Stage Of Life.

Tell me something new, something that you came up with. Not the usual stuff that one hears on every next nook of the street. You have to make the world feel the difference and it has been long since you showed it something different. The audience are waiting for you but don’t get the idea that they are gonna wait forever, because, here in this new world, everyone tries to show something different, something new and they are eager to put up their show.


It is a cruel world and it will want you too prove your worth, it will want you to make your mark. So while I am waiting for you to buckle up, I am hoping that you might get the idea that despite the timeless love, I might not have the patience to stand that long.

R.I.P.

It is the coming of an age for me, an age of innocence, of not worrying what will happen tomorrow, of chattering on and on like you used to do when you were a kid. No mean words, no hard feelings, no double meanings. No I don’t want to backstab anyone, no I don’t want to act like I have loads of important work when all I have got to do is earn a living. I am in this phase where I want to be all happy and carefree and I want this phase to last forever. For no matter how much people would like to say that their mean and self-centered life rocks, I know it doesn’t. And I know of joy that they will never come to experience and for this one thing I pity them all.

They will have a slight tang of it on their way to their graveyard and they will know how they were supposed to extinguish their ravenous thirst. But it will be time gone; it will be the coming of an age.

So, today when relationships keep altering, people changing, you ought to understand that life is all about this age of innocence.

That is why; when the rain starts to pour, I do not worry about how I am gonna look when I am all drenched. I know there will never be anything much better than the joy of experiencing this one moment in the history of life. So, lazing in the desert sun, I soak up in the joy of knowing that life is beautiful every moment.

And when I lie down under that tombstone of mine one day, I know I will rest in peace. What about you?

Oh yes, My dreams are back!! ♥

Let the words dance their way tonight, to the hearts we wish them to go. We will be sitting under the starry lights accompanying each other’s loneliness. It has been long since I found an inspiration; allow me to melt you in words. I won’t ask for much, just a few words you might want to share, a few smiles to give, a few high-fives and one good willed pat on my back. That will be more than enough, for I know how to carve memories in words while I am still high.

So, let the spirits join tonight, for we are celebrating our own world of carelessness and pure joy; and we are the king and queen of our paradise. It has been long since I met a dreamer like me and you and I will dream the world tonight in our own light. We will put the world to shame because no matter how hard they strive they never find the way to true joy. And here we are putting up curtains to the way, coz we have been visiting it too often.

Soon we will be going on our own ways from this square in the city. But whenever we are together, whenever we are high, we will put our world back together, piece by piece and reign over it once more coz we are the king and queen and we rule here baby!

Dedicated to 'you', for after this long dry spell of no dreams, I have found 'you'...

For you my love, I pour my heart to turn the snow red...

It’s winter arriving. It is the season of snuggling into the blanket for little too long, of holding the cup of coffee a little too dearly, of hugging your jacket a little too close. It is a season of ‘little too much’. It is the season we go for a walk on the snow clad roads, with flakes of heaven coming down on us. The street lights our spotlights and the pines our audience. We pry on the land with this unknown familiarity. For we know that it never is same in the day and night. We know that skaters envy us in the day; we know that when night falls our show is over. So here, let us play for the audience we love, the dance of eternal bliss. A thousand days from now, a thousand miles away, we will long to be here, to dance one last time, coz love has it that heaven may be, but long we will for you my love.

And there we go hand in hand, knowing in the mornings we conquer the land. Knowing whenever we look back at life, this will be the show we will miss of all times.

Dedicated to the ‘I-can’t express’ time of my life spent in Gulmarg.

Knight Kids....

So, these kids I was working with in my autumn breaks have left me astonished and awestruck. The amount of hardships and dark days they have went through and despite all, their eyes twinkling speaks a lot about their commendable courage. Small kids, who we presume to be able to bear no hardships and fit for only tenderness, have gone through such crude and tough conditions like drug abuse, physical exploitation and mental trauma. In this young age, when all you are presumed to do is play and enjoy life, they go through conditions that no one would want to endure.

When I met the kids of the ‘Ummeed’ house of ‘Dil Se’ Foundation, I felt a sense of admiration and respect for them. They not only have had to face a lot of hardships and abuse but also are still not able to live a normal life. Although the NGO tries its level best to give them all the facilities that they can, but still somewhere deep down the children know that this is not there family, that this is not what is supposed to be ‘normal’.

Anand (name changed) had left home when he was 10 or 12 years old, he has tried to revisit his home a lot of times since then, but although he would reach the station of his home village, he would return, entrapped in conflicts of within. Of whether his family would accept him or not, whether they would be happy or disappointed. Of whether they expected him to not be there anymore, of what if they didn’t want him to return.

It is painful to not have enough food and clothing to survive. But what is more painful and killing is the absence of a strong relationship and a family that holds on to you no matter what happens….

Of wounded hearts and undying courages..

Time heals all wounds, but not for the mother who does not know the whereabouts of her son from the last 20 years.

