I AND MY WORDS

The Redrawn Map (Courtesy: India Today) In 1947, the violence singing Hindus in the newly created West Pakistan had forced a whole bunch of them across the border with the then independent state of Jammu and Kashmir. The forces of then Maharaja Hari Singh halted their progress, and had started to deliberate on the potential rehabilitation, given cultural affinities, when the invasion of the Pakistani army irregulars happened, leading to an imbroglio on their status that was never resolved completely. They got the right to vote for the Lok Sabha elections, but under the then extant Article 370 and the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir, they had no resident status in the state. Their only crime perhaps was to choose to be Indians. Cut to the 1950s, with the renewed status of the Wazir-e-Azam of Jammu and Kashmir of Sheikh Abdullah, and Valmikis were called into the state to be sanitation workers. Incidentally, the idea must have spawned from how Pakistan even today only hir

Many Indians Are Still Obsessed with Pakistan (Picture Credit: India TV News) There was unnecessary coverage earlier this week on the visit of Imran Khan, the purported Prime Minister of Pakistan, to the United States of America. The snub given by Donald Trump, whereby no senior officials welcomed Mr. Khan and the casual low level audience eventually granted by Mr. Trump was taken over the top by many of our media personnel, though the reaction was seen from varying perspectives. While a nationalist bunch has clearly been crowing victory as a vindication of India's position, another set has again said that Mr. Khan should be given a chance by India, given the fact that he is literally the proxy for the Gernails of Pakistan Armed forces, and the power center lies in the GHQ Rawalpindi. Frankly, either kind of coverage has been a big bore to watch, let alone the extremities about the coverage. It has been bordering on the ridiculous to see people engaging in shouting matches o

Sanjay Gandhi and Indira Gandhi (Source: The Print) On 25 June 1975, India saw the extension of the external emergency, imposed since 1965 into the domestic affairs of India. More than 25 years have passed; yet, the public memory of the Emergency is conspicuous by its absence. It is as if this event, the darkest episode in the memory of India since its long colonial slavery, never happened. There have been no protests by so called liberals against the event. Our youth have no inkling on the events of that horrid night and the subsequent two years of dissent crushing of the worst possible magnitude. The amnesia of this country’s conscience is troublesome to say the least. Few accounts exist of what had transpired apart from the odd memorial of journalists – it is pathetic to note how our so called doyens of media of the time were hand in glove with the establishment of the time. Lal Krishna Advani’s adage - You were asked only to bend, but you crawled – was a tight slap on

While We Bribed Officials for a Scooter, Some People Just Called to get Cars (Image Courtesy: Rediff.com) Yes, even I studied as a ‘Patelian’ back in the day, with the Khan Market in vicinity. And no, I am not part of the OG Khan Market Gang that Sowmya Lakhani so proudly belongs to . The problem with her limited periphery of sight, blinkered by holier than thou attitude, symbolizes all that is wrong with the Khan Market gang. What is this Khan Market gang, one may ask. Let me tell you, being a peripheral player, what it means. Schools like Columba’s, Modern and Sardar Patel were for the longest time populated by the children of New Delhi elite, who actually had extremely privileged lives, and access to several things that people like us living on the periphery of the city did not get. Children in this school are divided by class consciousness of an acute kind, with groups living in bubbles –many of these children faced first world problems, with the others just looking on, some

Image Courtesy: The Wire Public memory is a strange beast. It takes little by way of throttling to erase it easily – restrict the discussion to intellectualism, or ensure a public amnesia about events by erasing the picture and its contents. However, memories of individuals fail to be erased. Truth can compete with official versions and public amnesia, but to what extent? When there is hardly anyone to do anything beyond reproducing the same arguments over and over again, even the proponent, the sufferer of the story is loathe to talk about it. After all, what does one achieve by scratching old wounds repeatedly except pain? Marichjhapi is an island in the Sundarbans, and little beyond it is remembered to this day. Any talk of it is merely talk today – absolutely nothing has been done about it to this day. While the Sundarbans is an interesting cultural complexity to study, the island of Marichjhapi hides in its womb the horrific memory of the massacre that took place in 1979. While