Kashmir is experiencing a tumult of another nature these days. Life has virtually come to a stand still. The cycle of violence is taking a heavy toll on human lives. While there is no accountability for the barrel, the stones are duly accounted and audited for by the administration.  How pathetic is a mindset that refuses to give value to innocent lives, hide behind a power veil and speak arrogance on news channels. It may not unnerve them but every time an innocent is killed, the wound within the Kashmir psyche goes beyond balm.

All around there is a noise that I can make nothing of. The sounds echo all around but fail to make any meaning. When you fail to understand and comprehend the mind fails to reason and decide. My voice gets lost in the din of cries that reverberate outside. The procession has grown by now and everybody wants to be heard. Can we have somebody who represents us all? 

I am caged at home and seem to have lost track of which day of the week it is. Every day starts with a bright morning only to wind up in a ‘not much to do with’ dull day with mind restarting for where it left, searching for reasons, questions, parables and answers; answers I don’t really have.

I hear a 9 year old has been shot. I try to imagine the fall of the tiny soul but am left with tangled thoughts. Cannot imagine how a human mind could have decided to pull the trigger towards a sapling. I think of the lullabies that his mother would still be singing to him. The cradle would still not be shifted to the attic in his home. His questions would have still been responded with smiles and his childish action with joyous awe by parents. At this age childhood is full of bliss, unending joys and innocence. How many of us would want to rewind to that innocent past of our lives where life was not demanding, deceit and sin were unknown. Innocence seems to have fallen to bullets across my motherland. I could see the same innocence in 9 year old, 15 year old, 17 year old : I cannot count them  as a number. They are innocence trampled and without guilt. No reasons. No reasons whatsoever!
With devil having a free run in my homeland, my heart is as heavy as lead. I want to speak, to talk to somebody. I call my school days friend in India mainland. Our school days used to be full of fun and joys, used to share all emotions and thoughts with each other. His migration some decades back along with family and community send us in different directions. My call finds him home watching some ‘gadget guru’ a tech show on some news channel. I talk about the killings in Kashmir, he does not seem much interested. I tell him about teens and children being killed, seems no great news for him as he in engrossed in the TV. I drop the call. His perceptions may be very blunt and foggy but the priorities out there are clear in front of me.

Seems we have to carry our pain and our burden all alone. Friends have been lost out there and those who may have claimed to be ready to nurse our pain have since erased the promises made on rainy day vapor covered glass. It is our individual fight with the evil.

On a peculiar day I need to attend, I got an emergency (or could say orders). As I move out from my home and drive through a secure road, the ghost town haunts me. The cheers of the population, the smiling faces, the rhythm of life in Kashmir – everything is gone. I hear some of it has been exported to the other regions of our land. We seem to have become fodder; some say for the roaring cannons, some say for the other man's industrial units. In both the cases we are being consumed, either as a commodity or as a military experiment unit. Who bothers beyond the valley? For  them we are nothing but units of trade.

As I continue to venture out of home, I can only spot men in fatigues, in khaki: strange faces, who stare at you, question you and impose on you. No amount of explaining and reasoning can change the frown on their faces. My professional credentials become my passport to move ahead. I move on a deserted road. I search for inhabitants but see no one. It's all desolated.
 
Back home in the evening I am informed that essentials are running out. I am reminded of a news item that appeared in a local daily about the ordeal of a family whose only bread earner could not bear to see his kids go hungry and decided to venture out with is auto rickshaw to earn some money to feed his family. He encountered a khaki machismo. I wonder if any of the affluent in his neighborhood had bothered to help him. I momentarily forgot the demands of my own family. I suppose these stories would have been repeated across the habitations around us.

I am reminded by my wife that it has been a long time since our daughter had any interaction with school books and that I need to take up the initiative. But seriously, I surely have lost touch with school lessons since. I need to teach myself her school lessons first and then only can I do any justice to the reintroduction of books with her. I take her books in my hand but my mind is blank. I cannot see anything in these pages, my thoughts have restarted from where they left in the morning searching for reasons, questions, parables and answers; answers I don’t really have.

I am caged, but my mind refuses to stop searching for answers. My mind does not want to stop the quest, it will continue the search.
I refuse to be caged. My mind refuses.

Lastupdate on : Mon, 26 Jul 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
Lastupdate on : Mon, 26 Jul 2010 18:30:00 GMT
Lastupdate on : Tue, 27 Jul 2010 00:00:00 IST