Srinagar, July 18 -- By Syed Nissar H Gilani

Six months ago, my gut failed without warning.

That sentence still stops me. A body that had walked five to seven kilometers every day, that had never touched a cigarette or a drop of alcohol, crumbled within days of a bout of food poisoning that struck while I was travelling.

I lost ten kilograms so fast that the face looking back at me in the mirror belonged to a stranger.

I am telling this story publicly because I think it says something about what Kashmir's hospitals can do when the stakes are highest, a fact that gets buried under decades of coverage that treats this region as nothing but a flashpoint.

Consider the life that crisis interrupted.

I was born in September 1946 and spent ...