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The entire list and a brief profile of 'Delhi ke nirmata'⁠— the makers of Delhi felicitated at Kejriwal's oath taking ceremony

<ul><li><strong>Three major films – <keyword id="198679" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Haider">Haider</keyword>, Fanaa and Mission Kashmir – offer a more nuanced look at the most militarised zone in the world than Indian history books. </strong></li><li><strong>the New Delhi board-designed syllabus of the Indian Council of School Examinations did not mention the special status of the state of <a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/kashmir" class="link-text"><span class="text">Jammu and Kashmir</span></a>, the only Muslim-majority state in <a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/india" class="link-text"><span class="text">India</span></a></strong></li></ul><br />In school, the New Delhi board-designed syllabus of the Indian Council of School Examinations did not mention the special status of the state of <a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/kashmir" class="link-text"><span class="text">Jammu and Kashmir</span></a>, the only Muslim-majority state in <a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/india" class="link-text"><span class="text">India</span></a>.There are separate Indian state boards as well. I studied under a central board. We did not learn about the circumstances under which the state joined the Indian Union, nor that Kashmir is the most militarised zone in the world in terms of the number of armed forces personnel per square km of territory. Through my school years in the 1990s, there were news stories from the state about blasts and killings and terrorists, seemingly always about violence. Did they delve into the background of the anger? I don’t know because I did not go beyond the headlines. There was a sameness and one-sidedness to them – invariably images of fire and guns and empty streets – that never invoked interest.<br /><br />When the television news business arrived in a big way in India, this impression was amplified – Hollywood action movie-style visuals of gunfire and explosions and people running for cover, or reporters reporting amid the silence of empty streets patrolled by army men with enormous guns strapped to their bodies. Bombast with no context. This is unsurprising, because journalists’ access to the Valley is mediated through the army, making them structurally dependent on the armed forces and predisposing them to be favourable to their perspective.<br /><br />When <span class="text"><a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/narendra-modi" class="link-text">Narendra Modi</a> </span>ran for prime minister in 2014, his Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto promised that <keyword id="405091" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Article-370">Article 370</keyword>, which spelt out the special conditions under which the province joined the Indian Union at the time of Independence, would be removed. For a populace that was, like me, mostly unaware of its content, it was easy to latch on to simplified nuggets such as the fact that Kashmir does not allow land to be sold to Indians from other states. It sounds like a concession made to a Muslim-majority state but this land restriction exists in several states in India, and is important to prevent heedless development in ecologically sensitive areas.<br /><br />Strange as it may sound, it is the <span class="text"><a href="https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/2184614/triumph-modi-propaganda-bollywood" class="link-text">Hindi film industry</a> </span>that has taught me the little I understand about the anger in Kashmir, about the “special” powers of the armed forces stationed there and the “special” consequences they inflicted. Three Bollywood films in particular have left an impact – <em>Haider</em> (2014), <em>Fanaa</em>(2006) and <em>Mission Kashmir</em> (2000). There have been several indie films, extremely well-regarded, but I choose to focus on the big-budget, big star projects of the film industry because these arguably had the widest release and reach.<br /><br /><em>Haider</em> is a reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in the “rotten state” of Kashmir in place of Denmark. The setting is much more central to the drama here than it is in Hamlet where the rottenness of Denmark was expressed only in the suspicious death of the king. Here, politics is central to Haider’s father’s disappearance from Kashmir. We never know for certain if he is alive or dead, and this, as we see in the film, is the situation that many Kashmiri families find themselves in.<br /><h3 style="margin-bottom: 1.42857rem; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 300; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.71429rem; line-height: 2.35714rem; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; display: inherit;"><br /></h3>The evocative term half-widow has arisen from this waiting without end – this is the status of Haider’s mother and many other wives who don’t know what has become of their husbands. In the uncertainty about his father (and the many fathers and brothers and sons who have been taken into custody by the forces in Kashmir and never returned), Haider (and Kashmir) is going mad. Gravediggers sing songs, they are so inured to death. Citizens hesitate to enter their own homes without a pat-down security check, they are so conditioned to being checked. Mothers beg that their sons are sent away from them because they are so afraid of losing them to the insurgency or to the limitless powers of the Indian army.<br /><br />Most of all, the film articulates the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) that the Indian government has imposed on the Valley, how terrifying it is when men with guns have boundless power and no one to question them. Rapes and disappearances ensue, and there is no need to answer what happened because Afspa gives you “special powers”. “Do we exist or do we not”, the film asks in a haunting choral crescendo reminding us of that original line in Hamlet, “to be or not to be”.