(July 10, 1:27pm)

Just ordered a few books on Kashmir on flipcart...
Hope to have them delivered by end of week...

These include The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer, Kashmir, the Untold Story by Humra Quereshi, and, My Kashmir: Conflict and the Prospects for Enduring Peace by Wajahat Habibullah..

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The choices haven't been random... I was always sure I'd be balancing my reads between fiction and non-fiction...

That's because the danger of 'self-interest' is as much imminent in civil servants writing a memoir as it is in Kashmiri Muslim writers, who might extol militants to a degree where their atrocities on Pandit men and women get only insufficient mention or may be written in a fashion that inclines the reader to believe these were sporadic, isolated incidents, not part of the larger objective...

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So while the first book is a fiction by a Kashmiri Muslim, the second one is a non-fiction by his brethren around the same time..

The third book is journalist Quereshi's account of his two decades of interaction with village folk, and the fourth one is by Wajahat Habibullah, perhaps the only government servant to have referred to the Konan Poshpora victims as "genuine in their anger"....

And this at a time when the army was doing its every bit to prove the 12 hour long mass rape as ISI propaganda...

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Let's see.. I have to read a lot... Mine is only a story of relationships, but since the plot is J&K, I must allow every interpretation of the conflict intrigue me, if not influence me!

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