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For this week’s blog post, I decided to look at the story “Kashmir’s Forever Wars” by Basharat Peer. This story looks at the India-Pakistan War in Kashmir and the impact it has had on families in Kashmir. The narrator travels throughout the region and meets with families who have had family members\u00a0join the militants. The narrator specifically explores the motivations and reasons behind people joining the militants and how it has impacted the communities in which they lived.<\/p>\n
I chose to make a network graph with edges between characters who appear in the same scene. This network graph helps illuminate several interesting things. Not surprisingly, the narrator is the central character of the story connecting all the other characters. This graph also illuminates which groups of characters tend to interact with one another. Just by looking at this network graph, someone who has not read the story could still make inferences about which characters might belong to the same family or community.<\/p>\n
While this graph allows one to make basic inferences about the story and the interactions between characters, many important aspects of the story are not represented by the graph. For example, since this graph is not weighted, it treats every interaction between characters to have occurred only in one scene. However, the reality is that several characters interacted multiple times throughout the story. This graph is limited in that it does not express the strength of relationship between characters. Furthermore, one should be careful to not judge the importance of characters based off of this graph. There are a few characters that appear in the fringes of this graph, but in reality are actually driving forces to this story.<\/p>\n
Another thing lacking from this graph is a distinction between the nature of the characters. Given the backdrop of a war and storyline of Kashmir being a war torn state, most people can be categorized based on which side of the war they believe. This story is also about reconciling those differences and about people who made surprising choices of which side they identified with, despite their family’s beliefs. This graph could better show the conflict of the story by coloring the nodes of each character based on the side with which that character identified with. This would further highlight to the reader the different sides present in one family or community, and would drive home the author’s point more directly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"