Author: Kashmir Newsline

By Santosh Bakaya ‘Minotaur: A dark tale of power-crazy leaders’ is a blistering book, gut-wrenching in its intensity and powerful in its impact. A book for the present times. A book for all times. Exciting. Full of intrigue. A roller coaster ride that sets a reader’s pulse racing. Penned by Sunil Sharma, the Toronto-based writer, academic, critic, and editor of a bilingual journal, Setu, the book got the coveted Nissim International Prize for Excellence in English Literature (Prose for the year 2022) selected from submissions from across the world. ‘The ghosts appeared abruptly at midnight and easily blended with the surrounding shadowy…

  The worst-hit victims are the poor and the ill-informed. By Sajjad Bazaz There are thousands of depositors who are struggling to get their money back after depositing it in unregistered schemes. Most of these depositors don’t report it to law enforcing agencies and fight at their own level. However, there are victims who file complaints against entities running such unregistered deposit schemes. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has received 1,540 complaints related to the non-repayment of deposits and money collected for various kinds of investment schemes (964 in 2020-21, and 576 in 2021-22). Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has…

The government, it seems, has created a miasma of confusion over every data point that can allow to ascertain exactly what the state of the Indian economy is.  By Sanjay Kapoor There are numerous critical numbers that do not, yet, have an official imprimatur and hence are conveniently dismissed by the government as unreliable and even fake. What about the GDP numbers? The government has been claiming that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. All this chest-thumping does not square with how the health of the economy is perceived by the likes of former…

Snow last year, and the year before that, fell in late autumn which hurt the orchards and, with it, weakened the horticulture sector. While orchardists survived these hard-hitting events, the latest set of troubles is mounting an unbearable pressure – one that can be difficult for many to survive. The latest troubles couldn’t have come at a worse time. It is the time of the year when Kashmir’s apple farmers reap the benefits of their toil. With it comes a financial safeguard for the rest of the year till the next harvest. But, the harvest this year has been…

Anatomy of Erdogan’s Kashmir salvo.  Shome Basu Recep Tayyip Erdogan has an uncanny way to deal with things and Kashmir has been one of his favourite topics to stir, whenever needed. One has to understand Erdogan to understand Turkey’s stand on Kashmir. Erdogan rose from a society that ws grappling with ‘modernism vs orthodoxy’ debate. Although, he himself remains a typical modern man, who has not forced women to wear headscarves in Turkey or brought any stringent Sharia law, but his measures remain to be populist when it comes to political Islam. For a long time, the father of modern Turkey Mustafa Kemal Attaturk has…

 Lily Swarn, the award-winning poet and author released her collection of Urdu ghazals at the Press Club of Chandigarh amid fanfare and wide media coverage. In this conversation with Kashmir Newsline, she talks about the book and how she fell in love with Urdu language.  Yeh Na Thi Hamari Qismat is an evocative title. How did it come about?   The strains of Ghalib’s immortal ghazal, ye na thi hamari qismat ke visal-e-yaar hota, have haunted me ever since I first heard it crooned on a  Murphy radio tucked in a wooden niche in my distant youth and that is where…

This is the final part of the trilogy of essays on Kashmir’s urban history and architecture and how the Srinagar city should shape up under Smart City Mission. Jaspreet Kaur Introduction Cities accommodate 31% of India’s current population (Census 2011). By 2030, urban areas are expected to accommodate 40% of it. Fifty-three percent of the population in India will be living in urban areas by 2050 (UN 2018). Three Indian cities—Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi—feature in the top 20 megacities in the world. This increase in the pace of urbanisation poses spatial and infrastructure management challenges for a country. The…

How the Lankan lions lifted the trophy against all odds and why the hot favourites flunked. By Bilal Ahsan Dar It’s not how you start that’s important, but how you finish. ~ Jim George After beginning with a humiliating loss to Afghanistan, when they were bowled out for a mere 105 runs, Sri Lanka made an exemplary comeback to conquer quietly and get crowned as the Asian champions. A side without any star cricketers, seen as the underdogs and probably in nobody’s favorite list showed what wonders self-confidence, a never-say-die attitude and team effort can do. “I think in…

The Central Asian countries, plus Pakistan and China, believe that Afghanistan should be a part of the group.  By Shome Basu Every bit of today has to go back to World War II and consequently to the Cold War between the US and the USSR, till the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and finally to 1991 when the Soviet Union was fragmented into more than a dozen separate nations. But how did the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) emerge to become a challenger to the last known superpower: the US? SCO is an organization of nine countries and together they account for nearly half of…