It was the most lavish wedding in Kashmir. Held in the crispiest summer of September. Each guest greeted with a bar of gold as they entered the tent-house, made of fine silk, that swayed in the fresh afternoon breeze of Dal Lake, since the gala was playing itself out in the resplendent lawns of Hotel Santoor, on whose finely manicured grass had sprouted red roses and yellow tulips of various kinds, planted just for this auspicious occasion, the news of which had spread far and wide, across the mountains, thus bringing busloads of officials, yes men, sentries and the city’s high and mighty, together with a motley group, 1200 to be precise, of uncles, aunts, cousins, neighbours and random relatives, themselves dressed in the finest cottons of the day, tilla-embroidered from the most expensive tailors downtown and wearing the most granular karakuls, sitting atop their heads a little askew, why not, for he was Mr. so and so and accompanying him was his bejeweled Mrs. so and so, as if they had come on their own offspring’s wedding, when suddenly a clink of Tash and Naer announced the feast was about to be served, and like ants, rows and rows of people organized themselves into circles of four, and the first dish that saw served, dear reader, wasn’t your usual methimeaz, but four giant goshtabas, accompanied by two little ones, so that each plate had twelve pieces of that amazing, spherical dish, served by waza-boys, who were feeling quite tip-top so far in their velvet coats, white socks and white gloves, embossed with letters M and S spaced out by a red curly heart, a token of appreciation and a bespoke honour for the bride and her groom. But soon, a litany of giggles broke out when the guests saw this reversal of buffet, for what had often come as a full stop on this sumptuous prose of Kashmiri gluttony was now its first dish, that is quite radical, a man said, yes, but it looks tasty as hell, the other man said, so let’s keep quiet and keep eating, and like that, each dish arrived one after another, the new one more presentable than its predecessor, but it was only when the six foot kebabs of the day got served that there happened some murmur of a protest, for the kebabs came wrapped in brittle gold foils, looking at which a bearded man overcame himself, had a gumption to get up, and shouted by God, enough. But, the poor moralist, his entreaties were soon submerged by a noise from outside. A rich siren came to a halt. The top minister had arrived, albeit carelessly late. He was bowed to and quickly ushered to a thickly carpeted baithak by a group of linen-clad men, those who most mattered on that venue. Oh, what a day it was in Kashmir, so peaceful, so serene, so warm and so hospitable, when the joyous eaters reached to their crafty looking boxes of salad, and guess what, found each piece of their bitter radish wrapped in a 2000 rupee note, when suddenly a loud voice oscillated from a speaker-system, clung to four neon-lit metal poles in the middle of the tent-house, and announced, ladies and gentlemen, pardon us for this, but the honorable host doesn’t want to accept anybody’s wartaw, any gift in cash or kind, in his sheer humility, so please don’t be offended or burden yourselves, instead, please enjoy the rest of your meal. The voice then casually pointed to mini-fridges, been brought along at that very moment by waza-boys, wrapped in glistening wrapping paper, look, he said, my dear esteemed guests, our host has even gone to the trouble of thinking how to safeguard the spoils of your plate, the leftovers, because we are going to have a long, cheerful night here, so make sure you deposit your thick packets of Wazwan into frigid souls of your sub-zero optimized fridges, and enjoy today’s delicacies tomorrow when you inshallah reach home.

For those who don’t follow UFC, it’s tough to describe what is at stake in the Khabib versus Gaethje fight on October 24.

There is a man who wants to drown another man in the ‘deepest ocean’.

And that place could well be the Arabian Gulf! And, why not?

Metaphorically scary as it might sound to drown someone in a deep, dark ocean, it is a very open, strategic threat to push Justin Gaethje to the fourth round as a tired, mauled opponent.

That’s Khabib Nurmagomedov’s plan right there, laid bare as he often does before a fight, ready for a surgical dissection by Gaethje and his team to find that one, unknown answer, that twenty-eight other fighters haven’t been able to answer so far: how does anybody defeat Khabib?

So, what does Gaethje do? He thinks [and you have to trust his instinct here because he knows Khabib not only as a foe but as a buddy too, whom he once helped cut weight] that Khabib is scared to get hurt, he avoids damage.

Does he?

Gaethje’s assumption relies on a rather innocent observation that nobody has seen Khabib getting hurt.

