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...

How many ZEOs or CEOs spend time in schools? We do have an information processing cum literacy department but not any education department. I argue that we need to change the name of the department from education to literacy department as long as we don’t prove that it is also educating. Once we had it, at least something approximating it. Now we don’t. I think the following explains my point.      There have been numerous critiques of current educational system and various proposals to redress the increasingly appreciated problems at moral and spiritual plane inherent in it.      Suggestions from certain well known commissions constituted for analyzing and development of educational policy; suggestions for bringing in the moral and spiritual element in education that had traditionally been the bedrock of Indian educational system and that constitutes vital element of our cultural heritage have not been implemented, or perhaps could not be imp...

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...

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...