A few weeks ago, the pilot of J-K government's official plane had a chat with a young guest, inquisitively scanning the cockpit. ``Why don't you learn flying?'' the pilot asked. ``I do. But I don't want to become a pilot. I want to become a politician''. Zahir Abdullah's words may be a mere fascination of a child towards the high political office but when this boy grows up, a plunge into politics is a real possibility. Like his father and grand father, Zahir _ the younger son of Omar Abdullah _ too was born surrounded by a political legacy.

If history lives in a generational memory, the most important chapter of Kashmir's story revolves around the Abdullah family, whose successes and failures have impacted the destiny of Kashmir and its people for a century now.

The story begins from Soura in the outskirts of Srinagar city where Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah was born in the fall of 1905 to a shawl trader on the banks of Anchar Lake. Abdullah was the youngest among nine siblings and was born two weeks after his father's death. He was given the name of his great grand father - a Kashmiri Brahmin who had converted to Islam under the influence a Sufi Mir Abdul Rashid Baihaqi in 1766.

In his autobiography ``Aatish-e-Chinar (Flames of the Chinar), Sheikh recalled a difficult childhood spent in penury. As a child, he had to walk 10 miles a day to attend school and worked with a grocer to support his family. Abdullah recounted his dream to join medical school, and later an ambition to go abroad for studies, which was thwarted because of the discriminatory policies against Muslims during the Dogra rule in Kashmir. Still Abdullah became one of the only few Kashmiri Muslim men, who fought and managed to proceed for higher education. At 25, when he returned to the valley from Aligarh Muslim University after completing masters in Chemistry, Sheikh's personal contact with discrimination during his student years and later in finding a job was so bitter that his entire worldview was shaped by it. His mother Khair-un-Nissa and a Sufi, Akhun Mubarak Shah - who taught him Quran in a maktab - had a major influence on Sheikh. ``My earliest memories are of my mother sitting on the praying mat,'' Abdullah recollected in his autobiography. ``I always wanted to follow her footsteps''. In a half a century long public life, Abdullah's speeches would always begin with the recitation of the Quran.

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