The mid-seventies in Anantnag felt like the valley itself was breathing faster, alive with ideas and this restless hunger to say something true through art. I was a young student at the Degree College Khanabal Anantnag, searching for any crack of light that would let me pour out what was churning inside. That’s when I got a chance to meet Bashir Dada. From the first moment, he seemed larger than the room we were in.His theatre group’s tiny office in Cheeni Chowk was nothing special to look at. Just a cramped space smelling of old scripts, tea, and cigarette smoke, yet it hummed with purpose. Dada, who earned his living as a schoolteacher, became someone else entirely when he stepped into that world of creation. He welcomed me in, gave me a place in the group, and for a while I felt part of something enormous. We staged plays at the Town Hall, at the Police Lines, anywhere they’d let us. We ran on nothing but his fierce vision and our own stubborn love for the work. Those late-night rehearsals, the shared cigarettes outside under streetlights, and around Anantnag bus stand, the broken sheds of Industrial estate, the hush when the lights came up and the audience actually listened. I recall walking with him in the empty streets of Anantnag during nights while he played the song “Yaad Kiya Dil Ne Kahan Ho Tum” on mouth organ. Those nights still come back to me when everything else feels far away.For close to fifty years I’ve watched him from near and sometimes from very far. The truth is, our relationship wasn’t always smooth. There were long stretches when we weren’t on speaking terms at all, years when pride or misunderstandings or just life kept us apart. I stayed silent, he stayed angry, and neither of us bent. But even in those cold seasons I never stopped respecting him. More than that, I adored him in a quiet way, and yes, I envied him too. Envied the way talent seemed to pour out of him so naturally, the way he could move so easily between painting our wounded landscapes, writing ghazals that cut straight to the bone, directing plays that left people changed, even doing those television serials and radio dramas that reached into every home. He was, and still is, that rare all-rounder who never made a show of it.I’ve stood in the same room while he painted, watched the brush find the exact shade of grief in our snow-covered pines. I’ve heard him recite his own lines in Kashmiri or Urdu, words so full of romance and rage and love for this place that they felt like they were bleeding onto the floor. His work never shouted for attention; it simply arrived and stayed with you. So when the J&K State Awards lists for 2025 and 2026 were announced, that familiar ache returned, sharper this time. A few names on there truly deserve the nod, people who have given real years to their craft. But too many others feel like afterthoughts, beginners whose footprints are still faint, some who seem more comfortable with budgets than with breathing life into a character or a line. In the performing arts section especially it stings. How do you place novices shoulder to shoulder with a man who has spent half a century holding our stories in his hands?Dada would never chase the honour. You won’t find him waiting outside offices or writing recommendation letters for himself. That was never his way. His witness has always been the work itself, the plays that made strangers cry together, the verses people still murmur to comfort themselves, the paintings that hold both the beauty and the bruise of Kashmir. He doesn’t need a certificate to tell him he matters. The people who still remember his lines, who hum his melodies on quiet evenings, they already gave him the only crown that counts.
Still, it hurts to see the system keep choosing proximity over persistence, unknown names over lifetimes. We’ve watched folk singers and radio artists from our own soil climb to the Padma Shri because someone, somewhere, recognised decades of quiet devotion. If our state had shown even half that heart and vision, Bashir Dada’s name would have been sent forward years ago. His life is more than a career; it is one of the truest living records of who we are, what we’ve endured, what we still hope for. In the end he stands as he always has, tall, unassuming, creating because he cannot do otherwise. The silence between us in those difficult years never erased what I felt. Respect stayed, admiration stayed, envy stayed too. The kind that comes from seeing someone do what you can only dream of doing so well and love, the complicated kind that survives distance and words unsaid. No award committee can add to what he already carries inside him. But when they keep passing him over, they don’t diminish the man, they chip away at whatever trust we still have in the idea of fairness. Bashir Dada remains our uncrowned king. And in my heart, he always will.
