JK PANORAMA PRINT final

JK PANORAMA
VOL-I, ISSUE-1 DECEMBER-2015 | Budgam
OPINION
“I’LL GO TO ANOTHER COUNTRY”
(Kashmir can’t be conceived as being outside of
that larger geopolitical continuum of which India
and Pakistan are the main poles)
SHANTIVEER KAUL
he closing lines of the poem 'The City'
written by Greek poet Constantine
TCavafy have haunted me ever since I
first read them - over three decades ago.
These lines, in fact making up the second of a
two stanza poem beginning with the phrase
'I'll go to another country' are worth
reproducing every time one thinks, breathes,
reads or writes Kashmir. Doing all four here
and now, I reproduce them in the hope that the
reader of this piece partakes of the power of
these lines as also the hope that shines
through the seeming despair they project at
first reading.
“You won't find a new country, won't find
another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old in the
same neighbourhoods, Turn grey in these
same houses.
You'll always end up in this city.
Don't hope for things elsewhere: there's no
ship for you, there's no road. Now that you've
wasted your life here, in this small corner,
You've destroyed it everywhere in the world.”
I could never have summoned better lines to
describe all that is Kashmir and Kashmiri
today.
These lines are as much a record of the
loss felt by Kashmiris in the act of physical
'hijrat', hopefully temporary, during the course
of over two decades of a turmoil not of their
making as is it of loss, hopefully not
permanent, of values and traditions nurtured
over centuries and generations of sociocultural
evolution – a social cost not as well
documented – that actually is the defining
characteristic of being a Koshur in the first
place.
When one Kashmiri meets another
fellow Kashmiri anywhere in the whole wide
world each of them, after getting past
identifiers of nationality, geographical locus
and other such things, discovers something of
Kashmir peeping through or out of the other.
One is not talking about that much flaunted
neonism 'Kashmiriyat' here but some mutual
or defining characteristic, some shared
historical memory or even common
acquaintance with a person, place or thing.
With that discovery of a Kashmir ensconced
in either breast, both Kashmiris bask in the
warm glow of unexpressed camaraderie. This
is a common enough occurrence and many a
Kashmiri would have experienced it while
having been outside of Kashmir. But is it not
true of every community or group of people?
We Kashmiris may well feel it to be our
exclusive property but the phenomenon is
pretty commonplace. It happens with
Punjabis, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Sindhis as
much as it does with Uzbeks, Tajiks, Uighurs
and Mongols – pretty regularly and in a
similar manner too. And often the
phenomenon gets projected in a way that it
envelopes whole continents and transcends
constituent nationalities or sub-nationalities,
linguistic cognates and topographical
affinities. A personal flashback of over a
dozen years ago would serve to illustrate how.
After a couple of bland and largely tasteless
meals at the very outset of my maiden visit to
the Continent I was forced to seek out an
'Indian' restaurant to rescue my nearly dead
taste buds. The Indian restaurant I was
directed to was called 'Karachi' and was run
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