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />In <em>Fanaa</em> (2006), a blind Kashmiri woman and a terrorist fall in love with each other during India’s Independence Day celebrations in Delhi. He is there to carry out a blast and she to dance at the national celebration: classical opposites, the nationalist and the revolutionary. After the blast, the terrorist disappears because he comes to the realisation that he would put the woman in danger because of his work. The nationalist’s blindness means she cannot locate him. Years later, fate returns him to her doorstep in Kashmir and the two reconcile briefly before she hands him over to the Indian national forces. <em>Fanaa</em> is nowhere near as compelling or thought-provoking as <em>Haider</em>, it is simply a star-crossed romance set in Kashmir. But it ends on a pointedly ambiguous note. When the couple’s son asks the mother why his father was a terrorist, she replies that he did what he thought was right. The film clearly argues that the terrorist is misguided by malevolent forces yet it refrains from making a moral call on the terrorist’s actions.<br /><br /><em>Mission Kashmir</em> (2000) is about a powerful policeman whose son dies when militants forbid doctors from treating the child. In an episode of poetic justice, the policeman kills a boy’s family in an encounter and adopts the traumatised boy. This encounter is likely carried out with the vast powers granted to Indian forces under the Afspa, certainly no questions are asked of the policeman after the encounter. But the man himself is hollowed by remorse, especially at the sight of the boy who lived. He becomes a terrorist, determined to avenge his family’s gruesome end. That classic divide is set up again, terrorist against dutiful nationalist in a land where loyalties are sharply divided. Eventually, the terrorist comes around to the Indian nation’s view, that Islamist groups are provoking young men like him to divide India.<br /><br /><br />Like <em>Haider</em>, <em>Mission Kashmir</em> questions the actions of Indian forces in Kashmir, though the conclusions the two films come to are different. The policeman’s remorse suggests that the Indian state has a lot to think about and apologise for, that the unchecked power that it has granted its forces leads to <span class="text"><a href="https://www.scmp.com/thisweekinasia/topics/human-rights" class="link-text">human rights</a> </span>violation that feeds the insurgency in the Valley. <em>Haider</em> on the other indicts the Indian state for unleashing this unapologetic, shameless military strength on the Valley. Incidentally, Mission Kashmir is made by a director who is from Kashmir himself. <em>Haider</em>, similarly, is written by Basharat Peer who is also a Kashmiri and has written a highly-acclaimed book on Kashmir called <em>Curfewed Night</em>. Both films are informed by a lived perspective of Kashmir.<br /><br />On August 8, 2019, when Prime Minister Modi addressed Indian citizens on Kashmir, he mentioned the prospects for films. “I urge the Hindi, Telugu and Tamil film industry to come to J&amp;K for shooting their projects,” said Modi. The Hindi film industry has long indicated that Kashmir has a special place by marketing movies filmed in the Valley, naming films using Kashmir in the title and using iconography identified as Kashmiri like the houseboat and the chinar leaf. No other Indian state has been marked as “special” like this by the Hindi film industry. There are films named after big cities like Kolkata and Mumbai and Delhi, but nothing after an entire cultural identity. Until <em>Mission Kashmir</em>, however, these films only did lip service to Kashmir, promoting a tourist’s view of the state, a natural “paradise” where hero and heroine fell in love. These films were not rooted in Kashmir, disengaged from its problems. <em>Mission Kashmir</em>naturally is a product of its times, born out of a decade-plus of the insurgency that flared in the Valley in the late 1980s. Thereafter, as the unrest never subsided, there have been several films which offer an insider’s view of Kashmir.<br /><br /><h3 style="margin-bottom: 1.42857rem; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 300; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 1.71429rem; line-height: 2.35714rem; font-family: Roboto, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; display: inherit;"><a href="https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3022046/indias-kashmir-move-attempt-shift-its-muslim-demographic" class="link-text">India’s Kashmir move: an attempt to shift its Muslim demographic?<br /></a></h3>I’ll end with one of the opening sequences of <em>Haider</em>, where his (Hamlet’s) mother, a schoolteacher, is teaching the children of her class the meaning of home. “It is brothers and sisters and fathers and mothers. It is unselfish acts and kindly sharing and showing your loved ones you are always caring.” It is an obvious metaphor for the Indian nation and its fraught relationship with Kashmir, the parents and the estranged child. The filial bond is often invoked for India and <span class="text"><a href="https://www.scmp.com/topics/pakistan" class="link-text">Pakistan</a></span>– brothers separated in a bloodied moment.But there is also another metaphor here: the Indian state teaching us the history of our “home”, and our duties as citizens and how we should live like brothers and sisters at home, “unselfish acts and kindly sharing”. It brings me back to where I started, what we are taught about our home and what we are not. Every nation controls its citizenry through education and so does India. We never learned the conditions in which Kashmir joined the Indian Union, and the circumstances we created to keep it at any cost. Perhaps it is not so strange then that I learned what little I did about Kashmir from our biggest film industry. For all its commercial inclinations, its lessons feel less biased than that of the Indian state’s.<br />

