The Greengrocer and the Parrot
CAUTION: PR at work
The grindstones of time
Billboard Blight in Srinagar
D?j? vu
Tug of war over central varsity
Blood on the Snow
Ibrahim Wani reads Nobel Laureate and Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s most political novel, Snow.
When snow falls, it blankets and covers the world in whiteness where every colour is erased by white. White homogenizes the world. Then snow melts and disappears. With this the world reverts back to its old ways and forgets the world that was a white expanse.
The novel “Snow” by Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Prize winner synonyms the journey of snow with human emotion. In this novel everything is in a state of constant change, in a state of unbecoming like snow, and thus snow here becomes the reference point of everything human beings are capable of. The novel vividly catches the divides in Turkey and the constant struggles of identities between the Islam and the West, the Oriental and the secular Kemalist, and the Kurd and the Turk.
This novel revolves around Ka, a lonely poet, an exilee Turk visiting Kars, a Kurdish town in Turkey as a journalist for a Turkish newspaper. He is to cover the city elections and a rise in the suicides by young girls allegedly over a headscarf ban in educational institutions. The headscarf ban issue has polarized Kars and the suicides by girls unable to bear the humiliation of not wearing a headscarf to school have only deepened the fault-lines between religion and the secularist state.
You’re It
In despair is the decline of mind and soul
We were taught to revel in simple pleasures, grew up with radio and black and white TV, our fun for life was set without video or virtual reality games,
Our future, who decides it?
Police reforms are urgent
Dr Raja Muzaffar Bhat
Terror laws are being seen as a weapon to fight terrorism, but what about those who practice the law? Is our police still not a professional force? In 2006, the Supreme Court of India came out with some police reform directives in Prakash Singh vs Union of India case. J&K is the only state which has not taken any concrete steps towards reforming its police force.
Conspiracy theory, indeed
Tarique A Bhat
Franklin D Roosevelt declares, “In politics, nothing happens ‘by accident.’ If it happened, you can bet it was ‘planned’ that way.”
Is there is a methodical pattern in recent unrest in Kashmir which travelled from Shopian to Baramulla? The answer is a resounding “yes”! Many of us believe that the gore Shopian rape and murder incidents and brutally violent response to the protestors were aimed at disturbing the Kashmiri psyche. Chaos, instability and great civil unrest are the natural results. Anyone who would argue that it is a case of black and white, without shades of grey, does indeed require a snooze.
Simplistically comparing the developments in last two months, there is a clear dynamic at work spurred on by a popular discontent. The cry for justice to rape and murder victims remains unanswered. New Delhi is pretending not to notice there really is a problem at all.
Conspiracy theory, indeed. The empire, political players etc., always conspire, and no less so when people are taking to the streets with great courage to express grievances.
Rip the rapist
Among the gory crimes against women, rape is the most heinous one; it murders the soul of the victim. The man commits the crime to subjugate, suppress and force a woman into submission. Since ages, rape has least been about satisfying carnal desire, and more about gender supremacy and show of manliness. The planet earth being male dominated the womenfolk is supposed to be submissive, humble and any deviation from this set pattern warrants punishment, rape and sometimes even death.
Rape is not a crime committed just by lesser mortal, the deprived or anti-social. In our times highly placed and most powerful Bill Clinton molested his office assistant during his Arkansas governorship, mighty Mike Tyson committed rape many a times. Even age is no bar. In 2006 a 25 year old son of a top industrialist violated a woman in his mid fifties. More recently, the “shining” star of Bollywood Shiny Ahuja blackened his face by outraging the modesty of his maid.
Ansari’s Convocation Address
Dr Gull Muhammad Wani
The fact that Vice President of the Republic of India concluded his convocation address by quoting Edmund Burke that “the only thing necessary for triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” is an intellectual provocation to people in the arena of public life, academia and other sectors to explore multiple meanings of his convocation address.
The central idea of Hamid Ansari’s convocation address was to chalk out a vision for India in 21st century in which he found that smaller identities have to coexist with the larger identity that India constitutes. He believes that in a composite nationalism, the smaller identities can only be integrated with the larger identity and there is no scope for assimilation. He examined the issues of deprivation and alienation and found that it is the powerlessness which drives out the smaller identities and pushes them into the alienation trap.