Our journey never ends

Arvind Passey
10 August 2019

The day our Lok Sabha made way for the removal of Article 370, Siddhartha Gigoo, a writer and a Kashmiri, tweeted: “This state subject certificate was under lock and key. Made me feel ‘special’ until today. Now I’m an equal. Am as Kashmiri as everybody else, as Indian as everybody else. Still dream of my lost Homeland. Of going back.” One can read a really long story with a completely different narrative hidden in the brevity of a tweet. This is the sort of story that one can meet in a number of places scattered all over our country… a story where the climax is finally going to experience a completion.

The journey though isn’t going to end. The strange thing about being a human is that we always have a new destination following the previous one… and our travel goes on. Let me add that every destination reached becomes the starting point for yet another journey. What is happening isn’t only going to give a different narrative lens to Kashmiris but to each of us. There will be changes in perspectives that will have all the elements of all the genres in which writing exists… and when I use the word ‘all’ I obviously mean our neighboring countries and also those that have large geographical distances to be covered if we wish to go there.

Talking about journeys, do you think the journey of a person from being a non-writer to being a celebrated one is easy? Or for that matter, is the journey of a lone maverick thought to becoming part of a tale easy? Even words travel great distances and suffer conflict in unheard of ways before finding a place in a poem or a story. But the story for thoughts and words too doesn’t end at one destination. There is always another task assigned to them and they happily accept it and move on, leaving their mark on some narratives. This issue of  ‘Education Post’ has such journeys in its pages and so you, as a reader, are going to have ‘Chetan Bhagat’, the Kashmir issue, and a lot more as your companion during your journey from one moment to the next.

See, even time doesn’t stop. We change the way we think about it and place it in neat slots called the past and the present and then we wait for time to transform in accordance to our definition. Talking of definitions, we are known to have tweaked them since time immemorial to suit our needs. What was good was turned over and became not so good and the opposite is present in the same measure. Certain words too have been made to dress in different clothes and they have always sportingly agreed. Thoughts, however, are sometimes fussy because they are emerging from the human mind. It is the human mind that invariably has to be gently coaxed to discard thoughts and ideas that are no longer relevant to the new scheme of things. This needs meaningful conversations as life meanders through a new set of experiences and change slowly dawns. The night gets forgotten and every dawn is hailed as a miracle.

Read the articles and email us your opinions and suggestions… and please do not forget to share this copy with your friends. After all, even a magazine needs to travel on from one reader to another to experience salvation.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here