Dr Muhammad Maroof Shah

Who can vow that he has seen ten people he knows intimately and none had significant behavioural problems. Swift’s idea in his satirical masterpiece A Modest Proposal which proposed that the poor Irish may consider easing their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich people was to shock people out of complacency and insensitivity towards issues that they pass by. I think in Kashmir it is impossible to shock people perhaps for the reasons karwan kae dil sae ehsas-i- ziyaan jata raha . Or is it because we have converted life into an object of art? Or we are Nietzschean Zarathustras not vulnerable to pity and sons of the soil of saints who are said to be “beyond good and evil" ?  Humane Slaughter of New Generation “Papa, would you please slaughter me?” a five year old child asked.   “Why?” asked the shocked father. “Then I will join God and willn’t have to go the school.”   I heard this dialogue few days back and can assert that something simila...

I propose a few measures that appear to me best solutions to some nagging problems we all suffer from. Treating Professional Hazards We have many State appointed bakers, operating with tax money of the poor, who spoil over 80% precious cakes after months of toil and throw them to the dogs. Or many State sponsored car manufacturing units that throw into the sea over 80% of its finished products as they either don’t find roads for them or necessary oil to grease them. Professional colleges are, for the majority of students, animal farms where students are not made into productive beings but fattened for slaughter but their meet, unfortunately, is unacceptable to the public and they die like abandoned horses and old cows slow painful deaths thanks to frustration, ostracization and drudgery of applying and preparing for interviews for all kinds of posts. Therefore it is proposed that after completing degree of professional colleges, 80% of graduates should be hanged in a public ceremon...

Why isn’t it easy for our political parties to negotiate to be able to form a stable government in which opposition parties and critics too could largely trust or desist from mudslinging? Even if they do succeed in forming one, isn’t it going to be ever under strain? Aren’t all parties uneasy bedfellows when it comes to sharing power? I am not going to answer these questions – we know them anyway – but  transpose these questions to domestic sphere. Seeing the stalemate in domestic politics of home where only a few family members tied by blood relationships I have no surprises to be shocked by any arrangement that ensues and that have ensued in our history by different permutations and combinations in politics. If we are so divided at family level, if there is difficult to find the undisputed leader or trust in a leader at home level (most of us don’t practically buy the thesis inherited from our tradition that husbands are leaders (qawamoon?), if most mothers-in-law have grudges ...

Political stalemate today after fractured mandate and enormous contradictions in our political culture – I wonder if we have any today – are in one sense traceable to loss of culture. And this loss of culture follows disregard or atrophy of indigenous and cultural languages we inherited. Cognitive psychology informs us that we learn in our mother tongue, that our mind needs to translate in mother tongue and then cognizes whatever it is taught in other languages. What a tragedy if our minds are confused in which language to translate as it is through an odd mixture of non-classical Urdu, Hinglish and parts of Kashmiri that we are initiated into the world of culture.   Some of our best na’ats , munajaat , prayers are in Persian and Kashmiri. It means we are evolving into a monstrosity that can’t even pray properly. From both Arabic and Sanskrit – the languages of scriptures – we are already weaned away without even tasting them. It means our linguistic unconscious is quite impoveri...

John Derrida is considered one of the chief architects of postmodernist worldview. We are living, willy-nilly, in the postmodern age. And one of the chief characteristics of this is incredulity toward ideologies, especially those ideologies that make big claims. Deconstruction that Derrida advocated consists in taking nothing on face value, in noticing the gaps and absences and contradictions in the terms in which an argument or claim is made. It teaches us valuing difference and suspecting totalitarianism, fundamentalism and all such discourses that speak in the name of God/Truth/Future/Utopia/ Justice. Derrida said that Justice can never be done in absolute terms and all one can do is to approximate it and ruthlessly questions all judgments, all claims of justice from authorities. Deconstruction deconstructs all constructions imposed on people through sheer power or force or propaganda. We need the language, if not the methodology, of deconstruction to present truth to power, to sh...

Perhaps many important questions are missed but a couple of them haunt me and I wonder would they ever be properly discussed. First is a question of building up spaces outside the current political system.  And the second is cashing on spaces opened up by changing dynamics of politics. There is belated recognition that election boycotts have been counterproductive. Even in early 1990s we could have been politically active and exploiting given spaces for helping people move forward. Hurriyats have been increasingly criticized for being almost a spent force. And we can’t avoid an impression that fundamental failures in methodology and conception have been made by it. There is no culture of debate in it, no consultation of latest developments in political theory to help it better understand changing political scenario following major changes in the economic and political order after the end of cold war. One could seriously ask if attention had been given to create certain institutio...

