Mission Kashmir fails to strike chord, its music does

The movie is yet to be screened in any cinema hall here. The local Cable networks took the lead and showed the film on the small screen.

The movie’s "mission" is to attack the visiting Prime Minister besides blowing up the shrines of Hazratbal and Shankaracharya with an aim to flare up communal strife. And Mission Kashmir

is directly controlled by an Afghan mercenary while the only active and prominent local militant is Altaf (Hritik Roshan), who also operates under him.

On how the story is lacking the flavour of Kashmir militancy, another youngster Kaisar Ahmad Wani said, "Kashmir militancy is not drawn by the revenge sentiment." He said there is hardly any militant in Kashmir who opted for the gun after his parents were killed by the police, though many did join counter-insurgency and became Ikhwanis, after their parents or siblings were killed by militants.

"Though the story is fiction but it should have at least represented the broad facts correctly. The story of Kashmir is not so simple," Wani said. "A majority of Kashmiri boys take to militancy for an entirely different set of reasons. In fact, the way local militant Altaf has been shown in absolute control of an Afghan mercenary, who has been hired on a huge fee, also seems far-fetched from reality. There is no denying that foreign militants do operate in Kashmir but nobody – not even security force officials – will agree that their motivation is entirely money. They are drawn to Kashmir mostly through religious indoctrination," he elaborated.

The disappointment about the theme of the film, however, did not keep people, especially youngsters, away from the movie. "My children are glued to the television set since it came on cable. We have not even been able to watch the news because it is being repeated again and again," said Shameema Akhtar, a government teacher from Rajbagh.

Mission Kashmir

militant hideouts, however, do remind one of the early years of the 90s, when militancy was dominated by the pro-Independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). Those days, most of the local militant groups used to have their headquarters in abandoned houses of Kashmiri Pandits in the interior Rainawari area on the Dal’s banks.

"The way IGP Khan’s wife is taken to the militant hideout in the movie seems so real that I remembered those old days," said Mohammad Ashraf, a former JKLF militant. However, he said, the kehwa-walla inside the hideout does not gel at all. "I don’t recollect a single day when kehwa was being served."

The film, however, turned the `Keats of Kashmir’ Rusul Mir’s famous romantic folk song Rinde Poshe Maal Gindine Draye lolo and Dina Nath Nadim’s Bombroo Bombroo popular in the Valley. In fact, these Kashmiri folk numbers, which had been forgotten over the years, have emerged as symbols of Kashmiri ethnic pride. Mission Kashmir

‘s music has turned out to be a hit across the Valley. Passengers hum the songs as the drivers run the music on high pitch in their buses. In fact, there has hardly been any school function or a cultural show where these songs were not sung, that too in their original Kashmiri form and not the Bollywood version.