“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’ movieplex outing as hardly out of the ordinary. 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 the objective of tapping the inherent creative impulse to deal with internal conflict 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 inject will, aspiration and motivation to work towards imagined futures. Plus 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 India is alarming. And yet, the dreams, the hopes 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 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 a conventional exchange programme.”