Pick up any of his recent fights, he comes out not only as a champion but an unbruised one too. He avoids damage because he can.

Remember when he said nobody likes to get slapped. Not even him.

But while Gaethje’s observation might be innocent, his intentions aren’t.

If there is a one guy who is going to test Khabib’s defense to move away unscathed from a lethal shot, it’s Gaethje.

Why?

Not only because of Gaethje’s sheer sturdiness and confidence but also because Khabib has felt it. We have all felt it in the build-up to this fight. We felt it when Gaethje tossed away his interim belt within seconds of defeating Tony Ferguson. Leave aside the respect for that belt, he didn’t even acknowledge it.

We felt it when Khabib recently told an interviewer that Gaethje is very hungry and he was impressed by the kind of damage Gaethje put Tony Ferguson through.

Yes, Khabib is humble and all, but in this business of beating each other till the other person gives up, you only respect a fighter when you know he can kick your soul too, not just the flesh and bones, deprive you of your celestial flight, steal away your stardom and put painful question marks on your body and in your mind.

For some, Gaethje might have that impression on Khabib.

Take the last two fights of each men and what are we expecting to see on October 24?

An intense amount of pressure and weight from Khabib versus the sheer power of punches from Gaethje. A relentless ground and pound of Khabib versus the undying spirit of Gaethje as a fighter. He just doesn’t give up where you think other fighters would or you pray that they should.

But then, there is this masterclass of wrestling from Khabib, knotting up legs of his opponents as a merciless Amazonian anaconda, squeezing life out of them as he talks his talk into their bulbous, de-shaped ears, like a prophet of doom sitting on top of them, making them feel bad about all the nasty things they once said about him, his faith and his dad or making them feel bad about the career choice they made.

Remember a feisty Conor attacking Khabib’s bus and then recall a demure version of him weighed under Khabib’s verbal abuse at the edge of that noisy Vegas octagon of 2018.

That was a different fight. For Khabib it was about humbling Conor.

The fight against Dustin Poirier was about sealing a legacy.

The fight against Gaethje is, in his own words, about taking care of ‘business’. There is no trash talking in this one, no scores to settle, no bad blood. It’s as clean as it gets.

It’s about human ambition for both men and the purity of it.

If Khabib is to win this, he has to take Gaethje to that extra mile, may be that ‘deepest ocean’, where Gaethje as a fighter hasn’t been before. And that won’t be a cut over an eye or a broken orbital bone.

A physically bruised Gaethje is not a defeated Gaethje.

He would be there, lurching inside the octagon, watching his distance from Khabib, waiting for that one punch, a promised punch, that will put Khabib to sleep.

But it has to be one hell of a punch. A punch borne out of sheer blood and sweat, that could put, if not an end, but at least a dent, in the cherished legacy that Khabib is so after. It has a to be a punch that will write or rewrite history?

Can Gaethje deliver that?

We at The National have been speaking to some top world experts to understand what this virus is all about and will we get over this pandemic anytime soon.

1. Coronavirus: What is it, how does it spread and how to stay safe?

2. Coronavirus: The race for a vaccine

3. Chris Hadfield: An astronaut’s guide to self-isolation

4. Coronavirus: Lessons from Wuhan China

Remember Aylan Kurdi. Our hate sucked the life out of that young soul. He lay face down on that cold, heartless sand, like a naked trophy of our senseless wars. ‬

‪Remember Ghouta. It is a place in Syria. Don’t google it in these restrictive times as we lay cooped up in our houses. It might haunt our cozy status quo. ‬

‪Little children frothed at their mouths as their mothers saw them dying a miserable death when Assad’s sarin gas snaked into their distraught eyes. And then, shortly afterwards, their helpless mothers died too. ‬

‪Remember those refugees, who looked at the distant horizon of a promising Mediterranean, only to be swallowed by its tides, whole, like they never existed, like there never was a boat big enough to carry them across. ‬

‪Remember how the Ronhingya ran to a nearby hill only to look back and see their villages burning, and with it their old family album, and their precious cattle, and their history. ‬

‪Tell me where is justice in this age of impunity we got ourselves entangled into? We had started worshipping Fascist. Our votes as hypocrite as our minds. ‬

