Participants of Dialogue for Peace

Tomorrow we are going for a film show!” The excitement on their faces is hard to miss as the boys announce the next day’s itinerary. Perhaps in today’s time, one would dismiss the teenagers’ movie plex outing as hardly out of the ordinary or rather a regular affair.

The only difference is these youngsters belong to a territory where cinema halls were shut down long before they were born. Having grown up in the post 1990s Kashmir, many things that are usually considered “normal” attain a privileged status for people of the Valley. Going for movies is just one of them.
However, the “bridges of hope” are not out of sight and one such concerted effort has been initiated by The Seagull Foundation for the Arts.
In 2011, Dialogue for Peace — The Kashmir Project was launched with an objective of tapping the inherent creative impulse to deal with internal conflicts and find new ways to cope with conflict in the community. It includes empowering youth to find a path to reconciliation through the arts. Through creativity, it aims to inject will, aspiration and motivation to work towards imagined futures, and develop critical thinking and break mindsets, informs director of Peace Works Megha Malhotra.
Looking back at its inception, Megha recalls, “The work in Kashmir began with a chance ‘exposure’ to the realities of present day Kashmir at an India- Pakistan Peace Conference. The divide, the difference between young people in the Valley and young people across rest of India is alarming. And yet, the dreams, the hopes and the desires are not very different. We felt the need to bridge the divide, and the only way to do that was to bring them together. So, the Dialogue for Peace was launched as an exchange programme that does everything that a conventional exchange programme does, that is, fun, games, sightseeing. Yet it also does much more than what a conventional exchange programme does. It conducts workshops. And the process of the workshops, whether it is theatre or photography or film-making, leads to not only a deeper bonding between the participants from Kashmir and Kolkata or wherever else they may be coming from, but it facilitates looking deeper within themselves and finding a new voice of hope for all the participants. In the last two years, we have conducted four such sessions in Kolkata and Srinangar.”
Following the same route, recently 11 Kashmiri boys boarded the Kolkata-bound Jammu Tawi Express, paving the way for Dialogue for Peace to unfold another memorable chapter. Ask them, what was the first thing about the big city that caught their attention and pat comes the reply, “We have never seen such a big railway station.”
Shabbir Ahmed, who is associated with an NGO called Nazaaqat, is the only adult accompanying them for the eight day trip. He says with a smile, “My presence comes as an assurance for their families as most of them have not travelled beyond the Valley. The project is significant as such exposures are important for these high school students. They participate in workshops that involve the use of the arts to help educate and forge ties between communities,” adds Shabbir.
The participants of these workshops are carefully chosen keeping a mix of students from diverse backgrounds in mind. Each workshop has the group equally divided between students from Calcutta and Kashmir. Further the mix consists of students from diverse communities, different religious backgrounds, students from elitist schools, schools catering to the under privileged, students with special needs and also include students who have been directly effected by the conflict in Kashmir.
In a brilliant gesture, this time the students from La Martiniere Boys are also a part of the work shop conducted by renowned theatre practitioner Probir Guha and the school is supporting the project by boarding and lodging the visitors. “The theme of the workshop is hunger. Starting from the dictionary meaning of hunger-uneasy or painful sensation, exhausted condition, caused by lack of food; strong desire, we are exploring the social and political aspects of hunger — what historically hunger has influenced mankind, how it has influenced artists for example the work of Somnath Hore and how it has influenced film-makers writers, the famous Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and so on.
Keeping this background in mind, we go into what hunger means individually to each one of us, exploring issues of identity. Do young people today interpret hunger in the same way? Does coming from different backgrounds and having grown up under different surroundings and circumstances lead to diverse interpretations of hunger? Is hunger only related to the physical sensation of needing food. Or can it also be hunger for life, for dreams, for ambitions, for peace. Issues of conflict and political tensions that are usually associated with Kashmir are consciously kept at bay,” shares Probir.
On a concuding note, Megha revisits a profound moment from their Kolkata sojourn. “One of the Kashmiri kids sitting right beside me in the car turned towards me, and without any prelude, started talking of his childhood memories. It had only been three days since his arrival, but he already missed his home. Despite Kolkata’s cars, malls and swanky spaces, he preferred his green pristine village. We all listened in respectful silence, no one probing any further than what he offered. There had been a lot of unintended forays into discussion about the problems they faced in Kashmir, but this was the first time I was listening to someone from their group talk at length about happy memories.”