Opinion | Where The Mind Is Full Of Despair

The day which thousands of students had been diligently toiling for finally arrived, only to disappoint. On 24th August, JKSSB conducted the JE Electrical exam but in a rather startling manner. The paper was allegedly leaked an hour before the exam even began, leaving the candidates who had spent months preparing for this exam shocked and grappling for an explanation.An array of videos, capturing the hue and cry, started circulating on social media almost immediately. As I write this, sitting in a study hall, in Delhi, my despairing thoughts keep going back to Kashmir. This incident shook something in me, probably the door which was chained with fear: the fear of truth being judged as testimony and the words being deemed as rebellious; the fear of getting consumed in the roaring tides of chaos and getting swept away in the process. But I suppose the floodgates need to be opened for the turmoil in me to subside. The floodgates which should have long opened when the mind- bending reservation policy was implemented, when the youth unemployment rate reached its pinnacle, when job vacancies became a rare occurrence with no one to take accountability and when we were fooled into believing that things would take their right course while our voices would only bring disruption.We allowed ourselves to become powerless by not reinforcing our right to speak. What it created are timorous individuals, fearful to even ask for what is rightfully theirs. My favourite poet, Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s couplet, beautifully captures this pervasive pessimism:

نہ سوال وصل ، نہ عرض غم ، نہ حکایتیں نہ شکایتیں“

“ تیرے عہد میں د ل زا ر کے سبھی اختیا ر چلے گئے

Earlier in February this year, I was travelling back home from Srinagar city. As we made it out of the city, the weather worsened and it began to snow. Naturally, the roads were slippery, so the traffic moved painfully slow. Having left the city at around 3 pm, we had not made it that far when the sun began to set. At around 6 pm, we had to halt at the ring road because of an endless traffic jam. The night progressed, but we only moved a few inches in nearly 4 hours. Now you may ask how this anecdote is relevant here, so let me complete my story. During those 4 hours, I saw men getting out of their vehicles, making enquiries and eventually returning back. Turned out a truck had an accident, blocking the road. What surprised me was that nobody reached out to the traffic authorities. When I made a passing remark, out of boredom, about contacting the authorities, I was discouraged from doing so. However, I did reach out, but that is not important right now. I spent the remaining evening thinking about what had made us, as a society, so passive. I did come up with an answer, and I am sharing it here :

“Feels like the world is desolate with breathing corpses amidst the deafening rain.

The muddy ground recounts countless tales, buried unrecognised and forgotten in this obscure space.

This space is mute; I can only hear tired engines. The coughing of horns speaks of the inanimate burden.

The ways that have gone under with the screeching of listless folks, We have learnt to exist oblivious to the brunt our voices have suffered.

My love has frozen like the falling flakes outside my window.

Numbness is all I feel, yet tears roll down in sorrow.

I am running towards nothing only to crash too badly; the curves of the road keep getting murkier while I try to take a glance.

Every night here, does it look too accursed?

Does my new carcass have any inkling of where its battered soul belongs?

My veins are boiling, but the blood has long run cold; the voice I knew too well has perhaps chosen the grave.

An evening like this is what I dreaded so badly; my silhouette is tainted with all that I have chosen to forget.

The foggy windows of my old car feel like the prison bars where the voices keep changing, but the memories never fail to reopen the old scars.”

I am a literature student, so I often go to poetry to voice my thoughts. That evening, however, felt different than this Sunday morning. The students demanded justice, which was later delivered in the form of a re-exam notice, though the effectiveness of this move is debatable. Seeing young Kashmiris stand up in self-advocacy makes me emotional. I have always believed that we, as a society, cannot be passive. Our minds cannot be tamed and our spirit cannot be defeated. A few days back one of my friends asked me what the Kashmiri lines I kept humming meant and I explained to her that it is a call to revive our society with the light of our indigenous knowledge and history, the strength of our identity, the spirituality of our land and the spirit of our culture. I continued to hum the lines, “Wethyu badlyu panun taqdeer, karow tameer nov kashmir… Kashmir, meri jannate Kashmir” (“Stand and change your own destiny, let’s build a new Kashmir”), while it started to drizzle and my mind swiftly drifted back home, the land where hope dies a thousand deaths a day.

Aadila Irshad is a MA English student at Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi and can be reached at aadilairshadbhat8460@gmail.com