‪Dear world, our fascists still hold the glorious offices of disrepute. How would we not continue bowing our heads at their rich temples of hedonism once again? ‬

‪We had totally forgotten them, and with it their crimes. How did we not deserve an existential crisis as this — a slap, a shock — after a mad rush of our modernity fogged our cities, melted our ice, killed our sparrows and blinded our souls. ‬

‪We have run enough. We have proved everything. We have fucked up and we need to take a step back. ‬

‪Remember the menacing bush fires of Australia. We toyed with the nature for long and now a puny virus is getting back to us. And we are turning to our balconies for solace. Sing as much as you like, there is no healing in that. ‬

‪This virus is hitting us exactly where it hurts the most. Lets travel places now, let’s build huge castles of mutual admiration in our shallow selfies. ‬

‪Let’s again sing lullabies to the gods of oppression.

On his return, he would pause at the door, hurriedly dry up his eyes, and move himself into a false, self-assured smile. Inside, his wife did exactly the same, before she would open the door for him. Every time the door opened, they refused to look at each other, knowing, their eyes were still wet.

One day, the man took his wife to the city, to visit a bigger cemetery located inside the heart of the downtown Srinagar.

Their boy was buried at two places!

In the summer of 2016, the young man — who had left his village and his parents with a promise to return — was shot in his head right outside his college. The grey sketches of mitochondria on his biology notebook pierced with his innocent red blood — he was shot in skull with a teargas canister, ripping his brain into pieces. The rage among the students was so intense, that every time they tried to get to his body, they were forced back by a volley of pellet bullets.

Deep into that night, when the soldiers had returned to the barracks, his body was iced and quickly sent home. The ghoulish night was so dark and fearsome, men didn’t seem to care to collect the parts of his brain that lay sprayed at the corner of his college gate. The chunks of the young man’s brain wafted a fresh, warn air in that cold, dark night. As the ambulance wailed past with his bloodied body back towards his expectant village, and the night edged toward a mournful morning, a group of people came back to the spot of his death and swiftly picked up the pieces of his brain in a polythene bag.

The next day, when his body was put into his village grave, the parts of his brain were buried in the city.

This memory haunted his parents. They felt torn. To lose a boy was one thing, to not have him buried in a single grave, was quite another. It was a year since his death, but the lonesome couple still, somehow, thought that a part of him was in the city, in his college, reading in a library, attending classes …

I have this eternal fear of failing in my mathematics paper. Actually, I should have no such fear because I am not in a school anymore. The last time I took math’s as a subject of my study was in 1999. The year I matriculated.

But this fear of failing in numbers and equations has lived under my skin ever since. It revisits as a short dream, mostly in times when I happen to feel low.

I was good at Math B but terrible at Math A. I don’t know who came up this rather colloquial academic nomenclature to distinguish geometry [Math B] from the crudeness of numbers and equations [Math A], but it is simplistic as it is brilliant.

So, while Math B was a saviour of my pride, Math A wasn’t. It was a bully.

In 1997, just before the first snow of the year fell in December and Kashmir schools prepped up to go for a long winter holiday, I scored miserably in my math’s paper.

It was also the year I hated my voice. It was rough, coarse and husky — like numbers are. My life was split over whether to part my hair from the left side or from the right side. I was fresh into my teens, and beside handling the squeaky changes in my throat, I was tasked to breakdown a mathematical linear equation, or worse, make sense of surds.

As much as I detested surds, it wasn’t until many years later that I learnt there is something exciting about a surd. Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, the father of algebra, called irrational numbers “inaudible”. This was later translated to the Latin surdus meaning “deaf” or “mute”.

Also, the word absurd! You see the connection?

But anyways, I am sure Mr. Khwarizmi got great grades on both Math A and B. I ended up hiding the school report card from my parents for the whole duration of the winter holidays. It lay there, buried in my desk at home, pressed hard under the load of subject books that I liked most — Biology and English. I could never gather the courage to show the report card to my parents until they finally saw it. It was a bad experience!

I don’t wake up sweating when I am revisited by the bad dream of my math’s failure. But creepy it sure is. It makes my heart heavy. Smacks out all the confident adult years of my life, and makes me vulnerable — like I am back to school and facing a gargantuan crowd of nosy kids who want to look at my math’s report card and laugh!