It is beneath the dignity of any person who has self respect to beg for votes, observed Nietzsche Living in a world where: ~ “Politics has replaced philosophy” and we find, around us, politicians rather than statesmen. ~“Politics as industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country”  — and then declares itself puzzled that [people] have lost trust in its politicians. ~One is bound to be soiled by mudslinging which is “in politics, anything bad the opponent says about our candidate; in contrast, when our candidate does this, it is called 'making a good point.” ~“We'd all like to vote for the best man, but he's never a candidate.” ~Politics has been “concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.” “There are many men of principle in both parties …but there is no party of principle.” It is the rich that fund campaigns implying justice has been sold. Isn’t i...

Reading Political theory on Ethics and Bureaucracy Bertrand Russell has a collection of essays called Unpopular Essays. Today I am not commenting on it but attempting to write an unpopular essay. Though often reminded of Mark Twain who when asked to comment on heaven and hell said, “No comments. I have friends on either side”, I wish to express suspicions/questions that have haunted me and compelled me not to pray for success to anyone who requests when administrative exams are on. I try to pray instead with Iqbal: Meri dua hae ki teri aarzu badal jayae (I pray that your wish changes). These questions include: •Generally speaking, masses have felt alienated from bureaucrats and great social thinkers from Marx to Max Weber to Foucault have explained why this alienation is a product of the very system. Modern democracies are controlled by the interests of the Capital or are instruments in the hands of an elite class that has ascended in social hierarchy by a system that ultimately r...

How Others Perceive Muslims Generality of Muslims have failed to realize severity of modern challenges and they are yet to evolve a coherent and realistic response to it. This contributes, to a large part of modern Muslim malaise in all walks of life. Politically, socially, economically, morally they are, generally speaking, on the path of degeneration. Almost everywhere powerless or victims or complicit with alien hegemonizing forces, they have been unable to present in practice, if not in theory as well, answer to modern man’s problems. Caught between nostalgic idealistic constructions of the past and dehumanizing brutal imperialism, they have largely been unable to come to terms with challenges and opportunities that (post)modernity offers. Islam has been understood as a solution to all problems but modern Muslim’s ambivalence regarding it and his uncertainty regarding his own self definition has made it a problem. Conceptual baggage of both received image of Islam ...

Questions that our posterity will ask Posterity and in fact the current generation will ask us few difficult questions. As parents I don’t think we have any answers. A few questions and issues they will raise I discuss today. What we have made of Human Resource Management in Kashmir? Once it was not a big problem. Take the case of log winters, handicrafts and extensive local manufacturing of important woolen, matting and other commodities in most houses. Neither women nor the elderly people were jobless. Today even our youth are unemployed. And most of the jobs are in sectors that are not really productive or contributing in real sense to solving local problems. Previously it was almost all green. Just take the example of constructing house. A few decades back it cost almost nothing. Only certain patience. In the first year bricks were prepared. In the next year other requirements were gradually completed. Then labour was mostly either free or community based. Hardly anyone was hir...

“Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others,” writes Dostoevsky in  The Brothers Karamazov . This statement expresses the quintessence of traditional ethics as developed by mystics and in modern times by Dostovesky and Levinas. Sufi ethics is an elaboration of this theme. This great idea of answerability or responsibility is a response to Ivan, the famous character in the same novel who says: “If there is no God, all is permitted.” In Kashmir we behave as if there is no God and all is permitted and none is guilty. Let us analyze the question of responsibility in the particular case of scenario of water bodies in Kashmir. Our water bodies are fast becoming history. Most of the springs are gone. The Dal is politicized to death. Anchaar story is getting repeated in the Wular as it is dying a silent spectacular death. Glaciers are melting. Pure water in streams or rivers is becoming a fiction. We have to pay for water bottle and business of water pu...

In the light of Ancient Futures by Helena Norberg-Hodge Tourism can be a scandal. It can lead to destruction of not only land but cultures and sacred traditions It can ultimately create, rather than cure unemployment. It can, especially when unregulated, open up Pandora's box that are not foreseen by planners. This is one of many other important theses of the greatest book written on Ladakh ( Is it not ironic that one of our tourism ministers has been from Ladakh in the past? The sordid side of tourism – in the name of development we can turn sanctuaries of spirit into deserts where even devils would not dare to tread – is not kept in consideration.) The book, that every Kashmiri who is concerned with development discourse, tourism and identity of pir-waer should read, argues quite lucidly and brilliantly many theses that almost all of us would intuitively consent to. . It also argues the importance of Ladakh culture for the world that has severed ties with tradition.  Fir...