generation might be martyring their dreams without realising it. But is there a choice? After all, they do have a responsibility to rebuild a crumbling Jammu and Kashmir. A responsibility they might have to live with the rest of their lives.
I have friends and family who have dreams to pursue their individual ambitions, careers of their choice. Sometimes they take a few steps but often they pull back for the sake of security and the noble task of serving their family. I feel for their ambition and often I feel deeply guilty that I have the opportunity to follow my own. Of late I have been living in constant turmoil whether I should actually go all out chasing my own individual dreams after all or is it best to get back to the similar tug of emotion or responsibility that comes naturally.
Ambition is a healthy sign of progress, but if this country gets too ambitious and continues to make a show of it, then God help us all. In any case mobs are taking law into their own hands in the interiors and the lawmakers themselves are mostly serving time behind bars for their own doings.
For the fortunate, it’s a wonderful time to live through, to get an opportunity to get ambitious. However, not everyone within the country is able to pursue their ambitions with the same single mindedness. There are compromises to be made, families to be secured, for no one else will take responsibility for that, not the police or the state, not any employer or teacher, you yourself will have to do, if you live in a place where gun shots are routine and constant insecurity a way of life, where conflict leaves you with no choice but to curtail all ambition – economic and artistic especially, while a section of the country charges ahead economically, dissipating its successes into mostly entertaining themselves to death, making a show of it all and everyone else is…welcome to switch off the television!
I have friends and family who have dreams to pursue their individual ambitions, careers of their choice. Sometimes they take a few steps but often they pull back for the sake of security and the noble task of serving their family. I feel for their ambition and often I feel deeply guilty that I have the opportunity to follow my own. Of late I have been living in constant turmoil whether I should actually go all out chasing my own individual dreams after all or is it best to get back to the similar tug of emotion or responsibility that comes naturally.
Ambition is a healthy sign of progress, but if this country gets too ambitious and continues to make a show of it, then God help us all. In any case mobs are taking law into their own hands in the interiors and the lawmakers themselves are mostly serving time behind bars for their own doings.
For the fortunate, it’s a wonderful time to live through, to get an opportunity to get ambitious. However, not everyone within the country is able to pursue their ambitions with the same single mindedness. There are compromises to be made, families to be secured, for no one else will take responsibility for that, not the police or the state, not any employer or teacher, you yourself will have to do, if you live in a place where gun shots are routine and constant insecurity a way of life, where conflict leaves you with no choice but to curtail all ambition – economic and artistic especially, while a section of the country charges ahead economically, dissipating its successes into mostly entertaining themselves to death, making a show of it all and everyone else is…welcome to switch off the television!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Bombay half room memory - South Bombay, SS Hostel, other bombay half rooms
..Of hoping about film cameras returning to Kashmir with stories different from bollywood styled honeymoon romances for their main leads.
..Of wishing indie-independent films finding their place in India alongside mainstream market products
..Of music, poetry, srinagar and interrupted writing.
-- Of reading Rumi poetry and other poetry
..Of reversing the gaze of peep show cameras that live off voyeurism in the name of "surveillance", or of voyeurs who lived off it for their own profits or deals.
.. Of hoping for any impossible end to bloodspill branded as "global terrorism"
...Of knowing reasons about the appearance of people put on display- copying,mirroring sequences, situations from interrupted real life
by mainstream market film shops.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
-
ALONE, ALWAYS ALONE. ALONE IN BOMBAY, NOBODY THERE WITH ME, NO CARE FOR ME. PHOTOS SELFIES, DELHI,BOMBAY ...
