Sunday, December 23, 2018

The half lies of Koshur Identity


We need a psychological home as much as we need a physical one. A sort of a refuge where we go back, refuted by the world of allegiance.  Home is a place very special to Humans. Nothing in the world can replace it. It atones to our vulnerabilities.
Recently a good number of netizens took to social media, displaying their affiliation towards Kashmiri identity. Apparently, phiran forms a large part of it. This was a reaction to some government advisory that phiran must not be allowed in offices. While everyone is free and entitled to their opinion, however, I found the reactions very hallow and reeking of hypocrisy. In Kashmir, everybody knows each other. It’s a small place and the society is closely knit. We rarely marry outside our mores. The inter mixing with rest of the cultures of sub-continent was almost neglible till very recent. However, a lot of those things are changing. In the age of internet and technology one can choose a partner by just a click. Yes, tinder does that! A lot Kashmiris are travelling outside, exposing themselves to a whole lot of cultures. While all of this is fine, it becomes very necessary that in the process we don’t lose our essential character. So what is that character? What is it that netizens were displaying their anguish against? A piece of cloak that you wear and click selfies in? And this by those people who abhor when their children speak in Koshur –regarding the language downright lowly. This tribe of poor self-esteem walking strivers is dime a dozen in Kashmir and they give two hoots to your culture and identity.
Hypocrisy is being double faced. While all the hoopla goes on for my identity and my Kashmir- whatever that means, the situation on the ground is glaringly something else. Our indifference to our civic sensibilities is pathetic to say the least. There is zero accountability. Illegal construction by real estate mafia is rampant. Most of the hotels in ‘world famous’ Gulmarg and Pahalgam have flouted rules, illegally occupying forest land.  Footpaths are used for everything else but walking. Anyone in power seems unapproachable. Bullying of the marginalized is order of the day. The honest is mocked.  The system is so effing against the common man. Yet all of it is accepted. Corruption is so rooted that it has become a system. As long as you don’t come in my way, I don’t give a fig! That’s the attitude.
I’m a downtowner. Though we shifted to city suburbs in mid 90s, yet the downtown boy in me never left me. I usually walk over through its tiny labyrinth alleys, when I visit home in summers, finding a long gone memory in some alcove of my mind. It’s the only place where I feel I have arrived. All of this may be gone though. The vandalism of our architecture is everywhere. The art deco old is giving way to the brash glassy new and nothing is being done to protect it.
If you visit any European city, the care and effort to maintain the architecture of a city is so visible. The new is given a way, but not at the expense of the old. There is a concerned effort made to stick to their identities. You can destroy a city and its people easily by obliterating its architecture. Take the old city out of Srinagar, what remains is a ghost city. Ugly and morose. That’s because the sophistication and richness lays inside the realms of our old houses.  Their features being so distinct if one walks along the Nallamar.  A wooden porch on the first or second floor; red oxidized floors; baroque carving on windows; thin brown bricks.   The air smelling of its people who lived for hundreds of years. Along the walls that I walk in my ancestral home, that I touch and feel, I find the souls of my ancestors. Their sounds echo in the oxidized floors. It is said everyone must leave something behind when they die:  A child, a book, a house, a planted garden. Something that your hand touched so that the soul has somewhere to go when you die, when people look at that tree or house or garden.

I wonder what I would leave behind for my son, to know his identity. Certainly must be more than a phiran!