We all owe death a life. We will be robbed of our soul and soil returned to the waiting pit. What is essential is that, what we do while we live, we aim different lives, we idealise many people. As I am yet to turn thirty. I like Dr. Shah Faesal (IAS), Dr Shabir Hassan, a Biotechnology researcher at Harvard, Haziq Jeelani a researcher at Harvard, Parveez Rasool, the international cricketer. I like Waheed Para, the politician my age, Shela Rashid, the activist. I liked Burhan and Dr Manan; I liked Dr Rafi, the slain professor. I like Reyaz Naikoo and Zakir Musa too. I like all people with a good mind and intellect, I even like people with no intellect for disliking, abhorring and hating is too tough a thing to do. It requires a lot of energy and I am too lazy. I can’t help myself with a glass of water. I want to be something like those but I need somebody to give me his piece of mind so that I choose what I become. In the above list of achievers who should tell me who was astray and who is guided. The later three who left us might satisfy some passions but celebrating their affair with gun is our collective failure. They deserve to live, their lives are valuable as are ours. Kashmiris are by birth so non aggressive and peace-loving for instance put a gun in a Kashmiri’s hand and it will have to go off by itself- he will never dare to pull the trigger. We are not like other races that make frequent battles. We Kashmiris are a depressed lot, we have been in the frying pan for more than quarter of a century like before modern day cities and countries were not even born. Nations change their fate in a period of couple of decades. Look at the countries like UAE; from a desert to the most luxurious destination! Look at war tarnished Japan, how it rebuilt itself! Look where China took its GDP in a matter of decades! What has been happening wrong with us, why the questions on the face of our nation are always getting her goat? The badly-fitting collage of the people above is mirrored in our society. In a valley drenched in fresh-water rivers, lakes, springs, where very poor people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, why we choose to stink as a nation. Our collective thinking is a human cesspit. And this malodour is only animated and accentuated in the mass gatherings and at funeral processions. We produce children upon our wives but are they xerox machines they reprint it in moment of warmth. Why this over simplification of death? While rearing a son the discs of the vertebra of mother slip their places and spine of the father covers an 85 degree angle and on his death the mourning sisters for whom we have no social support mechanism in place are forced into illicit transactions in absence of a dependent. The foul which is being exhaled at those platforms has enough by which flowers will die, birds flee and angels retread. Thus the saying “fools rush where angels fear to tread”. All kinds of invectives to Europeans and disbelievers over their invented microphone and loud speaker systems which runs on their discovered electricity, whose medicines we take to cure our dysentery and constipation. Whose designed guns we brandish on their discovered social networking sites and call them by names which sure fit us to size.
I am a sibling of Mantoo’s Toba Tek Singh I don’t know my hero. Tragedy has befallen me. I thought lotus roots, the wooden basket of charcoal, the Shikara past the king’s spring and Jehlum that rows under Badshah bridge, the shrine of Shah e Hamdan was Kashmir. But now they have a different Kashmir. Now Kashmir has only one season that is mourning, the forty-day mourning period never ends here it just shifts homes. We don’t seem to believe in variety of idea any more, should a thought come against popular thought, we must hang that at the gallows because bullets don’t see the sincerity in thoughts they don’t have a brain they pierce swiftly. When a friend of mine argued with a man, who called every death natural or unnatural.
As a death of duckling except the one with the Indian bullet. My friend failing to beat him by stooping to the level of his stupidity made a sensible sounding statement by offering his piece of mind to the crackpot in the conversation. “Kashmir is for Kashmiris”. I was awestruck if it happens who are the Kashmiris that will take it. This pregnant brawl delivered the curiosity to know my protagonist and I know all these whom I mentioned above and the likes are important for our success as a nation. Human lives are precious gift of God, we should celebrate life and live with pride; we should not take pride in death. Choosing death over life is cowardice this is probably the easiest of choices at the plate. So the suicide is prohibited probably, it is defeat. Because death is inevitable nobody has got out of here alive not even prophets, messengers and greatest emperors. What is challenging is living, living with dignity in fact.
Evaporation of fear is a blessing which rare people are blessed with, imagine these brave hearts who dare death looking into her eyes if they choose to live what promise they hold to shape our fate better. We should live for Kashmir to change it from a mourning state to a merry state. We have symbols of resistance in every nook and corner which should inspire us. We need not to create new symbols we need a thorough application of sense. In a decade we as a nation will be liberated from all shackles of self damage and rewrite our own fate like we want to. We should catch the thieves that lie in the hearts of the pure breed who push the bright beloveds of mothers to embrace death and compare them to the purity in the heart of a whore in a brothel who atleast trades her own flesh.
Showket Akhoon is Ph.D Research Scholar Department of Chemistry University of Kashmir.
showkatakhoon@kashmiruniversity.net