A Rumor Mill

Almost nothing new is news in Kashmir. Even a piece of news itself is hearsay. If you ever watch a Kashmiri passing a word to others without confirming it to be true, you are supposed not to surprise yourself. It is a home truth. We cannot keep a word to ourselves for a while, confirm it and hand it over, but we tend to infect. We either love it or there may be an instinct of ‘rumoring’ in us. This is the cynosure invigorating our dubious personalities. We doubt what is doubtful and we doubt the doubtless. We are unsure of the present and future. We are unsure of life and death. We are unsure of the time and the places. Nothing in our lives that we can be sure about. Kashmir is a vacillating and ambiguous region – a territory of two minds, where none of the minds is a certain mind and no heart is awake. Rumors turn the peace of people’s lives upside down. Till it reaches a person who is not a rumormonger, the word would have affected the whole of the forest. However far-fetched a rumor is, one has to believe it. Kashmir since early ages has been a rumor mill (which is archetypical) and continues to be so. The age-old usual assemblage of men on the protruding edges of the shops is a commonplace where the rumors take birth, are adopted, and pledged to proceed with. They pass and we receive it. We pass and they receive. This is how the rumors survive in the valley of Kashmir. There is a plethora that we have inherited – both useful and useless, peaceful and disturbing, and gentle and harsh, and rumor is one among them.