WHY KASHMIR?
The people of Kashmir are friendly, quick to break into song when the mood is cheerful and just as quick to jump to the rescue and lend a helping hand in times of trouble. The children are bright and clever and just about unbearably cute. Kashmir makes the perfect location for a visually compelling film, and in fact in better times, Bollywood frequently featured Kashmir “as a backdrop for blossoming love on the big screen in India."
But these are not the images that have been flooding the media in recent years. Videos coming out now show images of pain and suffering and almost all have titles containing words pertaining to “conflict”, “militancy”, “violence”, “insurgency”, “dead”, “injured”, “beaten” and “disappeared”.
This is certainly a reality here but it is far from the entirety of Kashmiri life. Women marching and shouting slogans at a protest make the news but no one shows up to film them the next night when they gather to sing songs together at a neighbor’s wedding.
There are more sides of the story that need to be told...
While there are many happy, intelligent and well-adjusted children in Kashmir, it cannot be denied that there is also a pervasive undercurrent of instability here, reflected in the closure of schools for up to two-thirds of the school year, year after year, that is having a devastating and universal effect. To quote an article in India Today magazine:
Children all over the world are living through conflicts -- in Sierra Leone, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Iraq or earlier in Vietnam -- and growing up confused. But unlike those battlegrounds, where agencies like UNICEF and WHO are able to assess the damage and provide relief to the children, in Kashmir there are hardly any NGOs in this field.
Monetary aid is not what the children need. What they require is help to deal with problems like recurring nightmares, difficulty in concentrating, depression and a sense of hopelessness about the future. Most of all, they need help to understand that what they think is normal is actually something abnormal.
... so if you don't like the plot so far... help us change the script!
Our proposed curriculum and the film documenting its implementation will serve to address this need both through direct opportunities for communication between parents, students and teachers, and subsequently by hopefully increasing awareness among communities outside of Kashmir as to the nature and severity of the problems, while at the same time demonstrating potential opportunities to address the situation.
