With the backdrop of development of 1947-48, when it occupied some areas of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan tried its luck again in 1965 by sending across an amalgam of regular troops but this time without the looters, plunderers and rapist tribesmen. They were trained men of all hues, of various armed organizations, with army personnel as their leaders. Pakistan day dreamt that the Muslim population the State, particularly in Kashmir Valley and Punch area would rise in revolt against the Indian Government and support the infiltrators and intruders. Pakistan failed to understand the social vibes in the State, which were so clear in 1965. The Muslim majority population in the Kashmir Valley and Punch area gave a cold shoulder to Pakistan. Her calculations in the State went awry and most of the intruders during 1965 Indo-Pak War were either captured or killed and only a lucky few could retrace their steps to Pakistan occupied Kashmir. In conducting operations against the unconventional enemy, a lot of readjustments of forces by own army was adopted. At times, certain momentary vacations, reverses and losses had to be accepted for achieving of the major goal of defeating the designs of Pakistan and its army.

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India’s next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb’s reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent. Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi’s nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

What happens when you close your eyes? Does your mind get inundated by fond memories?Certainly! Over the past many years, my family has been bearing with my flashback moments. They have been kind by not bundling me off. They stay clear-off my territory when I collapse my eyelids.‘The Kashmir That Was’ is a collection of those flashback moments. It is a point where the unseen, unheard and unimagined sides of Kashmir converge; to let the people in the world know that Kashmir was far more than what they know of her now.Kashmir was a cauldron of modernity, philosophy, spirituality, rich culture and progressiveness. Each story in this book is a page from the simple lives that Kashmiri’s lived, many moons ago. I wish that these stories bring smiles and joyous nostalgia to the readers.

Transcript of speeches and comments made in debates.

Chandu Menon Was A Pathbreaaker In The Field Of Malayalam Literature. His Induledkha Was The First Novel In Malayalam In The Sense That It Was No Adaption Or Translationý