Category: Enough said

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The Kashmir problem

What can we do to help the people in flood-hit Kashmir, before the temperature drops and reaching the area becomes next to impossible?
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

This is one of the worst tragedies to have hit the Kashmir Valley and its adjoining districts. I’m sure all of us are pained to see the television shots of the hapless trapped populace struggling to survive against all odds.

I have been wondering about the fragility of modern techniques and technology. Of what use are our modern methods of connectivity and retrieval, when landlines and mobile phones are not working, when thousands of people are stranded, and when all the so-called sophisticated modern structures in the area could not withstand nature’s fury for even seconds.

At least people are trying to help. As humans, we need to reach out immediately, without waiting for our political leaders to take corrective action. I think doctors could travel in small groups and attend to survivors, civil society could rush volunteers and teams carrying tents, blankets, food packets, bottled water, medicines, clothes and whatever else they can spare.

Whatever happens, help must reach fast. It is now autumn in Kashmir, and within the next couple of weeks, temperatures are expected to fall and the situation will worsen.

Of course, it will take a long time for Kashmir to really bounce back, even come back to the way things were. For once the situation reaches a semblance of normalcy, the restoration process will take a really long time. Rescue teams and the authorities will face a daunting task – infrastructure will have to be restored, houses will have to be rebuilt, the homeless rehabilitated, the dead and missing accounted for, the sinking roads repaired, and above all, the mess and the rot that inevitably accompany floods will have to be tackled urgently.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

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Where we reward those who must be punished

Honest voices trying to shed light on atrocities are muted in our country, while blatant criminals are given Z Security.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

This sure is a strange phenomenon. What is the logic that prompts successive Governments to reward criminals with immunity and protection?

Take the case of Sangeet Som (in picture above), one of the main accused in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. The newspapers say he is due to get Z Security by the establishment. It seems to me that today, all one requires to be protected is to belong to a Right Wing organisation.

Does this mean that our laws are to be used only for commoners such as you and I? If you’re a politician in India, you could commit abominable acts of criminality and not just be left untouched, but also subsequently garlanded!

And then there is the story of Shubradeep Chakravorty.

Shubradeep (in pic on right) was a New Delhi-based journalist who later became a documentary filmmaker. He passed away here on Monday this week.Shubradeep Chakravorty I had met him and his wife Meera soon after he had made the controversial documentary After The Storm. The documentary focussed on seven young Muslim men who had been jailed on terror charges, only to be proven innocent and later acquitted from various courts. However, by then, they had been ruined on every possible front.

The documentary also highlighted how the men did not receive any compensation from the Government. I remember a comment that Shubradeep made on the sidelines of the film, “These seven (in the film) are a small number. At one 1,000 innocent young Muslim men could be jailed in India, implicated with terror charges on their heads…”

Last autumn, soon after the Muzaffarnagar riots, he and Meera had travelled extensively in the area, making another startling documentary, In Dino Muzaffarnagar, on the ‘political truths’ behind the incident. As was to be expected, the documentary ran into trouble from the start – it was banned after an initial screening at Mumbai’s Prithvi Theatre, then refused clearance for screening by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). He applied to the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT) against the CBFC decision, but that was also turned down.

Shubradeep was not one to give up, and he was determined to fight the “gagging order on the film by the Modi establishment.” However, the stresses of the case caused him to suffer a brain haemorrhage and he slipped into a coma, finally dying at a young 42 years of age this week.

I hope his widow, Meera, carries on his legacy and tries her best to show his documentaries to a larger audience.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy www.thehindu.com, www.flickr.com)

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Good deeds do bear fruit

A heartening little story started in 2002 in Kashmir by Nighat Shafi, has borne fruit in the most wonderful way.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

Last week, I wrote about looking for the positives in our lives, and more particularly, about finding positivity through books.

Humour me while I list out opportunities for book lovers to get up and close and personal with books, their authors and everything related to reading and writing.

From August 23, a book fair comes to the national capital. September, especially, is going to be a good month for literature, with several literature festivals taking off all over the country. The three-day long Bangalore Literature Festival begins from September 26, and the Kasauli Literature Festival will take place in the second week of October.

Needless to say, this time the focus of many literature festivals will be Khushwant Singh – his writings, his books, his life and times. Also, smaller festivals will take place in other cities and towns. An exciting time is coming up for book lovers!

The other positive I am noting is this: sensitive women are no longer sitting back and simply wallowing in their sorrows and upheavals, but they are stepping out of their comfort zones and handling several crises in their own ways.

Take for example, Nighat Shafi. I met her in Srinagar in 2002 when I was in the Valley working on my book on Kashmir. I was interacting with several men and women who were surviving amidst all the odds in the ongoing conflict. While speaking to Nighat, I realised that the upper middle class woman was no ordinary person – she was equipped with amazing foresight and the right amount of empathy towards the growing numbers of orphans in the Valley.

