After Life. I know, I'm very late to the party. Considering both Tiktok and Instagram are filled with the clips of that old lady talking to Ricky Gervais about what makes a society great. That's some impressive writing and the reason I actually managed to push myself to watch a TV series that talks a lot about suicide and death, despite adding it to my watchlist long before I saw those short clips. That brilliant writing is, in fact, what pushed me to install Tumblr and start writing here again after so many years.
This post is mostly to remind me to be expressive again and do what I've always enjoyed, but somehow stopped because Facebook and Instagram just took my attention away. I deleted all traces of social media apps a week ago, to cleanse my mind, and look at the irony: I ended up installing the most flamboyant/glittery of all social media apps: Tumblr. Writing my thoughts on phone feels quite different than how I remember it used to feel on laptop. But I'll come to that later. For the time being, let this journal be a reminder to self, to continue writing and continue expressing.
Tourism in Himachal has been flourishing over past few years. Unlike just a decade ago, when mainstream tourism in Himachal was concentrated to Dharamshala, Shimla and Manali, an average current generation tourist is exploring a lot of places previously unheard of. In fact, the quest to find an exotic village in some remote corner of the state and then tell the whole world about it, is the next fad. Instagram is filled with selfies of people overlooking snow clad mountains and photos showing their back/car/bike with a Himalayan backdrop. Facebook is filled with countless posts stating "insert a random number here" reasons why everyone should visit "insert a random hill state here" before they turn "insert a random number here" .
Internet has been a major reason for this boom in tourism sector lately. Until few years ago, if a person living in Delhi wanted to know about the places to visit in Himachal, they would contact HPTDC information center over telephone/FAX and would be presented with some pamphlets/maps outlining all the major attractions and details about how to reach there and what to do. If they wanted to visit a relatively unknown place, they would need to sift through and collate information from various sources - guidebooks, magazines and so on. This was a costly and time consuming affair for a casual traveller and most would have rather preferred a stay in some hotel in Shimla/Manali than go through all this hassle. Today, the same traveller can go through a hundred times more useful targeted and free information on his mobile phone, while casually browsing through travel blogs and travel pages on facebook, at the comfort of his bed on a lazy “saturday” afternoon.
Saturday plays another major role in this tourism boom. For the previous generation of youngsters, Saturday was just another weekday. People would long for the second Saturday of the month, when they would perform chores that couldn’t be accommodated in the free day of an otherwise 6 day long week. This meant travel was mostly about a meticulously planned family vacation, the purpose of which was to spend free time with family. But work culture in my generation specifically, has seen a major shift to the western style of working - “Work hard for 5 days, party even harder on the weekend”. However, not everyone parties throughout the weekend and definitely not every weekend - which leaves us with enough free time every week when we have nothing to do. So, if there’s a holiday on Tuesday or Thursday, or if it is a 3-day long weekend, you have an opportunity for 4 day long trip by taking just one day leave. This means a drastic increase in number of travel opportunities per year, within a 1000 kilometre radius. Complemented by a much higher disposable income available to expend on travel for an average young professional in today’s MNCs, it makes frequent short distance travel way more feasible than it was for our parents’ generation.
These are some of the reasons, which have contributed to the higher rate of tourist influx in Himachal. Being just an overnight journey away from Chandigarh and NCR, a lot of youngsters with sufficient free time and enough disposable income are flocking into the highlands of state. The same reasons are applicable to an overall increase in tourism throughout the country, but I’m trying to target more Himachal specific problems through this article. This article just touched upon the “why” of tourism boom in Himachal. In next article, I’ll try to explain the consequences and what is wrong with this. A lot of the information discussed so far is applicable to most of India, but the intention of this series is to focus more on how it impacts Himachal.
“Kashmir, a picturesque Himalayan valley, has been a bone of contention between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, since the decolonization and partition of Indian subcontinent”- This is how e…
“Kashmir, a picturesque Himalayan valley, has been a bone of contention between two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, since the decolonization and partition of Indian subcontinent”- This is how every media agency describes the situation in Kashmir. From Times to Guardian, Kashmir is about geopolitics. This callous and irresponsible appropriation of Kashmir’s decades-old indigenous resistance movement not only contributes to the “History of Hunters” but also helps the perpetrators of death and injustice to escape responsibility.