Bollywood teaches more about Kashmir than India’s schools

The National Green Tribunal on Tuesday descended intensely on Delhi and other neighbouring States for not finding a way to control stubble burning and guided them to give finish mechanism on execution of its headings by tomorrow to curb air pollution.<br />
<br /> A <keyword id="6377812" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="bench">Bench</keyword> headed by <keyword id="6357743" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="NGT">NGT</keyword> Chairperson Justice <keyword id="159838" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="Swatanter-Kumar">Swatanter Kumar</keyword> reprimanded the secretaries of Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab and <keyword id="6357713" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Uttar-Pradesh">Uttar Pradesh</keyword> for not implementing its requests on product burning and containing air pollution.<br />
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“What did you do when all this smog was going on and the particulate matter reached beyond prescribed limits? What steps did you take, except till yesterday? For the first five days nobody did anything, be it the states or the Centre. Show us one thing visible to common man,” the Bench said.<br />
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The green board likewise passed a large number of measures to enhance the surrounding air quality in the national capital including banning development exercises and operation of stone crushers and block ovens for a week in Delhi and NCR.<br />
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Amid the listening to, the Bench likewise blasted the AAP government for shutting schools without leading any logical study and asked how it arrived at the conclusion that pollution indoor was superior to open air for youngsters.<br />
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It additionally rapped Delhi government for sprinkling water through cranes rather than choppers to control dust pollution.<br />
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The tribunal guided the city corporations of Delhi to depute 50 for every penny of their staff to go to different destinations over the city to guarantee no dust pollution is brought about because of development and there is no burning of city solid waste.<br />
<br /> It likewise asked Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) to gather encompassing air quality information for a time of one week as a team with <keyword id="68030" type="PERSON" weightage="20" keywordseo="Delhi-pollution">Delhi Pollution</keyword> Control Committee (DPCC).<br />
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The NGT conceded the matter for listening to tomorrow after it was educated that the Supreme Court was additionally listening to the case.

