Editorial Policy

What you can hold us to

This page describes how Asian World Kashmir is made. It is here so that you can decide how much weight to give anything else on the site.

Bylines

Bylines are real people with real archives attached. If you disagree with a piece, you can see what else the same person has written and judge accordingly.

Priya Sharma, Kashmir travel and culture writer. Priya has spent years travelling through Kashmir and the broader Himalayan region. She writes about travel, heritage and the cultural life of a place that rewards those who look closely.

Amir Khan, Lifestyle and entertainment writer. Amir covers lifestyle, entertainment and the contemporary culture of South Asia. He is particularly interested in how tradition and modern life intersect in cities like Srinagar.

Zara Malik, Fashion and food writer. Zara writes about food, fashion and the material culture of the Kashmir Valley. She approaches every subject from the perspective of craft: how things are made, who makes them, and what they mean.

How a draft is built

• Dump first. Everything the writer believes goes down, unsorted.
• Mark the soft parts. Anything held on memory rather than evidence gets flagged.
• Check or cut. A flagged claim is either supported or removed. There is no third option.
• Second reader. Somebody else hunts for sentences that sound more certain than the evidence allows.

Choosing what to cover

What gets written is decided by demand, not by a schedule. A question that keeps arriving, from readers or from our own work, becomes a page. A clever keyword with no real question behind it does not.

How we date articles

Published means published. We do not bump dates to look active, and an edit only changes the modified date when it changes what the article actually tells you to do.

What we will not publish

• Guarantees. Nobody in this field can honestly offer one.
• Filler written to occupy a topic rather than to answer it.
• Anything we would be embarrassed to defend in person.

How the site earns

Yes, some outbound links pay. What they pay for is the hosting bill, not the wording of the assessment sitting next to them.

We have never taken a criticism down because somebody asked, and the asking tends to tell readers more than the original complaint did.

Putting things right

Write to [email protected] with the page address and what is wrong. Factual errors are fixed quickly. If the correction changes the conclusion of a piece, we add a short note at the foot of the page rather than quietly editing it.