Dear ‘still confused whom I am writing this to’
Because, I genuinely am. I am as confused as Krishna was in the current nation-wide success movie, ‘Kashmir Files’, the movie that took the entire country by storm and I eventually gave in to the pressure too. I gave in to the curiosity of its success, and maybe the subject because like a million other Indians, I didn’t know the truth of Kashmir too. As I already mentioned, Krishna, the main protagonist of the movie, embodies us, the youth of India caught in this ‘war of narratives. Some of us maybe, are consciously on the quest for the truth, while most of us aren’t; which is when movies like Kashmir Files awaken our social consciousness to know the truth. But what really is the truth? The movie rightly mentions that this is an info war, an advanced war where we are engineered to believe in what we have been taught to believe in.
Well, on the other hand the subject of the movie is extremely troubling. No denying that. If what is shown or said in the movie is anywhere close to reality, then let me tell you, I am scared. I am so scared that I want to believe that it is not the truth. There can’t be any form of humanism which is capable of such an act in the name of god. I would like to consider it to be not true; maybe because it hurts a little less, maybe it makes me want to believe that this is still the world that I would like to bring my children in. However, it does put the question in my mind: if what I believe is not true is really not true?
It is funny that this instance pops to my mind as we talk about this scenario, but it does. One of the reels that I recently came across was about how Nescafe established their market in Japan, Japan predominantly being a tea consumer market. Well, they did fail initially and on analysis they realized that it’s very hard to accustom the adults of Japan to the taste of coffee, so they launched coffee flavored candies for children. And, in no time, children of Japan loved the coffee flavored candies and developed the taste for coffee, and Nescafe became the largest manufacturer of coffee in Japan.
Well, I am 25 rights now and why haven’t I heard or read about Kashmir’s history till date? As the movie claims, no one really dared to ever speak about it, or I want to question if there was a power that decided what is to be heard or read by the children growing up in India post 1990s? Because, we are always going to believe in what we have read and learned in our childhood and when our belief is questioned 25 years later, we are definitely going to be confused.
I never knew Kashmir was to have a plebiscite. If I were to be honest, I wasn’t even aware what a plebiscite meant. Was this left from our history and political science on purpose or our educationalists thought it was not important enough to be taught? And, now the movie tells me this. Am I supposed to believe a movie or my entire education of twelve years?
Which is exactly why I am scared of this war. Because, this war makes me question my beliefs of who I am as a person or what I believed was the truth? There is no new news to the fact that every story has two sides, two perspectives to empathize with because nothing happens without the course of nothing. We are all living in a world which is driven by each of our consequences and at the end, it all boils down to which side of the story we want to empathize with, which truth do we want to believe in because there is no right or wrong to the morals of survival. It is really the choices we make to survive these situations, isn’t it?
And, the plot of this war is exactly pinned within this thin line of the two perspectives of the same story. In the movie, Radhika Menon, the ANU professor tells Krishna that the true power lies in the hands of those who have a voice and has followers who listen to this voice and if he were to be the voice, he would need a story and the story would need a villain because that is what will make him the hero. Well, I want to ask whoever is reading this, who is the real villain of our story?
I gave it a lot of thought and to my surprise, a very famous couplet by Allama Muhammad Iqbal, something we were taught in our childhood came to my rescue – ‘Mazhabnahisikhataaapas me bairrakhna’. The true villain of our story aren’t the people advocating for the right or wrong according to their own perspectives in this war of narratives but the people who are setting these narratives according to their perspectives for millions of uninformed youth to believe in.
So, I would like to end this letter with a question for all of us to go back and ponder upon, whom should this letter be really addressed to?
Clips and Pages 