KASHMIR BEYOND US Augijyot Kour Bali - Class

Xi

Opening eyes surrounded by beauties of snowed mountains, the red of chinars, leaving some of itself on the cheeks of every one of us, we all were born as babies of our heavenly mother, ‘Kashmir’. Most of the minority natives though, were not thought, for a long time, as the same. Being a part of a minority community myself, I was often reminded in a few ways or more that perhaps our belongingness to our mother was less, proportional to our numbers; but it didn’t take much long for me, rather us, the minorities, to realize that Kashmiriyat was beyond our conceptions, stereotypes and perspectives. The ‘Kashur blood’ knew no boundaries of a specific religion, region, profession, race, skin tone or any physique. These factors are too hollow to be seen as an index for measuring the Kashmiriyat that flows through all of us, together as one. Kashmiriyat is too profound to be tied to empty statistics, it goes beyond the prisons of minorities or majorities. The effortless smiles that the falling white pearls of snow give to the ones residing in high mountains are the same as those shared by the ones lying in the plains. The cold yet warm winds that flow over the majestic Jehlum to the orchards play with our hair alike. The pain in the once crystal-clear eyes of the Dal turning into the blurring darkness hurts all of us— its children— the Kashmiri Sikhs, Muslims, Pandits equally. It took millions of years for our ancestors, initially migrating from the original home continent of the entire human species, ‘South Africa’, to this surreal Paradise in which we all took our first breath of peace, and of life itself. This breath was taken by each of us, Kashmiris first and believers later, in exactly the same way. So, let’s not confine ourselves to the chains of any social division, school of thought or any external force and let those take our birthright—the freedom of belonging to our motherland Kashmir, of belonging to our home with equal pride and love uniformly— away from us. Our mother never treated us differently based on our numbers, it has loved and blessed us with its extraordinary beauty, peace and the feeling of home which we never find anywhere else on the planet or outside of it. That feeling, that particular feeling, is what binds us Kashmiris together, and not belonging to a majority in terms of population, dominance, power or riches. Let us pledge to never let our motherland and its motherhood down by dividing it with shallow thinking of it belonging to a select few. Our Kashmiri blood and the body made of its concrete soil runs beyond the narrow and hollow minds and ideas.