Srinagar, Sept. 8 -- By Navaid Runyal

I left Pogal Paristan on a motorcycle with a full tank and a private bet with myself.

Somewhere along nearly 4,500 kilometres to Nepal and back, I would find out whether a boy from a mountain hamlet in District Ramban could do something the map of my own country barely accounts for.

Strangers on the road kept asking the same question: where are you from. I answered it the same way every time. "Pogal Paristan, District Ramban, Jammu and Kashmir."

Watching the name land on someone's face became its own test. Most people had never heard those words before, not even inside India.

That blank look told me more about my region's place in the national imagination than any statistic could.

I am an electr...