India and Pakistan, backed by corporate media and their respective lackeys, lambast each other for decimation of human life in Kashmir while the people of Kashmir keep dying, one or several at a time. Nobody stops to think that a place, a civilization that’s older than most of the nation-states in contemporary world are being tortured, raped and silenced by the coercive agencies of both India and Pakistan. I am neither a fan of numbers nor of comparing the suffering of two peoples but it’s pertinent to mention that figures of mass-graves in Indian-Occupied Kashmir surpass that of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. A recent study by Doctors Without Borders (MSF) revealed that since 1989, Indian-Occupied Kashmir’s women have faced sexual violence far greater in numbers than Sierre Leone, Chechnya and Sri Lanka. Why are we being mowed down, maimed and muzzled? What’s at the heart of Kashmir’s humongous suffering? The answer to this is simple – A Kashmiri asking for the Right to Determine his/her political future. A Right that has been denied, misrepresented and twisted through the powerful narratives surrounding Kashmir from the last 68 years of occupation. A regular theme that encapsulates Kashmir is of Indians and Pakistanis killing each other to control a piece of Alpsian land.
Let me break the capsule. Both the countries are militarily occupying Kashmir from the past 68 years and when we hear about them killing each other, they’re actually exchanging firepower along a de-facto border that divides Indian and Pakistani Occupied Kashmirs. These regular battles don’t affect people living in Karachi or Mumbai but kill, injure and dispossess Kashmiri people. A population whose 200,000 people have been already “dispensed” during the last 25 years. In Indian clutches, Kashmir has been inundated with 700,000 soldiers, exceeding the amount of troops deployed by the foreign occupiers in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Indian troops, occupying Kashmir, aren’t restricted to certain enclaves or border areas but move within the population, eagle-eying everyone from workers to college-students and schoolkids. This orwellian web, a Benthamite Panoptican keeps Kashmiris under constant survellience, right from streets to facebook. Same is the case with Pakistani side. A Human Rights Watch report and recent revelations of a former BBC- journalist, give a slight idea of how Pakistani agencies keep firm control on every aspect of life in Pakistani Occupied Kashmir.
Coming back to the representation of Kashmir in popular language, everyone seems to be in a limbo of omitting two central factors. First, the brutal military occupation of Kashmir. Rather than calling it an occupation, everyone cleaves Kashmir into “administrative units” of Pakistan and India. This tones-down, rather absolves the brutality that Kashmiri people face every minute. The justification that the rhetoricians of this deceit give is that Kashmir, on both sides, has got a government. However, they censor the fact that modern military occupiers are not in the business of replacing civilian administrative structures with military juntas. Rather, they occupy and rule by controlling and collaborating with civilian governmental structures e.g. The Palestinian Authority in West Bank. The censorship also aids the occupying powers in shrugging-off any responsibility that international law has put-aside for them.
This shouldn’t leave a doubt that occupiers play no role in creating these structures in the first place. They manipulate Kashmiris into what Franklin Giddings, the imperial sociologist, calls Retrospective Consent. In rough terms, Giddings’ idea is to force people into enslaving themselves. India and Pakistan accomplish this in Kashmir through periodical elections. Second, the narratives of Kashmir’s active resistance movement are falsified by, well, making it disappear. Cloaking the movement under a fistfight between India and Pakistan, Kashmir’s resilience is erased-out and focus is laid on sort of classic imperial battle to rule over a “savage population”. Kashmiris “cannot represent themselves, they must be represented” seems to be a common stand of both the contestants. Nawaz Sharif, the Pakistani premier, recently echoed this belief while announcing that, “after India and Pakistan, United States is the third most important party in solving this conflict.” Anything missing? Yes, the powerless Kashmiris.
India’s self-fulfilling tornados of narrators meanwhile try to dissolve the indigenous resistance of Kashmir into an external phenomenon. Although, people from as far as Afghanistan have fought the repressive Indian rule in Kashmir, the genesis of our movement is wholly indigenous. Foreign fighters started trickling into Kashmir after 90s while Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, the first nationalist group, was established by two Kashmiris in 1977.
