Kashmir. March. Ice and Sun.

Breaking bones on shrouded nails
Mute deponents
Imbricating loess into a sapping mouth, underneath.

Mouth smokes history. Smoke binds
These memory splattered dices, woebegone! And there
Balancing on streaks of grey
Ogling vultures perch.

Hounds rally with bent spines. Dazed skulls.
Combing day-arrested, dark woods.
Insupportable felony, battering times coffer
Snaps the flicker.
With dripping canines they cut into the snow and earth

Steal away the fire of an...

Book Review: Non-fiction/ Jinnah vs. Gandhi by Roderick Matthews, Hachette, 330pp; Rs499 (Hardback)

Whether India was fortunate to inherit the best of Gandhi and Pakistan has had to make to do with the worst of Jinnah couldn’t be understood as simply as Roderick Mathews suggests, otherwise through his commendable research on these two decisive but confronting figures. In close notice on the reasons of confrontation between these two, this book comes out with an alternative mandate and...

Morning with fade lights
Birds fly with hidden plights
Vehicles adorned with red lights
Announcing the curfew for Valleyites

Wake up with sweat face
The nightmare I thought was the real pain
Streets with forces and barriers
Screams for the justice carriers

Ghosts with high heels
Feels like a threaten wheel
Sounds of horror what they make
Nobody knows what will be the next take

Shops and hopes shut their face
Feels again to face the barren race
Weeping hearts and lifeless souls
Compels us...

Book: Our Moon has Blood Clots
Author: Rahul Pandita
Pages: 258
Publisher: Random House India

Uprooted from their native place it is very difficult to overcome the resentment of the people whom one perceives didn’t support them at that time. Rahul Pandita left the supposedly earthly paradise when his community was dominating it. The author was 14-years-old when his family shifted to Jammu for fear of perceived violence from majority community in Kashmir.

It is not possible to empathise...

I have long been born for now
Weary of space and hour
Knitting the shards of existence
Into silence
Around a turbulent self
Roaring and screeching
Ever over reaching
The strongest walls of mortal fancy.
Bind me then!
I refuse to hold
Myself, within me.

I am a claim
Of blood and fire
Fluttering upon ripping outcries
Rolling in the bloodshot angry eyes,
Bellowing poignant from a Himalayan height
Shattering the vacant corridors of might.

I was stripped in the baking sun,
Electrocuted on the...

Over the decades, politics and high class but baseless discourses have produced only the trashes on Kashmir-the devoid from realities remains a harmful trend which is yet to be over. The dearth of expression becomes more acute once we try to see on the works surfaced after the outbreak of militancy in valley. This is because the chasms existed between the dry outsiders’ opinion and the ground realities were stood unmanageably high.

Rahul Pandita, who is known only for his remarkable works...

Mark Antony says well in Julius Caesar-“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Shakespeare’s aphorism has become more important to remember in today’s time, as lives getting increasingly involved in a never-ending present. In categorical explanation, writers live with their own prejudices and a balancing amount of fairness to judge the conditions, shaped mostly through the imaginative processes.

Popular trend allows a writer to have...

Ibn-e Safi is not an unfamiliar name for anyone with an interest in Urdu detective fiction. After all, he has been called the Arthur Conan Doyle of the subcontinent. The Imran series, perhaps the most popular short-novel series in Urdu literature, is a prime example of his creativity. The popularity of the series can be well measured from the fact that even after Safi’s death, it was continued by numerous writers, and although not as brilliant, they are still widely read by fans addicted...