Kashmir’s much-hyped literary festival has been cancelled. The organisers of ‘Harud: The Autumn Literature Festival’, scheduled for September 24-26 in Srinagar, cited the possibility of violence as the main reason behind this decision. The festival secretariat said they were concerned about the possibility of protests and the "heightened" nature of the debate.

The debate in question was the incisive criticism that the organisers faced from writers, journalists, filmmakers and...

A literary festival, by definition, is an event that celebrates the free flow of ideas and opinions. It not only assumes a freedom from fear. It demands a certain independence of mind and spirit. To hold it in a context where some basic fundamental rights are markedly absent, indeed, denied to the population, is to commit a travesty. In fact, as literary and artistic festivals held elsewhere, Israel and Sri Lanka for example, show, such events are sometimes used to falsely assert the...

In this all encompassing darkness
Hope turns to despair
Not a single ray of light gleams
Deafening silence pervades…

Only wolves are heard
Mourning death
But of whom…?

O father!
Protect me
For I cannot bear
This sullen, sickening air
Stinking!!!

With the pungency of rotting flesh
Of humanity.

I see headless zombies
Stamp bullet ridden chests
Amid pools of blood
Leaving a gory trail…

No father! No!
I dare not look beyond
For this ‘Ghastly Spectacle’
Blurs my vision!

(Rabia...

Noted Kashmiri writer and poet Gulam Nabi Aatish has been selected for Sahitya Akademi Award-2011 for writing the best book for children in Kashmiri language.

The book titled “Nov Kehtsha Mentsha” was selected out of five books in the final round of selection by a three member jury in a meeting convened by Dr Aziz Hajni here few days.

The decision of the jury was ratified by Elective Board of Sahitya Academi in its meeting held at Thrisure Cochin yesterday.

An announcement to this...

The sun going down ashamed
and bruised all along its predictable course,
takes with it the picturesque translation of the bid:
Wherein men are made to scream hoarse
and women relegated to the hue in eyes half sunk
Children return to forgetfulness: wishful and drunk.
(That ‘alcohol’ forced up their tender eyebrow tips)
One couldn’t make out their dry lips;
we were never given to forgetfulness.

 

Eid was skipped in all its repetitive sanctity,
Small girls don’t want to go to school...

The tradition of writing autobiographies is old. In previous epochs with few means of entertainment and information they remained popular substitute to poetic epics. Babar wrote his autobiography and it remains an important source of history of that era. Jahangir too wrote one and it again serves as a source of medieval history.

In recent past we have seen Sheikh Abdulla writing his biography when he became politically irrlevant and the autobiography provided an excuse for that irrlevance...

Mucky labyrinths lead to castles of pain
Dingy, choking alleys give way
to spaces of loss.
Shrills of outlanders echo in the fearful silence
Trampling Jackboots walk up to the House of God
Piercing metal cuts through dreams;
rosary falls apart.

Bullet holes on the mosque door,
lead to tunnels of pain- infinite and dark!     

Rain moans as it falls,
on graves dug last summer
in row, without epitaphs.
The ageless Wilderness where we belong!

Wild flowers surround a grave-  Bud
Buried...

When a noted novelist reviewed Basharat Peer’s memoir, Curfewed Night, he called the book “…a brave and beautiful report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore”.  Imagine an ongoing struggle that claimed more than 70,000 lives, witnessed thousands of arrests, rapes and ‘systematic torture’ in the past two decades and is still vague to the outside world?

Imagine a zone being more militarized than Iraq and still not being talked about. That is the reality of Kashmir. Last...