In a modest workshop filled with the fragrance of seasoned wood, 78-year-old Ghulam Mohammad Zaz continues a craft his family has preserved for eight generations — the making of the Kashmiri santoor.Surrounded by tools that have outlived artisans, he works slowly, each strike and polish echoing centuries of tradition crafting the musical instrument.”Seven generations have worked and I am the eighth; I have no guarantee anyone after me will do this work,” Zaz said softly, speaking in Kashmiri.Once, several of his family members shared this craft in the heart of Kashmir’s main city Srinagar, in the Indian-administered part of the Himalayan territory.Today, he is the last in the city to make the instruments by hand.”If I tell anyone to make something, they won’t know what to do or how to make it,” said Zaz, who produces around eight to 10 instruments every year, selling for around 50,000 rupees ($565) each.”It is not as simple as just picking some wood — one needs to find the right kind of wood.”The santoor, a hundred-stringed zither-like instrument played with hammers, has long been central to Kashmir’s musical identity, giving the Muslim-majority region its cultural distinctiveness.The contested Himalayan territory has been divided between India and Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947.Militants have fought Indian rule, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan.Tensions remain high between New Delhi and Islamabad.In May, clashes between the nuclear-armed rivals sparked the worst fighting since 1999, killing more than 70 people in missile, drone and artillery exchanges.- Mystical music -Historically, the santoor formed the backbone of “sufiana musiqi”, Kashmir’s mystical music tradition, with its hypnotic and reverberating sound bringing tranquillity.”Musicians used to come from Iran to Kashmir, they used to play santoor and other instruments,” said Muzaffar Bhat, a music professor at a government college in Anantnag.”They used to sing in Persian… we adapted the santoor from them and assimilated it into our music.”The instrument received a new life in the 20th century.In the 1950s, celebrated Indian musician Shivkumar Sharma — born in Jammu and Kashmir in 1938 — used the santoor to play classical music.”Due to that, this became popularised in the classical circles throughout India,” Bhat said.Suddenly, the santoor was no longer confined to Kashmiri sufiana gatherings -— it had become a celebrated voice in Indian classical music.Yet tradition faced challenges as Western instruments and global music trends began to overshadow local sounds.”A lot of our traditional Kashmiri instruments became sidelined,” said Bhat.For craftsmen like Zaz, this meant fewer patrons, fewer students, and the slow decline of a centuries-old family profession.Zaz sells his instruments in Kashmir, but also receives orders from Europe and the Middle East.But there is hope. A revival, however modest, is taking root.”Since the last few years, a new trend has started,” Bhat said. “Our youngsters have started to learn our traditional instruments.”

Vacationing in India, engineer Amrutha Tamanam rushed to return to the United States after Donald Trump abruptly announced a $100,000 fee for the visa she holds.As she scrambled to get back to the country she’s called home for a decade, racially motivated far-right trolls launched coordinated efforts to disrupt flight bookings from India, calling their campaign “clog the toilet.”The White House would later clarify that the new H-1B fee was a one-time payment not applicable to current holders. But leading US companies had already advised their employees abroad to swiftly return to avoid the fee or risk being stranded overseas.Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began searching for a flight from the city of Vijayawada, as users on the far-right message board 4chan moved to overwhelm  reservation systems, in a bid to block Indian visa holders from booking tickets.One 4chan thread encouraged users to find India-US flights, “initiate the checkout process” but “don’t checkout,” thereby clogging the system and preventing the visa holders from reaching the United States before the announcement took effect.The campaign may have had a direct impact on Tamanam, who encountered repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically allows users a window of a few minutes, timed out much faster.After multiple attempts, she eventually managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending around $2,000 — more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare.”It was hard for me to book a ticket and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,” Tamanam told AFP.- ‘Keep them in India’ -The 4chan thread –- which also circulated among far-right Trump supporters on Telegram and other fringe forums — read: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”Responding posts, many riddled with racist slurs, advised users to hold seats for popular India-US routes on airline websites and booking platforms — without completing the purchase.The stated goal was to block availability on high-demand flights, making it harder to find available seats and inflating prices.Illustrating the scale of the operation, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser and claimed: “I got 100 seats locked.””Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight,” another wrote.Several 4chan users also posted about holding up seats on Air India and slowing the airline’s website. However, an Air India spokesperson told AFP the site experienced no disruptions, with systems operating normally.- ‘Shared antipathy’ –Though difficult to measure the campaign’s overall effectiveness, the trolling was an attempt to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP.”The real scary thing about 4chan is its ability to radicalize people into extremist beliefs,” Beirich said, adding that several US mass shooters had published manifestos to the site.H-1B visas allow companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialized skills — such as scientists and computer programmers — to work in the United States, initially for three years but extendable to six.The United States awards 85,000 H-1B visas per year on a lottery system, with India accounting for around three-quarters of the recipients.In an age of information warfare, the troll operation illustrates how bad actors can launch disruptive attacks “with the stroke of a keyboard,” said Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.”As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet,” Levin told AFP.”What I think is so relevant is how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilized online.”