But one day, just out of nowhere, Mr. Muscle man made an unceremonious entry!

He was like John Rambo teaching mathematics in a public school just across Srinagar’s Zero Bridge.

With blonde hair, curled upwards at the hem of his neck, his fair complexion and a punk attitude, he looked less like a math’s teacher and more like a Hollywood star. And he also had big biceps.

But Mr. Muscle man wasn’t a shallow fancy show. His understanding of mathematics was immaculate. He helped me take my revenge. I got 82 out of 100 in my final math’s score. It was a redemption.

And with that humble score, I bid farewell to mathematics for ever.

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in the U.S. recently, my wife and I took our six-month old son to Kashmir to celebrate his first Eid with his grandparents. This was Eid-al-Adha, when Muslims all over the world sacrifice a sheep, a cow or a camel.

Modi went to the U.S. to meet with Silicon Valley’s top tech executives about his government’s flagship project, “Digital India.” The Indian prime minister even got “teary eyed” at a town hall with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s headquarters.

I went home to Kashmir with a rather modest desire to have fun on Eid and perhaps share photos from our festivities on Facebook and Instagram.

But, while Modi managed to impress Zuckerberg enough that the billionaire put the colors of the Indian flag over his Facebook profile picture — as did many other Facebook users — nobody in Kashmir, including me, could even manage to get online to share greetings with our friends and family.

Why, you might ask? Well, for the three days of Eid, starting on Friday, Sept. 25, we were stuck in the black hole of an 82 hour-long internet blackout enforced by the state, in an era where connectivity is everything.

Imagine not having internet during Christmas or Holi.

Kashmir has a long history of communication blackouts. Every year when the rest of India is celebrating the country’s Independence Day or similar such national days, internet access and messaging services are often the first things Kashmiris lose.

Over the years, people in Indian-administered Kashmir have had an uneasy relationship with India. Most Kashmiris not only mistrust Indian rule but have also been living under a heavy military footprint. A growing spate of human-rights violations has also helped fuel an armed uprising that started in 1989. In the last few years, as summer begins, a new wave of resistance brings thousands of protesters on the streets, throwing stones and demanding their rights — an expression of protest that has been dubbed “Kashmir’s Intifada.” And every time the authorities fear that protesters might use the internet and mobile messaging services to mobilize crowds, there is a clampdown on communication.

But this blockade was the first of its kind on a major Muslim holiday.

Beef Ban?

It turns out that security agencies in Kashmir feared that there might be “misuse of the Internet by anti-national elements.” The authorities suspended the internet amid fears that communal violence might break out over the issue of the beef ban in the state.

Though Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state, a recent controversial court order directed the government to enforce an 83-year-old, colonial-era law banning cow slaughter and the sale of beef in the entire state.

Their purported reason for cutting off the internet was directly related to this law: Kashmiri Muslims might put up pictures of their Eid sacrifice on the internet, hurting the sensibilities of the country’s Hindus.

Which begs a question: Where else on the planet does a dying cow bring a nation’s internet down? I am still trying to get my head around this one.

Flying back to Delhi

During those three days at home, driving around the city with portions of the sacrificial meat to be distributed among our relatives and the poor (as is the Islamic custom), I grew increasingly anxious that I still didn’t have the tickets for the flight back to Delhi with me. And being under an internet blockade, it was next to impossible to get them.

If you have ever landed at the military-run Srinagar Airport in Kashmir, you know from experience that you have to have proper credentials to fly. A screen shot of half a flight ticket (which I had in my mobile phone) is probably not going to cut it most of the time.

Finding solace in a cartoon
After a weekend without internet, I returned to Delhi with a certain sense of urgency. As I skimmed through all the tweets and Facebook posts that I had missed the past three days, I came upon a cartoon that intrigued me:

MIR Suhail on Twitter

'Digital India'... #Kashmir #Govt #EidGift #InternetBan #DigitalIndia pic.twitter.com/LwRe4FpIwQ

Mir Suhail, a Kashmiri political cartoonist, tells the whole story in a poignant sketch: A distraught looking Kashmiri man sits in the shadow of a “Digital India” being championed by a cheering Narendra Modi.

While Modi was pitching ‘Digital India’ to Silicon Valley, Kashmir’s internet was cut off was originally published in Firsthand Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFPVUqGTjpU