The Bored Engineer

Disappointment and disillusionment are the virtues of the pessimists who love to bask in them to reaffirm their sadistic outlook of life. So when I as a self-proclaimed Optimistic–General of World Optimism Council tell you that the book “ Neither A Hawk Nor A Dove ” by Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri was a major disappointment for me, you know I’m not just saying it for the sake of saying it, I have been tormented by something painful that must have hurt my soul. Enough of the theatrics, I picked up the book because of two primary reasons:       It promised to give an insider’s view of the backchannel settlement of the Kashmir agreed upon by India and Pakistan around 2006-07.    The drama that unfurled in India when Mr. Kasuri was here to promote his book and his subsequent appeal that his book was not a Pakistani propaganda, rather an attempt to bridge the gap in the Indian and Pakistani narratives about our shared history. The books starts with Mr. ...

As I wander through the ruins that I once called home I can’t help but feel the apparent despair and hopelessness. Everything that I once called home is lost. The home has lost its warmth. For me the mention of home always brought to my mind the images of me entering the home. It’s an old house, really old something like 150 years old. Many heritage enthusiastic organisations have declared it as a heritage site and offered to renovate the parts of it. And of course my parents declined the offer, their argument: “It’s our home and if we feel need to renovate something we will renovate it on our own.” I always liked this pride of theirs because it made me think of them as the strong people who will never bend whatever be the circumstances. I mean these are the people who survived the ethnic cleansing and target killings of the 1990s. As I keep walking I look around the elegant but deserted buildings that are all around my home. These were all inhabited by people before they left to ...

‘Kashmir’ - an issue so volatile it can polarize the sanest of the minds into mind numbing extremism. Whenever Kashmir is on the boil or in the headline for any reason even the most liberal sounding people on my Facebook friend-list suddenly tear apart all their identities and fall into two categories: Kashmiris (mostly living outside the state and in other parts of India) who suddenly feel the need to highlight the ‘human right abuses’ which may or may not have been happening and people from rest of India who feel the need to thump their chest and abuse Kashmiris. While the silent majority looks on, occasionally expressing its dismay over the human right abuses and occasionally supporting the anti-terror operations of our armed forces (anti –terror not anti-protestors). I have been a part of the silent majority as well, looking around at people from both sides calling each other names and ‘highlighting’ facts which in their view are suppressed by ‘vested interests’. I do not ...