News stories by Athar Parvaiz, page 3

SRINAGAR, India, Mar 02 (IPS) - Upon meeting an acquaintance after a long time, a young man at a Srinagar drug store asks: "Where did you disappear?" The innocuous question elicits an unexpected reply from the other: "Weigh your words. There are people whose loved ones have really disappeared."

LEH, India, Feb 24 (IPS) - Surendar Mohan, catering assistant at the residential school Jawahar Navodiya Vidyalya looks thankfully up at the sun on this cold high-altitude desert in northwest India.

SRINAGAR, India, Dic 24 (IPS) - Mehnaz Bano (not her real name), a 37-year-old woman in a hamlet in Indian Kashmir, is living a "satisfied and peaceful" life ever since she secured her daughter's property rights before her remarriage – though not without a long and tedious struggle following her first husband's death.

SRINAGAR, India, Dic 02 (IPS) - A vast and picturesque meadow called Tosamaidan, about 112 km west of Jammu and Kashmir's capital Srinagar, has now become the rallying point for hundreds of villagers who want the artillery exercises being carried out there by the Indian Army to stop.

LADAKH, India, Sep 24 (IPS) - The Ladakh of today is a different world from the one Skarma Namgiyal remembers as a child. Back then, he had taken for granted the breathtaking beauty of its landscape, the purity of the cold mountain air, and the sweet taste of water in its streams.

CHANGTHANG, India, Sep 05 (IPS) - The famed pashmina shawl that keeps the cold away – in style and at a price – could itself have become the victim of winter. Thousands of goats whose fine wool is weaved into pashmina have perished in extreme cold being associated with climate change.

SRINAGAR, India, Aug 16 (IPS) - Zareena Bano has had to skip school 17 times this year to help out on her family's farm in Tangchekh village in the northern Indian state of Kashmir.

SRINAGAR, India, Jul 22 (IPS) - Twenty-three-year-old Haleema (not her real name) was not the first female patient at Srinagar's Chest Diseases Hospital in the Indian state of Kashmir to try to run away.

SRINAGAR, India, Jul 09 (IPS) - As a little girl, Rubeena Begum had big plans: she would become a doctor and secure a decent income working in one of the 30 hospitals in the Himalayan state of Kashmir in north India.

SRINAGAR, India, Jun 05 (IPS) - Leaning on her daughter's arm in the post-operative ward of a hospital in Srinagar, capital of the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Raja Begam views the anti-infection pill she is being offered with a large dose of suspicion.