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The Dignity of the Drowned: On the Sacred Weight of Loneliness
Sometimes life does not strike like a thunderclap but like a slow erosion. You wake to an ordinary morning, but somewhere between the first sip of tea and the last conversation of the previous day, the ground beneath you has shifted. A word spoken, a gesture withheld, a summon received, a door closed, a call not returned, and suddenly you find yourself standing in a corridor of silence, wondering when the world decided to move on without you. Other times it arrives violently. A letter bearing an unfamiliar seal, a voice on the other end of the phone, a confrontation in the open street, a harsh knock on the door…
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Counter Currents – Generational Trauma & Toxic Families
I A sincere question stands before us: How do we live after inheriting wounds we did not choose, parents at war with themselves, with each other and with us, homes that taught fear before trust, patterns that seem to pass like blood from one generation to the next? We are told to “heal,” to “set boundaries,” to “break cycles,” and many try; yet the attempt often collapses into exhaustion. People ask, almost whispering, what if we fail again? What if what they did to us is already deciding what we will do to our children? How are we do come out of this circle of “trauma”? While we face these…
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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