Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Sanaullah Mir is Kashmir’s Mulla Nasruddin   One hour talk with a gifted mind is worth scores of books. And there are such gifted minds amidst us. I immediately recall  two such minds – I call them Super Mirs or Meers of Mirs  – Prof. Sanaullah Mir (Parvaaz Sahib) who teaches philosophy at AMU and Prof Shabir Ahmed Mir, awardee of “scientist of the year” at international level, a self taught mathematician and one of the most brilliant pharmacologists of India, who has  retired last year as professor of veterinary pharmacology. Today we converse with the first Mir. Brilliant people have their own idiosyncrasies. Perhaps these are the cost of devotion to thinking. Sanuallah Mir, generally speaking, doesn’t pick up phone. I doubt if he would be tempted to take up even President’s call. He has no important document like service book copy or certificates with him. His colleagues have been great friends and they take care of his documents and may other matters he is...

While I am convinced that current democratic model is corrupt, unworthy of those who want serious change, complicit with money power, impermeable to genuine change from the below or in the favour of the impoverished class and that our choice could only be between two evils, lesser and greater, we are called to question, condemn and hope simultaneously in this knotty scenario that admits of no neat idealistic solutions. While ethics would require shunning the politics altogether and fight using non-political spaces, somehow the question of the political props up. Regardless of the charge of political naivety that raising the question of ethics today may warrant according to many pundits who command the language of power, I think, recalling Faiz, we can’t afford silence, “Ham matayilowh-o-qalm karate rahaegae .”  Let me put, regardless of political correctness, some ethical questions to those who matter politically as today, on this apparently crucial time, Kashmiris are asking a s...