Is the Kashmir conundrum a political issue? Yes! Does the Kashmir conflict need to be resolved politically? Yes! Have the people of Kashmir suffered immeasurable losses and been unbearably traumatized, particularly over the past two decades? Yes! Have the people of Kashmir been displaced, disenfranchised, and dispossessed? Yes! Can the rivulets of blood and loss of innocent lives in Kashmir be forgotten and relegated to the background? No! Does the holding of assembly elections and...

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...

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 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...

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...

Ailing Ashraf Ali died a month after Fatima moved in. She remained alone there with her daughter, Iman, in a three room house, amidst the fields at the end of town limits in Magam, overlooking a busy highway. Beyond the house was a small pond covered with a carpet of duckweed and a naked garden, gleamed with a white birch grove, acacia trees and foliages of strawberry twigs. Birds used to twitter there from morning to night, soaring in swarms, over the bare tree tops, calling down the chilly...

The moment Shahmal spied Ghulam Khan entering the compound with the bird in his hands, she was up on her feet. She even forgot to wash her pheran which had been soiled by her six-month-old baby. She felt as if she had found a treasure and cried to her husband instantly, "So you have brought it! I was apprehensive that you would come empty-handed even today."

She almost snatched the cock from her husband's hands and began to stroke its feathers and comb. 'Four-and-a-half rupees I paid for...