Courage lies in frail bodies.....

We, in the paradises and fantasy lands of our own highly underestimate the courage and determination of a human being. I realized this when I met Zeeba. Zeeba is an aged woman, a grandmother of two, whose beautiful blue eyes fascinated me. But this is the good part of her story. All the rest is sad and agonizing. She is a widow who lost her only son to the violence and unrest of the valley. Her son, with no apparent connections with any of the militant groups was fired by unknown gunmen. Her son was married and had two kids. His son of two years saw the dead body of his father infront of him and was unable to process the fact of death and loss.


Zeeba lives with the children of her deceased son after the mother of the children left her children for her second marriage. Zeeba is old, weak and physically not fit to take care of the kids but love and sympathy compels her to be with them. She cries silently on her fate, for her daed son, for the kids but continues to take a brave stand against the world not for her own sake but for the two kids. She fears not death but the fate the kids are destined to meet after she is no more.

And They Cry For No One To Hear....

Rafeeqa with three sons and a daughter has been searching for her husband, Mushtaq Ahmed Khan, since the last 13 years who was taken from his home one fine night at 1:00 am in 1997. No one has heard about him and nobody claims to know about his whereabouts. The Battalion of army that took him away from his home and family after beating him up infront of his family denied having any information regarding the person. The battalion is no more in the valley and with their departure died every last hope of the reunion of the family with Mushtaq. The family now pleads to atleast be able to perform the final rites of Mushtaq.


The children often ask their mother where their father is and if he is going to return or not. They ask if he is dead or alive but Rafeeqa does not know what to say for she is not sure herself.



Raeth’s son was accused by the army of selling shoes to the terrorists as he owned a footwear shop. Her son was also picked up from his home, from his bedroom while his son and wife were sleeping just besides him. The army, as the family alleges, dragged Raeth’s son by holding on his hair at 2:00 am in the morning of some date, which is of little significance to her, of 1997 . Raeth claims to have searched all the possible camps and jails but all in vain. Officers claimed to know the whereabouts of her son and guzzled about 8 lakh rupees all to go waste.

.She continues to have hallucinations of hearing her son come back or calling on to her. Raeth wonders if her son is alive and whether he craves to meet his family or not. Wonders if she will ever be able to see her son just one more time. Cries for her grand children who will never be able to see their father ever and for not being able to even perform the final rites of her son.



Since Saima’s brother went missing, she has lost her mental balance and so has her brother’s. She is now a middle aged woman with slightly whitening hair near the hairline but her mind is still stuck up somewhere in the past. She is more shy than a 10 year old and she behaves like a kid. She refuses to pray or let her mother do so because she says it is all in vain. She refuses to meet people or talk about her missing brother. I thought I imagined it but while I was talking to Saima I did hear her mother wail and cry. A cry not of disappointment but of helplessness and a broken heart.

To Start With...

 I am working in Kashmir with an NGO named ‘Shehjaar Help Foundation’ as an intern this summer. Although work in Kashmir is not that regular but still I do get the opportunity to work twice or something in a week. Yeah, it may sound weird but that is how people in Kashmir work and how work goes about. I have been meeting women of the families that have been affected by violence and terrorism going on in Kashmir. It is sad to hear such stories but what we forget to corroborate with the fact is that it is heartbreaking, traumatic and technically impossible for the families to survive after the loss they suffer. The families not only undergo a mental breakdown but also in many cases, an economic crunch.

The trauma to the family is not mostly caused by the loss of the person but by the conditions and particulars associated with the loss. Many families have no clue how their son or husband died, or who killed them, or why they were killed. And those who disappeared have a blearier idea of how, what, when , where, why. Women often start and end their stories by a sentence which often sums up all they know or are aware about. The stories go like, ‘some men came and took him away in a vehicle and we haven’t heard about him from anyone since.’

Now a long story of someone’s loss is sad to hear and hard to bear. But sadder than that I assume is that one short sentence that defines the loss, the grief, and all the events that happened along. That one sentence leaves a question lingering about in your minds and hearts of what followed. People go missing without a trace; men are shot dead by unknown gunmen; some people walk into a house kill a person or the family and move out; no one gets to know who the killer was, no one gets to know where the missing people have been taken, are they alive or dead, will they ever come back, no one has any idea. They live their life with their hearts burdened with questions they seek answers of, questions that no one claims to know answers of.

While listening to these women I often wondered what is more painful, seeing someone being killed an undeserved death in front of your eyes or someone gone missing without a trace and no idea whether the person is alive or dead. When a kin dies in front of you, with it dies the possibility of him coming back into the lives of his family but when someone goes missing, even years after the incident, the family always has that ray of hope that may be someday he may come back, may rejoin them in their joys and sorrows. But at the same time, there remains an ambiguity to his status, to his existence. Is the ambiguity of existence more painful than the certainty of death or is it the other way round.