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A review by tejaswini30
Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir by Farah Bashir
5.0
It's more than an year now of living with restrictions due to Covid-19. This has been a traumatizing event for most of us even if the effects are not visible in its entirety. But we still had the internet to keep us busy, the privilege of calling anyone and everyone from our phone; even watch them through video calls to feel that they are physically with us for the moment. We also had the privilege of roaming around in our own house, walking to the stores to get whatever our palate craved to eat, pursue our hobbies to make up for the lost social life.
A lot of the privileged folks have equated our restricted lockdown years with living in Kashmir under military control. Farah Bashir's memoir is a much needed reality check for us to bust that myth and there cannot be a better time to read this book with the recent scrapping of section 370 by the Indian Government.
To continuously live under siege of the military is disproportionately more traumatic and disturbing than living under a lockdown due to a pandemic. Instead of equating these two situations as similar it is important to compare it the other way round for us to make an attempt to understand the brutal and controlling conditions people in Kashmir are living in.
Every sentence in the book embeds the trauma that people under military control live with. Every experience, otherwise normal for anyone living in a no-military control zone, reeks of the unending trauma of life under a siege. Every aspect of daily life is affected or rather in control of the unrest due to the state control.
This is an absolutely essential read!
A lot of the privileged folks have equated our restricted lockdown years with living in Kashmir under military control. Farah Bashir's memoir is a much needed reality check for us to bust that myth and there cannot be a better time to read this book with the recent scrapping of section 370 by the Indian Government.
To continuously live under siege of the military is disproportionately more traumatic and disturbing than living under a lockdown due to a pandemic. Instead of equating these two situations as similar it is important to compare it the other way round for us to make an attempt to understand the brutal and controlling conditions people in Kashmir are living in.
Every sentence in the book embeds the trauma that people under military control live with. Every experience, otherwise normal for anyone living in a no-military control zone, reeks of the unending trauma of life under a siege. Every aspect of daily life is affected or rather in control of the unrest due to the state control.
This is an absolutely essential read!