Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Reading Rafiq Raaz’s Naiy Chhay Nalaan Some poets become brand names during their youth. They are too powerful, and charming to resist for lesser mortals. Under their shade many lesser trees fail to find their individual bloom. Their devotion to perfecting the art – at least in its formal aspect – earns them both respect and awe. They dominate their age. They lure goddess of poetry with all her beauty and grace.  Amongst such poets is Rafiq Raaz. Rafiq Raaz’s Naiy chhay Nalaan (The Flute is Complaining) is one of the most influential volumes of contemporary poetry in Kashmir that helped shape Kashmiri ghazal written after it. With its publication its poet has established himself as a Master of younger generation of poets in lyricism through deep attention to form and metrical innovations. Raaz’s language is neither elitist nor arcane, unlike some parts of his illustrious contemporary, Rahi. It doesn’t get needlessly ambiguous that constitutes dubious virtue of much of modernist po

Badri Raina is Kashmir’s contribution to Marxist discourse in India. A vast majority of people are not capable of thinking – or don’t care to think – and don’t distinguish between opinion and truth. (If you doubt, visit facebook and see how illogical, uninformed, prejudiced comments don it). The question is why so many brilliant and gifted minds, especially in the modern world, have been alienated from religion and have, in order to maintain loyalty to critical reason, taken other refuges than what we would call the refuge of religion? Isn’t it strange that religions should be convicted in the court of reason when their ultimate principle (Logos/Truth/Good/Buddhi/ Aql) grounds reason and its deepest motivations that secular humanism has championed? I don’t intend to attempt to clarify this issue but ask a somewhat related question – is it the religion of the masses or priests or saints and philosophers that fails the test of common sense and critical rationality – while reading one

 Modern age is characterized among other things by extreme obtrusiveness of evil.  Acute perception or cognizance and evil - evil within and evil without – in diverse manifestations deeply affected him and his relationship with the ground of all goodness – God. Yet in the wasteland – that immense panorama of waste and futility that modern life is, the traditional belief in the goodness of God and man has lost credence.  Modern man fears God dead, or impotent or absent or on leave.  Modernism as the search for alternative values, the humanized God, God as superman presumes that traditional theistic worldview is no longer credible.  Modern man’s pessimism, absurdism, agnosticism and paganism and his loss of belief in Grace, Salvation or Heaven are all attributable to his acute sensitivity to evil and consequent loss of traditional belief in Divine Goodness.  He feels with Arnold that there is no help for pain. Having felt disenchanted  with or alienated from the God, “who holds all

Nietzsche can’t be wished away and there is no escaping the task of engaging with him. Would you believe that there are people who don’t know that there are social sciences,  computers, airplanes and countless technological gadgets around us? Those who believe we can have, or we can use modern technology without engaging with background science or secular reason that brings it are such people. Divided personalities, divided loyalties, clouded vision, cursing imagination and insensitivity to finer culture are what distinguishes them. They constitute the majority in the Third World. They have not heard of Nietzsch. They haven’t read any of his books and haven’t heard even his most (in)famous statement “God is dead.” Yes, they haven’t heard of the bull in the China house of conventional religion. They still talk of God in terms of substance, in terms of force, in terms of cosmic being or policeman, in terms of ground of ordinary morality. They still talk as if the other world is in a