NGT Bans construction work, asks Delhi govt to curb pollution

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>Walk into any Walgreens, pop open nearly any digital camera and you'll see it: the ubiquitous SanDisk memory card.</p><p>Over the past 26 years, SanDisk bloomed from a three-person startup in Milpitas, California, to a company <a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ae?s=SNDK+Analyst+Estimates">with $6.6 billion in revenue</a>, a market cap of around $18 billion, and 8,700 employees worldwide.</p><p>And it almost didn't happen because the US government repeatedly told co-founder and current CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, that he would not be allowed to go to college in the US.</p><p>If it weren't for his father's dogged determination, "I cannot imagine where I would be," Mehrotra told Business Insider.</p><h3><strong>Here's the whole story in Mehrotra's own words:</strong></h3><p>"I grew up in India until I was 18 years old. My father had the dream of sending me to the US for my undergraduate education. I came from a lower middle-class family there, but he certainly dreamt big!</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>"I applied to come to the US right after I had finished high school in India which was 11 years of high school. At that time, you needed 12 years of high school to get into a US college."</p><p>So he was not accepted anywhere.</p><p>"I chose at that time to go to a college in India and apply again after my second year. This time, I got admission to UC Berkeley. I was not yet 18.</p><p>"I went to the US embassy to get my visa and it was denied. I tried again, and was still denied. My father said, 'We are not going to give up.' I applied another time and was denied again.</p><p>"So I got rejected three times by the US consulate in New Delhi.</p><p>"I do not know a more tenacious person than my dad. He figured out who the person in charge [of the consulate] was. In the lobby, there was a picture of him so he waited until he returned from lunch and he tracked him down and followed him to his office.</p><p>"The counselor didn't really want to talk to him, but was nice enough to listen. For 20 minutes non-stop, in a very passionate and angry fashion, my father blasted away at the counselor, explaining to him how much of an opportunity he was depriving me of.</p><p>"At the end of that 20 minutes, the counselor said, 'Ok. I'll give your son a visa.'  I learned from my dad that tenacity is the key to success."</p><p>Mehrotra studied computer science and electrical engineering at Berkeley, eventually completing his master's degree and discovering a love of "designing chips" he told us. He got hired out of college by Intel and that's where he met his SanDisk co-founder Eli Harari.</p><p>Since then, he's racked up more than 70 patents in the field of chip design and computer memory.</p><h3><strong>All three of SanDisk's founders were immigrants</strong></h3><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>All of the co-founders came to the US from other countries. Harari, the original co-founder CEO, emigrated from Israel. He led the company until he retired in 2010, when Mehrotra, who was COO, took over. (In 2014, Harari received the <a href="http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2014/sandisks-founder-dr-eli-harari-recognized-by-president-obama-with-highest-honor-for-revolutionizing-the-flash-storage-industry/">National Medal of Technology and Innovation</a> for his pioneering work in memory chips.)</p><p>The third co-founder, Jack Yuan, was from Taiwan. He stayed with the company from its founding in 1988 until semi-retiring in 2004, too. (SanDisk went public in 1995.)</p><p>In the course of 26 years, the company has been through its share of good times and rough times.</p><h3><strong>Fending off Samsung</strong></h3><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>In 2008, when the global economy was collapsing, SanDisk hit the skids.</p><p>"Consumer demand was changing and we realized just being dependent on removable products not good enough. It was a fairly tough time In the fourth quarter of 2008 we reported hefty losses," he remembers. The team decided to get into new forms of memory, particularly flash memory for the smartphone market and the <keyword id="6356323" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="Enterprise">enterprise</keyword>.</p><p>That was years before anyone was taking flash memory seriously, particularly in the enterprise.</p><p>In November of 2008, SanDisk's stock was trading below $6, and around that time, "Samsung, actually tried to acquire the company as well," he told us. After some soul searching and a "series of meetings between our senior leadership team," SanDisk turned them down, he remembers. "I give the credit to Eli, our CEO, and our board and our management team.  We believed there was a huge opportunity that lay ahead of us in flash."</p><p>By 2011, a year into Mehrotra's reign, Sandisk had recovered enough to make its first acquisition, a flash company called Pliant Technology, <a href="http://www.sandisk.com/about-sandisk/press-room/press-releases/2011/2011-05-16-sandisk-announces-agreement-to-acquire-pliant-technology/">paying $327 million cash</a>. It made a few more acquisitions in the market in 2013.</p><p>In 2014, it bought Fusion-IO for $1.1 billion, too. This was one of the companies that helped create the enterprise flash storage market (and who famously employed Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak).</p><p>Fusion-IO was a a 2011 IPO darling that hit a tailspin in 2012 and lost both of its co-founders in 2013. Mehrotra was eyeing it for much of that time.</p><p>"We first looked at Fusion-io at the end of 2013, and the valuation at the time appeared too high and we decided to pass on it. The deal restarted again in March/April of 2014 timeframe, and the acquisition was completed in July in 2014," Mehrotra told us.</p><h3><strong>A $1 billion business</strong></h3><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"></div><p></p></div></div>And now SanDisk is moving quickly to become a major player in flash enterprise storage.</p><p>"This business, this year, we expect to achieve in flash sales and enterprise storage, $1 billion in revenue. So think. It just started for us in 2011 and we've grown this business to $1 billion," he says.</p><p>Investors have been excited - and sometimes downright hyped up - about SanDisk's future too.</p><p>The stock has been on a roller coaster over the past year, (reaching above $100/share a couple of times) and it has mostly traded at well over $80. Lately, the stock has tumbled to the mid $60s, as the company has been warning investors that its 2015 might not be as stellar as their excitement for it. But even so, that's a far cry from the lows of 2008.</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-headphones-tricks-2015-2">14 things you didn't know your iPhone headphones could do</a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="o2OGM3czpWcydnvhjbkDBd6feXPuExiD" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

This man built an $18 billion Silicon Valley company - after the US government almost didn't let him in

You Searched For "delhi school blast" and got 4 results

The entire list and a brief profile of 'Delhi ke nirmata'⁠— the makers of Delhi felicitated at Kejriwal's oath taking ceremony

BI India Bureau

Bollywood teaches more about Kashmir than India’s schools

SCMP

NGT Bans construction work, asks Delhi govt to curb pollution

BI India Bureau

This man built an $18 billion Silicon Valley company - after the US government almost didn't let him in

Julie Bort

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