For a Kashmiri student like me who migrated out of J&K for higher studies, the witch-hunt of my ilk in the JNU row or the recent arrest of four Kashmiri students in Rajasthan allegedly for cooking beef is far from shocking. Nor is the fact that all Kashmiri students in Kolkata are on police's radar or that the tenements inhabited by us will soon be checked in a door-to-door campaign in Goa. It's a reality we have lived for years, and our campus or professional life outside Kashmir is literally a path of thorns. And targetting us is also nothing new. Have you forgotten the sedition case against 60 Kashmiri students in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, for cheering for the Pakistani team during a televised cricket match against India? This was in March 2014, months before Narendra Modi came to power. Cricket matches with Pakistan, in fact, are always a tense situation. Most Kashmiris cheer for Pakistan. If you're a Kashmiri student, most probably you'll get a call from you parents to go to your relatives' place to stay safe, or just avoid being near people that day. The rest of India lives in denial, and abuses us every time they hear it from us. So just how different is a Kashmiri student's life from a "normal" counterpart, say in campuses in Delhi? We had a different childhood and thus different personalities. We are considered serious folks, who jump to political conversations at the drop of the hat. But if you look at how we grew up, it shouldn't surprise you. We are a children of conflict who grew up in war. All my childhood, I saw Army men standing guard outside school, even inside the building. Once, a cricket ball smashed into the window of our neighbors' house. Next, we heard firing. The lady who lived there had screamed she was being attacked, and the Army around the park that we were playing in, took up the guns. Or the time when me and my siblings lay down on the floor for hours because there was an encounter in the neighborhood. Or that time I ran holding my mother's hand running away from bullets. All this takes away a part of your innocence. We grow up questioning, and that becomes a way of life. I have found other students in Delhi to have very different concerns, with different realities than ours. I personally would find them to be far less mature than us emotionally. We are precocious kids.

"He is a terrorist, a traitor," is a label given to us routinely.

A few years ago, I was in Lajpat Nagar when my car broke down. I sought somebody's help who responded. But as soon as he noticed my number plate of J & K and asked my name, he went away mumbling "See, bloody terrorists are roaming here". Such incidents are routine. We don't take them to heart, obviously.

We know better than to participate in campus politics

Because we think it's easy for the police to pick us up for questioning, we usually stay away from limelight or any kind of activism. I recall a recent incident near Hauz Khas Village, when we were walking in the street around 11 30 pm. The cops stopped us. They checked our IDs. I knew what was coming: I was questioned for minutes while the other two friends from Delhi were not asked a single thing. So we prefer staying away from attention.