Sanchit Gupta's Blog - Posts Tagged "kashmir"
The Loss of Childhood
A few months ago, the game Pokemon became a rage on our smartphones. It had fictional characters around us that we needed to find, give a home to, and nurture with potions and power boosters to help them grow. Along the same time, a post that went viral on the internet was about Syrian children posing as Pokemon characters, asking the world to find them. There was one touching image in particular of a boy holding a Pikachu placard in his hands, trying to smile as he did so, because I think he liked the character. I too liked it, and while I went raging about trying to find my beloved Pikachu on the streets, I think that boy wished someone would think of him as their Pikachu and take him home.
I don’t know who that boy was and what he had lost. The continuity of a war I didn’t want to understand had made me so immune that I speculated and soon forgot. What I couldn’t forget was that I too was a boy once, and how would I have felt if I had lost my family and home at that age? There won’t be any more birthday parties for him, he won’t play with the neighborhood kids when the evenings dawned, he won’t be caught cheating during exams. No, it was not just an attack on his home. What that boy had truly lost was his childhood. He would have wanted to ask questions, but from whom? He must have forged an enemy in his heart, a nameless one. Yet, even though I could read and witness that, maybe I could not really understand it very well. Maybe because as someone who had seen a very comfortable childhood, what could I have known about the pain of losing one?
It was when I was in Kashmir, the heaven on earth, that the anonymous boy on the internet came alive on the streets. I could see mute and stoic boys and girls who wanted to laugh and cry, I could hear things they wanted to say but kept hidden behind their little concealed smiles, just as the one in that photograph. Children of army men who went to school every day fearing whether the bus they travelled in would be blown up, children of civilians who couldn’t play cricket without knowing if their playground may become a battleground soon, children of Kashmiri Pandits languishing in camps of Jammu who seemed to have forgotten how Kahwa is made. Children who had lost their childhood, who were not on either side of the conflict, yet had grown to choose one. A side where all of them were right and all of them were wrong. I could see that the Syrian boy in that viral post and his nameless enemy too were no one but the same children.
The Tree with a Thousand Apples is the story of three such children who don’t just exist in Kashmir, they live with us and around us. They don’t yet know the world they are in and all they want is for us to find them. All they want is to be our beloved Pikachu. They know that if we don’t give them a home today, there will be another boy in the future sometime, holding the same placard again in his hands. The characters from the game may change but the child would not. They don’t want to tell us any of their grand stories because they have none. All they want us to know is that their childhoods long for a birthday party and neighborhood games, that they are just three children who were asked questions they didn’t know the answers to—they are just children like us…
I don’t know who that boy was and what he had lost. The continuity of a war I didn’t want to understand had made me so immune that I speculated and soon forgot. What I couldn’t forget was that I too was a boy once, and how would I have felt if I had lost my family and home at that age? There won’t be any more birthday parties for him, he won’t play with the neighborhood kids when the evenings dawned, he won’t be caught cheating during exams. No, it was not just an attack on his home. What that boy had truly lost was his childhood. He would have wanted to ask questions, but from whom? He must have forged an enemy in his heart, a nameless one. Yet, even though I could read and witness that, maybe I could not really understand it very well. Maybe because as someone who had seen a very comfortable childhood, what could I have known about the pain of losing one?
It was when I was in Kashmir, the heaven on earth, that the anonymous boy on the internet came alive on the streets. I could see mute and stoic boys and girls who wanted to laugh and cry, I could hear things they wanted to say but kept hidden behind their little concealed smiles, just as the one in that photograph. Children of army men who went to school every day fearing whether the bus they travelled in would be blown up, children of civilians who couldn’t play cricket without knowing if their playground may become a battleground soon, children of Kashmiri Pandits languishing in camps of Jammu who seemed to have forgotten how Kahwa is made. Children who had lost their childhood, who were not on either side of the conflict, yet had grown to choose one. A side where all of them were right and all of them were wrong. I could see that the Syrian boy in that viral post and his nameless enemy too were no one but the same children.
The Tree with a Thousand Apples is the story of three such children who don’t just exist in Kashmir, they live with us and around us. They don’t yet know the world they are in and all they want is for us to find them. All they want is to be our beloved Pikachu. They know that if we don’t give them a home today, there will be another boy in the future sometime, holding the same placard again in his hands. The characters from the game may change but the child would not. They don’t want to tell us any of their grand stories because they have none. All they want us to know is that their childhoods long for a birthday party and neighborhood games, that they are just three children who were asked questions they didn’t know the answers to—they are just children like us…
The Voice of a Victim
Social media today is the place for the fourth battle of Panipat and the third world war. If Napoleon was born today, his Waterloo would have been a poorly written tweet and in the kingdom of Troy, Achilles’ heel would have been a troll.