Hours after Modi’s visit, Indian occupying forces killed a 22 year old demonstrator in Srinagar.
More recently, in the spring of 2010, when Arab Spring was months away, Kashmiri teenagers filled the streets with stones in their hands and songs of freedom on their lips. 122 young Kashmiris lost their lives but Kashmir is still portrayed solely as a “bone of contention” between India and Pakistan. Dehumanization has its types. Kashmiris are mere ossifications. Not only are we occupied, killed, dispossessed but our discourses and identities are monopolized and appropriated into the master-discourses of India and Pakistan’s geopolitics, the states that have turned into undeclared empires since their independence in 1947. India enacts colonial legislations in Kashmir while Pakistan, in the part they’ve occupied, demands absolute loyalty for the metropolitan.
After 68 years of brutal colonization, from the position of what some might call a subaltern, today I want to pose this important question. Can a Kashmiri Speak? Is the world ready to listen? Or, are we merely the grass that’s worthy of being crushed and deserves no attention in the fight between two bulls with nuclear balls?
Timelapse - Tarsar Marsar (Kashmir, India) from Praphull on Vimeo.
Timelapse of trek to Tarsar-Marsar lakes in Jammu and Kashmir, India.
Combined from 1134 images taken over 4 days using Canon EOS 550D 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens and 50mm f/1.8 lens
Masaan - A must watch. Some true emotions on screen. Tales of small town people and their struggle to get out of grief, entwine at Sangam - metaphorically and literally! Go watch if you can handle true emotions and if you can appreciate true acting. Not for the Shahrukh, Salman fan types - you’ll be disappointed.
It's one of those nights when the dreams are keeping me awake. I've been working like crazy for past 1 month with no regard for my health. The fact that I wasted first 6 years of my career being lazy and didn't achieve anything is eating me alive. Just checked my homepage and realized I haven't written anything here for a long time. In fact, I haven't done a lot of things lately that made me feel good and confident. It's time to change that.
At my place, when a person dies, we light up a diya at home, which is supposed to glow for days. Someone would cut the tip when too much of it has burnt to ash, someone would put more oil when oil level is low. Someone is always there by the side of it. It burns through day and night. The shadows of its fluttering tip at night look like an irregularly beating heart. It glows to the maximum and then the glow dims down, with shadows changing in shape and size with every passing second. There's nothing to learn from it, nothing to analyze in this. The diya keeps burning and glowing.
I greeted myself Happy Birthday a couple of minutes ago, and a chill ran through my body as I said so. Twenty-five years, that's quite some time. I do not expect anything big for this milestone day, it's enough that I have people around me whose company I enjoy. Last year, I wasn't even this lucky for the only meal I had that day was a maggi and spent the day (and night) home alone. This time, I am on a deadline from office that I'm surely gonna miss and so the day doesn't promise anything to look forward to (except maybe some scoldings from my managers). Still, there is a lot that awaits in the days and months and years to come, and the life is gonna take a turn this day forward.
I was excited when I turned 18 and I feel a similar excitement about the time to come. I feel a little depressed at the moment, and I have no clue why is that, but I'm sure the feeling will pass after a nap.
To the quarter of a century that just passed by, adieu!
To the day that marks new responsibilities, new opportunities and new experiences, cheers!
They say dreams are the ones that don’t let you sleep at night. I’ve had countless nights in my life when my dreams have kept me awake. At one point of time, I used to be so sleep deprived due to these dreams of mine that I would be completely restless during day. I had so many ideas and motivation, but no energy to actually do anything about them, because I would be tired of not getting enough sleep. And then, one fine day, I stopped dreaming.
I stopped dreaming because I was getting ideas, and wasn’t achieving anything, not because I wasn’t capable of achieving, but because I was too busy conceiving the ideas. My life has been very calm since. There have been no dreams, no goals and almost 3 years have passed since I last did anything that would content me. I have done things, seen places, met people. But there is a void that’s making me think!
I need to find a reason to stay alive. I need something to look forward to when I wake up every morning. I need to find a way to channelize my energy. I have to start dreaming again and actually do something to make those dreams a reality.
