Azhar Wani, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Azhar Wani

Azhar Wani studies English literature at Ashoka University. He is the poetry editor for an undergraduate literary journal called Plot Number 2. He previously attended the Summer Institute at University of Iowa's Writing Program, with his writing being published in an anthology along with other international and American participants of the program.

It’s Not Safe Outside — A Poem by Azhar Wani

November 24, 2019 | Poetry

Azhar Wani introduces a timely poem that takes a famous couplet known to every Kashmiri and inverts its meaning through the poetic verse. Such inversion confronts the idealization of Kashmir as a paradisaical site that over the ages has become a well of horrors, pain and trauma for its residents, particularly in contemporary times. In his own words, the poet explains, “the poem traverses distance and time as Emperor Jahangir’s words about Kashmir are echoed as a lacerated cry. Set in sometime that appears to be a looming catastrophe, one that hasn’t stopped prophesying itself for decades in Kashmir, the poem seeks a moment of recognition of the growing ‘otherness’ and forced identities. In that, all it seeks from the reader is a moment of wide thought.”