Life took a weird turn for me... So ppl who have known me to be obsessed with kashmir and radical politics, will not be surprised dat i ended up marrying a kashmiri pandit...
This gave a me different kind of perspective the one which the books were refusing to give... This was perspective of being away from your home... And living in regret of what could have been...
Ive read rahul pandita before... I thought his book hello bastar was path breaking... No matter how proud I'm of indian democracy, it made me prouder.. A lot of people have been persecuted for a lot less as far as the maoist movement is concerned.... But he had written something which was honest, unbiased and hopefully did justice to the people it was about...
Rahul brings the same honest approach to the book as well... At least tries to... But this book has been written with a lot of angst and a lot of frustration.. Maybe i can never even begin to understand this... But its left me with an understanding of why the kashmiri culture has become so important for my in-laws... And why it hurts them when we dont care...
Rahul was a boy when the exodus started and when his family left kashmir... The terrifying tales that he tells aren't laced with a typical writers's prose, but the terror of the situation does manage to leap out... Loosing his own family, your home to terrorism is a scary thought... But what is more disturbing is the fact that those who took it all away were friends and neighbours less than a decade ago...
Every story has two sides.. But the story of kashmir has three... And the side of kashmiri pandits and their trauma has been ignored for too long... As pandita closes his book he does acknowledge the suffering of a kashmiri man, without the caste or creed... But he also says and rightly so that the tormented were the tormentors as well... We shouldnt discount what human rights voilations happen in kashmir but we shouldnt also forget the story of a kashmiri pandit who became a refugee in his own country....
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