Baljit > Recent Status Updates

‘Grandma says time is a sentinel tree, marked with invisible rings inside, it’s straggly branches extending into the infinite sky, never perfect, never linear. In the span of a sentence a storyteller can jump back and forth centuries, as if a millennium could pass in the blink of an eye. But then it takes hours to describe a single event, every minute a stretch, an eternity.’

‘I know you don’t believe me, Narin, but a story is a flute through which truth breathes. And these are you family stories.’

‘Fido’s seen change coming in a single generation; the icy chains of prejudice shaking loose. She toils hard and with pleasure, so that other women may be freed from their set grooves (whether of poverty or boredom, dependence or idleness), freed to toil hard and with pleasure in their turn.’

‘…… And the British refused to see that the first anti-Partition front had opened in Kashmir which had a majority of Muslims. Because the fact flew in the face of the two-nation theory so beloved of Jinnah and the British! Kashmiris dresses similarly, shared surnames, and it was difficult to tell a Kashmiri Hindu apart from a Kashmiri Muslim. Because they all had the same roots.’

‘Dissonance before moments of harmony makes the harmony sound beautiful. Just as harmony and dissonance exist side by side in music, life is the same. Because harmony is preceded by dissonance, that’s why we think life is beautiful.’

‘Bapu was gone…..To the last, his step was light, his smile infectious, his eyes full of laughter. He lived and died at the top of his strength and powers. Where he sat became a temple and where he trod was hallowed ground. Bapu was gone, but his mighty spirit would be their eternal guide.’

‘She, the mighty Indus, was doing what the Mahabharata had already foretold, 3000 years ago: The dharma, when it is protected, protects. When it is destroyed, it destroys.’

‘Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority India. One got the River, the other got the name. But what of the Indus? Was she asked what she wanted? To go east or west? Her colour preference- saffron or green? Did she like the crescent more than the spinning wheel? Did she, the mighty Indus, realize she was free but divided? More importantly, did she care?

‘“ What are men but overgrown babies? When they go to war, it’s women’s bodies that form the battlefield.’”

‘India was free…broken in parts…bruised, but free. There was an essential unity to India that no partition could destroy. To that much-loved motherland, the ancient, the eternal, the ever-new, it was time to redeem their pledge. It was time to bind himself to her service. It was time to build a new nation.’