Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Choosing the short story writer is like choosing architecture of one’s house Life is a story or has to be lived as a work of art for getting meaning from it. All of us tell stories. The choice – a vital and fateful choice indeed – is what kind of stories we chose to tell ourselves and our children. Great short stories constitute the staple diet  of great education. We do spend a lot of time daily – six hours on average – day dreaming or what amounts to the same – telling ourselves stories with oneself as a hero. Jataka tales, tales in Rumi’s Masnavi and Saadi’s Gulistan, Panchtantra and fables of Aesop have been so central to education across cultures. Even scriptures have to make use of tales and the Quran asserts that the greatest tale – an odyssey of soul searching in fact – is that of Joseph (this tale is retold in many volumes by Thomas Mann in modern times- in fact our challenge is to retell great archetypal stories in a language postmodern man can relate to). In the mo...

We have few scholars of national or international standing in certain fields and what a tragedy if we don’t recognize them After the death of Amin Kamil many felt that we, as a community, didn’t honour him as he deserved and we failed to make full use of his great erudition in Kashmiri literature. What use do we make of  another literary giant Rahi Sahib, arguably the greatest living Kashmiri poet and critic whose poetic and critical work we have failed to translate and introduce to international audience  and we have failed to familiarize our newer generation with him despite his being the last great link from Lalla till date in what can be called Kashmiri Tradition– for learning to read him  newer generation may profitably consult young critics as Abir Bazaz (his essay “Learning to read Rahi”  comes to mind)  except for gracing certain formal occasions and occasional talks on electronic media? We have no platform for benefiting from our best scholars after...

Amin Kamil, the poet, the novelist, the researcher, the critic, the organizer, is no more. Yesterday ended a colourful and significant chapter in Kashmir’s cultural history. Gone is a special chapter in the literary history – the great decades long battle of ideas, of perceptions, of sensibilities between giants of Kashmiri literature – Rahi and Kamil intellectual duo is now history.  Without judging in ideological terms, and press for   adbi   fatwas, at least on aesthetic plane, we could enjoy proceedings of literary exchange between “rival” schools of Kashmiri literature. As a student of philosophy and literary criticism, I would draw attention to a couple of points on this day when we are shocked by the absence of a grand man of letters. Our current tragedy – political and cultural – is partly attributable to our amnesia and disowning our best writers. Most of the elderly writers we ignore and leave them to die suffering is a bitter sense of ingratitude from our s...