Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Ashiq Hussain SRINAGAR: Sameer Ahmad (name changed) was hardly 10 years-old when his uncle, a Hizbul Mujahideen militant, was killed in an encounter with security forces in the outskirts of Srinagar in 1999. The killing also shattered the lively-person Sameer was. He went into depression, left school and more dangerously took to smoking. Now 23 years Sameer drives an auto and has become a chain smoker. Medical experts are worried at the rate people are taking...
Posted 78 days ago.
Rahiba R Parveen SRINAGAR: "Mamma has gone to take rest. She will be back on Eid," says three-year-old Midha, when one asks about her mother Shazia Majeed, a librarian at the Islamic University of Science and Technology. One could easily have believed the child, but for the hard fact that Shazia won't be back: She was found hanging in her kitchen last November. Another Eid was only days away then and Midha was still waiting for...
Posted 81 days ago.
Nausheen Naseer SRINAGAR: Spread over 60 acres of land, on the banks of Srinagar’s Nigeen Lake lies a quiet leper colony whose existence seems to have been forgotten. Small mud houses with walls crumbling slowly to dust and lazy cows tethered out to graze near them, Bahrur, Kashmir’s last leper colony, looks more like a slum. An unkempt graveyard in the middle serves as a reminder that death is the only relief for the inhabitants of the colony who have...
Posted 88 days ago.
Today is Feb 21, International Mother Language Day - an observance held annually worldwide since 2000 to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. The date represents the day in 1952 when students demonstrating for recognition of their language, Bangla, as one of the two national languages of the then Pakistan, were shot and killed...
Posted 90 days ago.
Ishfaq Tantry JAGEER, SOPORE: Ghalib Guru, 15-year-old son of Afzal Guru, is sifting through newspapers, carrying news related to his father. He turns to his maternal grandfather and says, “Dada now all the newspapers describe Jageer as the native village of papa.” Ghalib’s maternal grandfather Ghulam Mohammad Bhuroo has been receiving visitors at a large tent erected in the front lawns of Afzal’s house in Jageer village, who drop in for...
Posted 92 days ago.
NEW DELHI: Arguably one of the toughest engineering challenges in hand, Railways plans to complete the Chenab bridge in Jammu and Kashmir by 2016, making it the world's highest rail bridge. The arch-shaped bridge across Chenab river-bed in Reasi district, which will be five times the height of Qutab Minar at 359 m above river bed, will connect Baramulla and Srinagar to Jammu via Udhampur-Katra-Qazigund covering the entire route in about seven hours. The ambitious project, which fell...
Posted 94 days ago.
LEH: Stanzin Thinless has just made an alarming admission. "I can't swim," he says. Alarming because we're both floating at a rapid pace downstream, caught up in the cold, caffe latte-coloured swirl of the Zanskar River. It's the end of our wild, bucking, three-hour white-water rafting trip and we've just traded raft for river to cool off. We can float effortlessly in our life vests and wetsuits, but already I'm shivering in the freezing water that comes from glaciers on the Great...
Posted 96 days ago.
The all-girl band from the Valley may have quit amid plenty of debate but it has not stopped the hundreds of others who have made a place for themselves as singers and rappers. Khursheed Wani brings you a report of how music was and will continue to be an integral part of the Valley It was a misty December afternoon. The streets in Srinagar were not too busy with people preferring to stay...
Posted 101 days ago.
Rakib Altaf SRINAGAR: India's Hindi film industry, the Bollywood has opened its arms to the all-girl rock band of Kashmir which caused an outrage in radical sections of the Muslim-majority valley. The band, comprising three school girls, disbanded after abusive comments on the Facebook and also a reproof from the grand mufti of Kashmir, Basheeruddin Ahmed. The police on Tuesday have registered an FIR and are looking or those who posted intimidating...
Posted 106 days ago.
Rakib Altaf SRINAGAR: Activists supported them, the chief minister tweeted in their favour, but then a statement against them by the valley's chief cleric ended it all. Just over a month after its debut performance during a competition, Pragaash, Kashmir's all-eve band has finally called it quits. "Just tell everyone that we have quit," Noma Bhatt, the band's lead vocalist confirmed through a text message. "We are no more a band." The girls were in the...
Posted 107 days ago.