When I met her, she’d already set up an orphanage for children who had been victims of the conflict and left without homes and anchorage. On a visit to the orphanage, I was amazed to see how she had converted a bungalow into a home for about 40 young boys, most of them orphans. They now lived in this well-equipped, middle-class environment and went to an English medium school. I recall Nighat detaling the various odds she faced in setting up the home but that she was determined to save lives. She had invited her friends to help her run the home, and one of them had even come down from Himachal Pradesh to help and counsel some of the children. She’d said at the time that she also wanted to set up a workplace for destitute women.

Why do I mention her now? It seems that Nighat’s dreams and efforts have been realised. Last month’s United Nations Newsletter, UNEWS, carries a full page report on her work and efforts to reach out to women and children of the Kashmir Valley. ‘A better future for underprivileged children in J&K…Education, health care, economic empowerment of women, juvenile justice, relief and rehabilitation of destitutes, a children’s home – that is a wide area to cover by a small organisation, the Help Foundation, Shehjar.

‘This quaint and peaceful place, tucked away in the hills of Srinagar, Kashmir, endeavours to provide a better future for the underprivileged and destitute children and youth,’ says the report.

So Nighat Shafi, chairperson of this Foundation, seems to have been successful in fulfilling her dream. “For years, I dreamt of building an organisation that would help mitigate the decades of suffering of the people of my land…” she says.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant. 

(Picture courtesy week.manoramaonline.com)

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Books are our only pleasure

In times as turbulent as the ones we live in, only the reading habit can divert us and provide much-needed hope.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

There is so much to write, so much to think about even as I write. I wasn’t even too sure about where to begin this column – should I write about the few positives in our country, or talk instead of the destruction in West Asia?

Then I thought – I’ll write on the positives. God alone knows we need to focus on the positives in these turbulent times.

This year is Mulshi Premchand’s 134th birth anniversary, and there is a series of events lined up to celebrate the life and times of this writer, here in the national capital. Even as I muse over Premchand’s contribution to the collective Indian psyche – he wrote endlessly on human relationships amidst an unchanging social fabric – I realise that the biggest source of happiness and positivity for us humans today, is reading.

New Delhi is witnessing at least one book launch a day, and this trend is sure to accelerate with the onset of September, when literary festivals will slowly begin. Recently, the capital was witness to the launch of two new books – a volume on Khushwant Singh to mark his 99th birthday (he would have turned 99 on August 15), and aptly titled 99. The book is a collection of his essays, stories and poems.

The other event was the launch of Srinager-based writer and academic Shahnaz Bashir, who has written his debut novel, The Half Mother. I spoke to the author (in pic on right) Shahnaz Bashirabout the book and its title, and he said, “The story grew up within me. I had always been thinking of writing a small non-fiction piece on disappearances in Kashmir. I thought that every loss in Kashmir was getting lost in the general database of facts and statistics.

“The loss was, and still is, becoming dangerously normal, that, for example, if people do not die, the way they die here, it will be abnormal. That if you write the stories of the disappeared as small newspaper reports maybe a hundred times over, it would look like a normal daily report, and then this normality enters into our psyches. It seems somewhat normal that this person disappeared, that that mother is looking for her son, that a wife is going to be remarried because her husband and couldn’t be found, so forth.

“And then this is my writerly politics to expand the fact as much as possible because I think that so much that is happening to us is not only unheeded but also internationally ignored. We have only statistics, you know, so I believe it is really important to expand it as much as possible and that expansion can largely be done with fiction. In fiction, you would not only write about what actually happened but you would be able to write it much better, that how it happened that happened. And that is how The Half Mother happened,” he explained.

Then there was the launch of Kunwar Natwar Singh’s book, One Life Is Not Enough. The autobiography was bound to create a stir. Given Singh’s background as India’s former External Affairs Minister and a diplomat who had interacted with the Who’s Who in international politics, he obviously has had a long career in Indian politics. He was part of the Congress Government till the Volcker Controversy erupted in 2005, which led to his resignation from the Manmohan Singh cabinet. The man’s writing lineage is also an interesting one – over the years, he has authored several books, such as The Legacy of Nehru, Tales From Modern India, Yours Sincerely, My China Diary, and The Magnificent Maharaja, among others.

At the launch, Natwar spoke at length about the significance of the Congress party in a secular democracy as ours. I am still pondering over this view that there is no alternative to the Congress party for this country.

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy indiatoday.intoday.in, Shahnaz Bashir)

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Why are we silent on Gaza?

Not only is India and its Government not reacting to the Gaza killings, it is punishing protestors here in brutal ways.
by Humra Quraishi

It is a strange situation – the country says nothing about the ongoing crisis in Gaza, where the death toll has already reached over 600 people, but it quickly quashes any form of protests.

