Euro-American exclusivity has mostly been responsible for eclipsing the universalizing appeal of trauma studies. In a bid to cater for trauma accounts of the Global South, the present study attempts to look into the trauma of people living in Kashmir, a conflict zone in the middle of the third-world Asian countries. Kashmir is one of the disputed regions and a center point of conflict between India and Pakistan since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The political turbulence as well as the resulting militarization has rendered the entire Kashmiri community listless and prone to traumatic experiences. Despite the serious nature of the traumatic experiences of the people living in Kashmir, and as depicted in the literature produced therein, little scholarly attention has been given to it to voice out these accounts, which are necessary for claiming the truthful depiction of the Kashmiris. This article uses Jeffery C. Alexander et al.'s Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity and Kai. T. Erikson's Collective Trauma as the theoretical framework to analyze the selected Kashmiri Anglophone literary text titled The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed. The study finds that the traumatic memories of Kashmiri people, as a community, are no different from the likewise traumatized people of the Global North. Here, the Kashmiri narrative takes the responsibility of presenting the reality of life. The investigation concludes that fictional narratives, through memory of the past, bring a compelling tale of eternal suffering, establishing the fact that it is not the individual that must bear the moral responsibility; rather, it should be the collective.

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Plants show physiological, morphological and chemical responses to microbial, physical or chemical factors which are known as elicitors. Water deficit stress is one of the most important abiotic stresses that affects plant physiological and morphological traits. Chitosan is a natural, less toxic and economical compound that is biodegradable and eco-friendly with various applications in agriculture. The present experiment was carried out to evaluate the effect of pre-harvest foliar application of chitosan on quality indices of tomato plant under different water stress conditions. Tomato (Cv. Rio Grande) plants were subjected chitosan concentrations (0, 50, 100,150 mg L-1) and water stress intervals (3, 6, 9 and 12 days) after 15 days of transplantation. Tomato plants treated with 6 days water stress interval recorded maximum fruit firmness, fruit juice content, total soluble solids, titratable acidity and ascorbic acid content and minimum of fruit juice pH. Similarly, chitosan application @ 100 mg L-1 attained highest fruit firmness, percent juice content, total soluble solid, titratable acidity, ascorbic acid content and minimum fruit juice pH. It is concluded that 100 mg L-1 chitosan application along with 6 days water interval had positive impact on quality indices of tomato.

Injection drug users (IDUs) are considered as a high risk group to develop hepatitis C due to needle sharing. In this study we have examined 200 injection drug users from various regions of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province for the prevalence of active HCV infection and HCV genotypes by Immunochromatographic assays, RT-PCR and Type-specific PCR. Our results indicated that 24% of the IDUs were actively infected with HCV while anti HCV was detected among 31.5% cases. Prevalent HCV genotypes were HCV 2a, 3a, 4 and 1a. Majority of the IDUs were married and had attained primary or middle school education. 95% of the IDUs had a previous history of needle sharing. Our study indicates that the rate of active HCV infection among the IDUs is higher with comparatively more prevalence of the rarely found HCV types in KPK. The predominant mode of HCV transmission turned out to be needle sharing among the IDUs.