[Reader-list] Dear Omar – hope you remember us

[Pawan Durani]

Dear Omar – hope you remember
us<http://thekashmir.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/dear-omar-%e2%80%93-hope-you-remember-us/>
: Contributed by Ms Preeti

Dear Omar (Abdullah please and not Omar Farooq),

As one of your contemporaries, I will take the liberty of addressing you by
your first name and not as the honourable CM or any of the official titles.
I write to you as a fellow Kashmiri whose ancestors shared the same land,
air and water as yours.  But somewhere I seem to have lost the right over
the place while you have achieved the highest office in land. As an Indian
and a Kashmiri I was thrilled to see someone like you take the oath of
office of the CM, rather than a rabble rousing ranter. The gods of Kashmir
seem to be finally listening.

Though you might know and be aware of the existence of the community of
Kashmiri Pandits, I don't know how many of the current generation of the
Valley are aware that such people did live alongwith their ancestors not so
many years back. For their information I will add a few details about the
community. Kashmiri Pandits are Hindus (all of them Saraswat Brahmins) whose
generations were the early habitants of the Valley. Sparing the detailed
historical tomes over here, the Kashmiri Pandits or KPs as they are called
for short, suffered a series of religious persecutions over centuries. Yet
to the surprise of everyone they managed to survive and achieve a high-level
of erudition, both at the scholastic and spiritual levels. However as
history teaches us, smartness doesn't always lead to success. Continuous
years of persecution created a shift in demographics against us pushing us
to lose our religion and culture. However being a very stubborn and at times
a very arrogant race, the Kashmiri Pandits decided to fight back on ways to
preserve their way of life.

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http://thekashmir.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/dear-omar-%e2%80%93-hope-you-remember-us/