In all these battles, however, that day of yore and today of gore, the tramlines of the warrior and the victim are defined the same. Here is King Geoffrey slashing the ghastly head of the hapless Ned Stark. The King laughs and dances in all his glory, the crowd chants on, the attacker and the supporters of the attack are all joyous. And amidst them, his daughters look on, one from the crowd and one from the podium where his head rolls away like a bloody hairy ball.They are the victims- silent, crushed, weak and voiceless.
Be it in the badlands of Syria or the goodlands of downtown New York, be it in the supposed heaven of Kashmir or the supposed hell of Boko Haram, when a head is rolled there is always someone who cheers and someone who grieves. When King Geoffrey executes Ned Stark, law is the attacker and a supposed outlaw the victim. When the night’s watch ambushes Jon Snow, outlaws are the attackers and law the victim. The insurgents of Boko Haram rejoice, the extremists of ISIS do, the white supremacists of New York chant the Christmas Carol for Trump, the separatists of Kashmir arouse the crowds, the ones in Chechen form human cordons, the chest thumping GauRakshaks wash the cows with human blood. Everyone has their leaders leading a revolution, everyone has their followers proud of being a part of one. The path is ominous, but they all have a reason. The law and the outlaw clash. Who is the attacker and who is the victim? Who is a revolutionary and who is an insurgent?
It is confounding. It should fill us with reason to believe that the law will always take the right course. But then, 100 years of slavery and 400 years of colonialism have been products of law. Gandhi thrown on the railways platform was an act supported by law. Warriors like us, the progenies of Achilles, are fighting it out in the fourth battle of Panipat. We all have a voice, we exercise it, we lead the attack on each other, we bleed, we fight back, we are sure we will win. We forget the victim, the one who hasn’t yet fought back, the one who is weak and disarmed, the one who has no voice.
When it comes to Kashmir, who then is this voiceless victim? Is it the Kashmiri Pandits exiled in their own country? Or the Kashmiri civilians blinded by pellet guns? Or the armed forces with their camps burnt away by a coward enemy overnight? The attacker is rejoicing, laughing away hysterically like King Geoffrey, at both our bravado and cowardice. The people at his kingdom are chanting the king’s name. And the victim is lost, weak and voiceless in the jungles. We the followers have a voice. Outside the law and the outlaw, we have a choice to give our voice to either the victim or the attacker. Or, we can wait for the victim herself to become an attacker. Then what will we do?
In all these battles, however, that day of yore and today of gore, the tramlines of the warrior and the victim are defined the same. Here is King Geoffrey slashing the ghastly head of the hapless Ned Stark. The King laughs and dances in all his glory, the crowd chants on, the attacker and the supporters of the attack are all joyous. And amidst them, his daughters look on, one from the crowd and one from the podium where his head rolls away like a bloody hairy ball.They are the victims- silent, crushed, weak and voiceless.
Be it in the badlands of Syria or the goodlands of downtown New York, be it in the supposed heaven of Kashmir or the supposed hell of Boko Haram, when a head is rolled there is always someone who cheers and someone who grieves. When King Geoffrey executes Ned Stark, law is the attacker and a supposed outlaw the victim. When the night’s watch ambushes Jon Snow, outlaws are the attackers and law the victim. The insurgents of Boko Haram rejoice, the extremists of ISIS do, the white supremacists of New York chant the Christmas Carol for Trump, the separatists of Kashmir arouse the crowds, the ones in Chechen form human cordons, the chest thumping GauRakshaks wash the cows with human blood. Everyone has their leaders leading a revolution, everyone has their followers proud of being a part of one. The path is ominous, but they all have a reason. The law and the outlaw clash. Who is the attacker and who is the victim? Who is a revolutionary and who is an insurgent?
It is confounding. It should fill us with reason to believe that the law will always take the right course. But then, 100 years of slavery and 400 years of colonialism have been products of law. Gandhi thrown on the railways platform was an act supported by law. Warriors like us, the progenies of Achilles, are fighting it out in the fourth battle of Panipat. We all have a voice, we exercise it, we lead the attack on each other, we bleed, we fight back, we are sure we will win. We forget the victim, the one who hasn’t yet fought back, the one who is weak and disarmed, the one who has no voice.
When it comes to Kashmir, who then is this voiceless victim? Is it the Kashmiri Pandits exiled in their own country? Or the Kashmiri civilians blinded by pellet guns? Or the armed forces with their camps burnt away by a coward enemy overnight? The attacker is rejoicing, laughing away hysterically like King Geoffrey, at both our bravado and cowardice. The people at his kingdom are chanting the king’s name. And the victim is lost, weak and voiceless in the jungles. We the followers have a voice. Outside the law and the outlaw, we have a choice to give our voice to either the victim or the attacker. Or, we can wait for the victim herself to become an attacker. Then what will we do?
