Morning 12th April

Heaven is the place where Gods resides, right? So, why would the valley have any paucity of them? Well it doesn’t. Kashmiri Pandits maybe a small insignificant (statistically) minority in Kashmir, but they have a fair number of pilgrims in valley. Amarnath is the most popular one of them, but for Kashmiri Pandits themselves, the numero uno of religious places is a place called ‘Kheer Bhawani’ or Tulmul. This used to be the favorite place of many Sages to meditate, due to some mystical calmness in the surroundings.
This mystical calmness was what we were headed to on the morning of 12th. The entrance to the temple looks no different to the entrance of any of the ubiquitous army bunkers/instillations you see all across the valley. All through my trip to valley, I had to try real hard to keep armed people out of frame in my photos.
Then there were things I was trying real hard to keep within the frame, but couldn’t. One of these things which even a gigapixel digital camera can’t capture is ‘Kashmiriyat’. The people distributing the ‘prasad’ (offerings to the god) at Kheer Bhawani are Muslims!! There are various concepts of secularism; Western one, where something secular is something atheistic; Indian political system one, where you ban anything offending any religion and give undue favors to people of all religions equally. Kashmiri concept is very weird given the fact that generally accepted norms of secularism are the ones discussed above. Its not mere economics that drives the phenomenon of why so many Hindu religious places in Kashmir are managed by Muslims (Amarnath is another example), it is something else. It is the underlined logic, thought & philosophy behind so many other things there. Some use a word ‘Kashmiriyat’ for it and some like Arun Shourie call it " incomparable blend of Shaivism and liberal Islam" , lets use whatever word you people are comfortable with.
I tasted the mystical calmness in all its glory; there were very few visitors to Kheer Bhawani that morning. I also had what was probably best lunch of my life, oil soaked bread called ‘lichhe’ and milkless tea called ‘Kahwa’. (Please don’t try the recipe in your kitchen, both ‘look’ & ‘are’ very different from what the description suggests).