In his telling of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from their homeland, Vidhu Vinod Chopra uses a tender lens to create a romance between two individuals, which is wholly lovely and believable. You look at Shiv Kumar Dhar and his beloved, Shanti, and you sigh.

January 19, 1990, was a black night for all the Kashmiri Pandits who had to flee their beautiful homes in the Valley to live the life of a refugee in their own country. 30 years after the mass exodus of around 4 lakh Pandits, filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who had to abandon his home in Kashmir, made a film to tell the world about the plight of Kashmiri Pandits in Shikara.

Shikara is director Vidhu Vinod Chopra's love letter to the memory of Kashmir as it once was. His films have a timelessness about them. They are beautifully shot, flow at their own pace and try to tell genuine stories. He has gone back to Kashmir with this one and talks about the plight of thousands of refugees because of the rise in militancy in Kashmir.

'Sir, he has never seen a Kashmiri Pandit'. That's the note on which Shikara concludes. And you're left with the thought, 'Neither have I'. When the virus of sectarian politics found a gullible vector in social media, it resulted in the outbreak of an epidemic that left all of us infected with some opinion on the issue of Kashmiri Pandits.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra's Shikara was conceptualised several years ago, but the timing of its release is both uncanny and apt. This nostalgia project for a Kashmir that once was chronicles the forced flight of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, and comes at a time when the Valley's residents are struggling with an unjust and debilitating lockdown.

Centred around the mass evacuation of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990, the story traces the life of young newlyweds, Shiv Kumar Dhar (Aadil Khan) and Shanti Dhar (Sadia), who flee their homeland and take refuge at a camp in Jammu, with the promise that they will return home some day.