Srinagar, April 13 -- By David Lepeska

"IN newspaper work," American novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote in a letter to a friend, "you have to learn to forget every day what happened the day before."

For journalists in Kashmir this is a blessing: if they were unable to forget what happened yesterday, last week, or last year, they would never be able to write today's story because they would begin to feel rather silly covering the same news over and over again.

Yet it is also a curse because it means the horrors of life in the Kashmir Valley fail to accumulate. In order to write about the latest deaths of neighbors, suffering of loved ones, or governmental errors, the Kashmiri reporter must push out of his head the thousands of previous tim...