I will share a personal experience: my father was posted in Jammu & Kashmir during the Kargil war. I remember my mom sitting in front of television throughout the day reading tickers which had name of the martyrs.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My dad was in the Indian Army. He died in a terrorist attack in Kashmir in 1994. After that, my mum and I settled in Noida. I went to Delhi Public School in Noida and then to Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi University. It was in college that I realised I wanted to be on the stage and in front of the camera.
I was a war correspondent and journalist for a long time, and I was very near the towers on 9/11 and very shortly after in Afghanistan.
When my father died, I was living in England. It was very traumatic that he died when I was away.
My father was killed by a German mine, while I lost other relatives in Allied bombing attacks.
I was brought up largely by my grandfather because my father only returned from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1947 and worked in the nearest small town, so I hardly ever saw him.
When I was little, I grew up in a place called Hertfordshire, which is just near London, but out in the country, and I visited Pakistan in the summers to go and see my family on my dad's side.
My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
I am originally a surd who was born in Delhi in 1982, just two years before the Sikh riots, so all my childhood pictures are in baby frocks with ponytails, as my parents wanted to hide the fact that I was a Sikh boy, given the riots. My dad worked for a travel agency, and we soon moved to Saudi Arabia.
My dad was a journalist. He was in Rwanda right after the genocide. In Berlin when the wall came down. He was always disappearing and coming back with amazing stories. So telling stories for a living made sense to me.
I have been to Kashmir many times, especially with my family, in the '70s.