In Berlin, in the footlights, with heart in throat.

In London, in the headlights, with heart in hands.

In her heart, in Kashmir, always in Kashmir.

A young woman that rather took the stage by storm at dasSMACC shares a little bit of her own heart and a lot more of someone else’s heart. Sanaah demands attention. She demands attention because attention is required. Not for herself. Attention is demanded on behalf of the disputed territory of Kashmir. On behalf of more than 8000 missing young men attention is demanded.

This is the young Medical Student and Poet Sanaah Sultan. Activist. Future pre-hospitalist.

SMACC continued to dream up new and imaginative things, new and imaginative ways to get a message across. It might be doctors that can act, paramedics that can defy gravity, film-makers that can do more using one button than you or I could ever do. In Berlin they had a poet.

I heard Sanaah speak to a packed room at the SMACCforce pre-conference event. I saw her do it again in front of 3000 odd people in the Tempodrom. There is a kind of bravery required for that sort of thing. She brings that performance to the Jellybean Podcast.

It is not my voice that you need to hear, it isn’t even Sanaahs. The voice we need to hear is any one of the disappeared. We need to hear those voices. We demand to hear those voices.

It was my pleasure to meet Sanaah. Meeting people like her makes all this podcast business worthwhile. Thank you to Sanaah. Find her on Twitter @Sanaa_Sultan

Thank you also to Mohammad Muneem and his Pune-based Kashmiri band “Alif” for their track Jhelemus from their debut 2017 album “Sufayed”. You can find that album on iTunes and search in Albums on Soundcloud for Sufayed.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.