I would like to know why security forces killed an unarmed 14-year-old om the Kashmir Valley. The boy was protesting against Israel’s brutal killings of Palestinians in the Gaza settlement. At least the young boy had the courage to speak out on a subject most of us are silent on. But what happened? He got killed for exercising his basic right to protest.

Gaza under attackThe bigger question is: even as besieged Palestinians in Gaza are killed, why is the world so removed from their pain? Where is our human instinct to react to genocides of this scale? Of course, why talk of the world when our own political rulers are not outraged enough?

Minister of External Affairs, Sushma Swaraj, has already categorically stated that the Government will not react to the current Israel-Palestine crisis. Why? Is Israel such a major force in the Indian scheme of things? Is it donating or selling arms technology to India? What is its hold on the Government?

Throughout a long career in journalism, I have been interviewing Palestinian envoys and the severe crises their countrymen have been facing for decades. One of the first Palestinian envoys to India, Dr Khaled El-Sheikh, was a member of the Al-Fatah movement for freedom before he joined the diplomatic service. The turning point came for him when his 18-year-old nephew was killed by the Israeli occupation forces, leaving him devastated. He was succeeded by Osama Musa, a former Air Force Chief of Palestine who was a blunt speaker. After Yasser Arafat’s death, he had said to me, “We are occupied, slaves to the masters – Americans and Israelis – to such an extent that we had to take permission from them to bury our leader Arafat.

He had spoken about America’s role in the long-simmering situation. “Can’t America see the killings taking place on a daily basis? Without America’s support, Israel is zero. Israel cannot survive a day if America does not support it.”

In the mean time, how about if we in India protest in a non-violent way and shun Israel-made goods?

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist and the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy 972mag.com, todaysinsightnews.blogspot.com)

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Dastangoi with Zohra Sehgal

Zohra Sehgal, the country’s longest living actress had seen a turbulent, traumatic life, but always emerged smiling, energetic and vivacious.
Humra Quraishiby Humra Quraishi

I have very fond memories of Zohra Sehgal.

Zohra Sehgal, probably the country’s longest living actress, was defined by her feisty personality, her talent, her grit and her sheer outspokenness. The legendary lady died last week, a couple of months after celebrating her 102nd birthday on April 27, 2014.

On the occasions I interacted with her, I was impressed by her spontaneity, and her disarming habit of talking about even in her personal life. What impressed me even more was that she always told these details in the dastangoi (story telling) format, chatting informally as we’d known each other for years.

She never shied away from revealing the details of the financial lows she experienced after her husband, Kamleshwar Sehgal, killed himself. His death left her and her children traumatised, and brought a highly turbulent phase to her life. At that juncture, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru helped her and her career move on.

Thereafter, she left Bombay to reestablish herself in the UK, only to return to New Delhi a few years later. Back in India, she embarked on another long phase of work, struggle and more twists and turns in the tapestry of her life.

I’ve always wondered – in the age of biopics and the fact that the film industry is always looking for good subjects, why hasn’t anyone made a film on the life and times of ZohraZohra Sehgal yet?

A few years ago, in the summer of 2012, the book Zohra Sehgal: ‘Fatty’ was released. It is written by her daughter Kiran (former spouse of artist Jatin Das) who is an accomplished dancer, and offers a deep look at the life of Zohra Sehgal.

I quote from the forward of this book: “When someone asked me to write a book on my mother, I wondered, ‘What can I write about her? She is my mother and that’s it.’ Most important, I am not a writer – far from it. I can only dance and nothing else! Then the seed was sown and I kept thinking about it as days went by.

“That was in 2006 – almost six years ago. My mind travelled in reverse gear to my childhood; with her, my father Kamleshwar Sehgal, and my brother Pawan, in 41 Pali Hill, Mumbai (then Bombay). What a happy family we were. Her strictness, my father’s laughter, the get-togethers with the neighbours, my friends and I running all over the place, going to school and of course to Prithvi Theatre with her. My first dance lessons and training were with my mother and I learnt a lot from watching her ‘dance’…

“I have written this book not as a historian or as an experienced writer but as a daughter who has been with her mother throughout her mother’s ups and downs, her struggle, her tragedies and her several moods! My mother has also been a great friend to me. We’ve had our fights, disagreements and criticism of each other – more her than me – our jokes on ourselves and on others. It has been wonderful. On 27 April, 2012, my mother Zohra Sehgal completes a hundred years of excitement in dance, theatre, films, television and this journey we call life. She exclaims, ‘I have hundred years of history in me!’ Congratulations, Ammi!”

Humra Quraishi is a senior political journalist based in Gurgaon. She is the author of Kashmir: The Untold Story and co-author of Simply Khushwant.

(Pictures courtesy workdoneinphotoshop.blogspot.com, www.rediff.com)

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