KASHMIR KI VADIYON NE KYA KYA NAJARE DEKHE... BY ALI PETER JOHN

I would to believe in the poet or was is the emperor Jahangir who said about Kashmir, " If there is heaven, it is here, it is here, it is here", that poet was referring to a Kashmir which must have been like heaven in his time and i loved to believe in his idea of Kashmir, till i had my own experience of seeing and living in Kashmir for a few days in 1980 - Ali Peter John

I had never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would go to Kashmir one day because for me my village was Switzerland and Goa was Kashmir or better. Till one day my editor told me that i was going to Kashmir to cover the shooting of a film called 'Apas ki baat'.

I couldn't believe it and didn't sleep for several nights till the day of my leaving for Srinagar dawned. I was accompanied by a rookie photographer called Rakesh Shreshta(whose son Rohan is now one of the leading photographers and was supposed to marry Shraddha Kapoor till very recently) .

I was overwhelmed when I the snow capped mountains from the window of my aircraft and before I could land at the Srinagar airport my romantic image about Kashmir changed dramatically, i saw men in uniform and carrying the most deadly kind of guns standing in every corner, the worst was still to come.

There were tall and happy women who were frisking passengers in a very crude way and a crude language and literally pushing them in all directions. We somehow got out of the airport and Kashmir was welcoming us with open arms and with all its flowers and fragrances.

We checked in a small hotel, which looked like a glorified shanty in Bombay and were shoved into one room. My photographer friend couldn't imagine living in that room and kept nagging me to ask the producer (Saleem Akhtar) to get us a better room.

I didn't like doing such things, but I agreed to do this all for a friend and we shifted into a suit at the Broadway Hotel which was considered to be the best hotel in Srinagar and was owned by Mr DP dhar, the chairman of the planning commission and a very close friend of Mrs Indira Gandhi and the Gandhi family.

All was well till the next morning and we left for the location where a new actor Raj Babbar and a new actress Poonam Dhillon were to shoot a romantic song on the dal Lake. There was as usual a huge crowd all around the lake shouting all kinds of slogans, the most common being "Allah ho akbar" .

The shooting had hardly began when a huge crowd kept marching towards the venue of the shooting, shouting out slogans which seemed to be very angry slogans. The leader of the protest met the director Harmesh Malhotra and told him that he had a very simple request.

His followers wanted him to hand over Raj Babbar and Poonam Dhillon to them and they would call off the protest. The scene was growing more and more angry and ugly till someone called the powers that be and a large convoy of police and army arrived on the scene and the shooting was called off and Raj and Poonam were escorted back to the hotel. And it was considered safe to call off the shooting in Kashmir.

The high drama had still not ended for me or for anyone who was there. By 3 PM, hundreds of CBI officials swooped down on every house of powerful leaders including Sheikh Abdullah. There were more than 400 CBI men living in Broadway where we were living and the whole night passed off with a blend of fear, anxiety and uneasiness.

Thank God, for a good producers like Saleem Akhtar we could take the first flight from Sri Nagar to Bombay and all was well with us, with the world and with the country.

But now when I look back at that incident at the dal Lake in Kashmir, I get a strong feeling that the scene was a beginning of all that has been going on in Kashmir for the last 40 years, including what is happening now over the Kashmir files.

The one thing i like about our filmmaker is their courage and their determination to do things however difficult they are. Like, it has never been easy to shoot in the valley for the last 40 years, but our filmmakers have succeeded in making some of the most relevant, romantic and realistic films in the very heart of Kashmir.

I don't want to go into the details of every film, but here is a list of some of the films that may churn your mind, heat up your mind or give you a pleasant feeling thinking about the Kashmir that was...

Kuch filme Jo pichle 10 saal mein Kashmir mein bani aur Kashmir par bani...
1. Imtiaz Ali who is also from Kashmir has shot three of his most important films in and around Kashmir.
2. Vishal Bhardwaj made Haidar entirely in Kashmir.
3. Vidu vinod Chopra who is originally from Kashmir made Mission Impossible, Mission Kashmir and even arts of 1942: a love story in Kashmir.
4. Uri the surgical strike was also shot in Kashmir.
5. JP dutta shot parts of his Border and Refugee in Kashmir
6. There was a time when Yash Chopra couldn't think of making a film without a major part of it being shot in Kashmir. And when he couldn't shoot in Kashmir, he changed his destination to Switzerland and never came back to Kashmir again.
7. In the good old days, IS Johar made an entire film called Johar in Kashmir and he didn't shoot a single scene in Kashmir but created Kashmir in Chandivali studio in Bombay. He was so clever that he created the Mountain peaks with heaps of bags of salts, an idea which was picked up by many other filmmakers, including the great patriot filmmaker Manoj Kumar who created Kashmir in the studios of Bombay and created all the peaks with salt at the mehboob studio.

Just before the pandemic, the well known actress Deepti naval had built her own house and studio on the outskirts of the dal Lake, a place she visited whenever she felt sick of Mumbai. I wonder what will happen to that house and her dreams if God forbid kashmir turns into a nightmare.