Bollywood goes beyond India. It is an example of India's soft power, but there is also the international influence. You also have Hollywood. Bollywood has reached many other places outside India. The world has changed a lot in the 1990s. Earlier we used to have only PTV and Doordarshan.

Even in those times, most movies were shot there. So it is more the general spread of Bollywood than anything elese. People do enjoy these films. You enjoy the good parts. The problems are not with anything Indian, it is with the government and policies. It is with the Indian symbol of statehood.

Recently, there was this movie called Tahaan and your book reads like a source material for that movie. Ten years have passed. Do you think this is the time when the real stories of that period will come out, just like yours?

If we look at Partition, other than Sadat Hassan Manto -- he wrote immediately after the event -- a lot of very good work came much later. It takes a decade or two to process those things when it comes to such great and dramatic events. And a generation grows up.

My generation has grown up right now. I know four other people writing novels about Kashmir. They are fascinating writers and there is a lot that is going to come up.

The boys have grown up and they are going to tell their stories.

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Image: A Kashmiri fisherman on the Dal Lake in Srinagar. Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images

Also Read: In the valley, the danger is of a reporter becoming the subject of a report

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