Kashmir Life

by Majid Maqbool In a seminal essay written as early as 1950, Akhtar Mohi-ud-Din urged writers to side with majority of people, not power, if...

Abducted, she spent more than a year as a sex slave entertaining drug addicts, paedophiles and other criminals who brutalized her childhood. She was...

As entrepreneurship in Kashmir takes roots, a businessmen is in the process of manufacturing biscuits from water chestnuts. Haroon Mirani reports. A Srinagar based company...

Amitav Ghosh referred to Agha Shahid Ali as the ‘closest that Kashmir had to a national poet’. Recently America’s prestigious and largest publishing house,...

As Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) entered poll fray in 2008 assembly elections, the Amarnath land controversy had polarized voters in Jammu. The Hindutva card was the best this right wing party could have played. BJP played the card and grabbed 11 seats in J&K’s legislative assembly.
Leelekaran Sharma, who led the Amarnath Sanghrash Samiti during protests in Jammu, Kathua and Samba districts of the state, entered Parliament election fray on a BJP ticket hoping to cash on the polarization once again. But the land controversy had already boiled down and Sharma was shooting his foot by joining politics.
Before the elections, Leelakaran had publicly announced that his mission was completely apolitical. By jumping into elections, he was actually making his intensions of a career in politics clear. This annoyed many voters who had earlier seen a selfless leader in Sharma.

 Ameen, once a student of History and Commerce, has moved far ahead of the times when he would vend dress materials cycling through the...

by Zubair A Dar On Friday, May 15, when Ghulam Ali Majboor breathed his last, it was not the death of an artist alone, it...

An otherwise antibiotic and antioxidant, Garlic coming through the trans-LoC trade has become a headache for the government of India. R S Gull reports...

Hamidullah Dar

Once a popular mode of transport connecting cities and towns in the valley, the Tonga or horse-cart has lost its sheen over the years – mainly due to proliferation of automobiles and in part due to apathy of authorities
While in Srinagar the Tonga has bitten the dust, in suburbs and towns, the vintage mode is still available. A horse driving a cart with the whipping driver standing in front and at least five passengers on the seats is partly visible on the streets in suburbs.
Although government tried to remove the Tongas from roads in towns owing to their obstructive speed and unusual stoppage, instead deciding to compensate the Tonga drivers by providing them vehicle permits and monetary benefits, the drivers are hardly impressed.