In the time Khoj organised a workshop in Srinagar, of which I was a part, fear and attendant danger was quite palpable. Terror ruled the streets and people’s heart. The stories I would hear from friends and aquaintances were filled with horrors riven by the state and terror groups. My understanding of the rather complex Kashmir question is quite limited. All I understood as an artist was any politics that divides is cruel and the stories borne out of it heart-rending. Caught in the crossfire were and are innumerable families with histories of violence, loss and unmitigated sorrow. It was the woman who was hurt the most.

My work with Khoj Kashmir, like all my fellow artists there, had to deal with this incomprehension, in which all arguments had the might of right and the word of god or nation backing it. There was no place for an individual’s tears and agony. What then came to me were empty wood cabins, pretty raw in their construct, fire, the mountains and the hand raised to receive benediction from the lord above. A gesture common to us all. What destroys it is the fire of imaginary differences and the inconsolable might of hatred.

This is what I strove to project through my installation work, a construct which dealt with the impermanence of life, memories, emotions, home in adverse juxtaposition with the permamence of irrationality. Of all kinds and types. In the midst my home could be destroyed, methodically. Like innumerable others before mine.