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Problem Narrative is Problematic
I In a world increasingly obsessed with diagnosis, the proliferation of problems has become its own self-sustaining industry, a vast machinery of concern that thrives not on the resolution of ailments, but on their perpetual redefinition and reproduction. Every domain of modern discourse, from activist circles to academic departments, from NGO funding proposals to political manifestos, from mental health apps to global development goals, functions by constantly generating new categories of disorder, disadvantage, and dysfunction. We are no longer allowed to simply be; we must now be diagnosed. One must have a trauma, a disorder, an oppression, a crisis of identity to be taken seriously. Entire vocabularies, terms like microaggressions,…
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Counter-Narrative | Response to “Empty Houses, Aging Parents: Kashmir’s Wealth Illusion”
The lament of empty houses in Kashmir, while deeply evocative, is not just a social observation – it is a cultural indictment, a misdiagnosed ailment offered with the wrong medicine. What masquerades in this piece as financial wisdom is, in fact, the latest iteration of Western secular epistemology dressed up as parental care and economic prudence. The article’s message – “live for yourself, not your children; invest in savings, not structures; be financially independent, not emotionally entangled” – is a eulogy for the death of a civilization’s metaphysical backbone: the family. The core ideological assumption of the article is secular liberalism, wrapped in the soft cloak of economic rationality. The…
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Culture Bashing Cannot go Unabated
Have you ever considered why birds, those little sages of the sky, lurch their heads in abrupt, start-stop spasms rather than simply gliding their gaze? Unlike us, they cannot swivel their eyes—they must halt their whole world, however briefly, to see anything clearly. Now, modern man, with all his digital twitchiness, has inherited the exact opposite malady: a ceaseless, unreflective motion, a scrolling of mind and soul that sees nothing at all. And so, in the marketplace of ideas—Twitter, op-eds, and pseudo-academic squawking—culture is endlessly flogged, never understood. If you wish to actually see where we are, pause! Stand still, if only for the length of a thought. Cease your…
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The Catastrophe of One Generation: A Cultural Holocaust in the Making
The generation born in the 1980s and 1990s stands as a fragile bridge between a world lost and a world looming – a generation that did not merely encounter modernity, but was engulfed by it. They are now raising children without being raised themselves by a living tradition. These men and women, now parents, were the first to be shaped not by awraad fatiha, but by Shahrukh Khan, Honey Singh, Enrique Iglesias, and the algorithmic chaos of social media feeds. The names of their childhood are not those of saints or scholars, but of actors, influencers, and unanchored ideologues. Raised in nuclear homes away from the hearths of grandmothers whispering…
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Counter Narrative | A Culture that Silences Men or Men with a Culture Silenced?
An article, appearing in Kashmir Observer, laments Kashmiri men’s silence as a cultural flaw, failing to realize that this very critique is shaped by Western therapeutic individualism. It sees emotional restraint not as a form of self-discipline (a classical virtue) but as repressive pathology. This betrays its underlying ideological commitments—secular humanism, psychologism, and gender-neutral egalitarianism—which define the human being as a bundle of expressive needs rather than a moral actor bound by higher purpose. But traditional Kashmiri culture, steeped in religion and spirituality, never denied emotional reality. It simply ordered emotions hierarchically: grief in prayer, pain in sabr, joy in shukr. The Prophet Muhammad (saw) wept, yes—but in balance, in…
Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment
