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...

Fraudulent Practices in Modern Medicine Those who care to think raise some uncomfortable questions and teach us to doubt. With one such doubting doctor who is also called poor man’s doctor, we deconstruct some reigning ideas in modern medical practice. In fact we can easily show that there have been some errors, even scandals, in modern history  that resulted in a dominance of modern allopathic system of medicine.        Dr B M Hegde, despite being criticized for right wing sympathies and some unsupported generalizations and  certain inconsistencies nevertheless emerges as one of the very few scientist-philosophers of modern India who needs to be widely read and debated. Passionate, informed, brilliant, witty, iconoclastic, provocative and lucid, Dr Hegde is a renowned cardiologist trained in allopathic system who has exposed, along with certain lesser known but significant scientists, fraudulent or somehow problematic nature of certain medic...

Camus’ The Plague can be symbolically read as Kashmir’s story, including the story of its Education sector. In order to solve countless problems in communication that cause divorces, end friendships and alliances, breed enmity and hostility between those who are otherwise co-workers or share ultimate goal, one needs to remember a few things that are defended by the greatest of thinkers and upheld by world religions and saints: “No man is wilfully bad.” Those who seem to be indeed bad don’t really know how they are injuring the soul by evil actions. If they indeed knew – one’s degrees or post doesn’t help here – they would not do evil. Hate the sin and not the sinner. Judge not.     Ignorance is the root cause of vice. Knowledge is virtue. We need to listen to the other, then true dialogue could ensue. Our perceived enemies are Heaven sent, embodying God’s jalali attributes. In fact it is our Spirit who projects them for its own growth. They are friends in disguis...

How many houses need to be burnt in order to force Fire Service Department to rush its extinguishing machinery? How many cries from how many rooftops from stranded people in flood will be needed to have rescue operation in action?       These analogies apply to education where we see all burning or stinking on ground and people resigned to leave houses burning or flooded and move on to beg for other spaces. None asks why not reclaim our lost territory.  If Naem Akhter attempts this task and succeeds that would be history. He has to embark on the task if he is true to his stated goal of making govt. schools attractive. “Akhteization of education” faces a crucial test. The public will screen its sophisticated logic and moralistic tone through this test. Naem Akhter is on trial. Will he muster courage to take note of countless dreams, cries and sighs of children and their parents denied right to free quality education? Or should we expect suo motto action ...

Let us not be angry, but debate and discuss and apologize for being angry. Let us believe, for one day at least, that no man is willfully bad and that people listen to well formulated and well-meaning arguments. Let us not condemn even the devil, unheard. Let us hope, for an hour at least, that dialogue does help if is not for solving Kashmir problem but when education is an issue. All education is dialogue. Not slogans. No name calling. I am reminded of a movie Twelve Angry Men that demonstrates a key idea from one of the most influential and respected modern philosophers, Jungen Hebermas. The idea is that it is possible to communicate in a democratic set up and resolve violent conflicting opinions. I wish this film were shown in every school and to all ambassadors and politicians who are involved in communication and dialogue. Even seemingly eternally irresolvable hash-nosh conflicts could be greatly helped if we learn how to dialogue. Incidentally it has no action, no acroba...

For most women living here, Kashmir has always been hell. To live as a daughter is hell, to leave one’s home for the spouse’s home is a bigger hell. To continue to live in alien house (that rarely becomes home) is like serving a life sentence. Most homes are a hell for daughters-in law. Mothers-in law have their own hell to keep burning. But let us today focus on the hell of our daughters who suddenly get deprived of the status as daughters and become only legal subjects, who are no longer humans. One daughter-in-law reaches her home by   6pm   where everyone including the mother-in-law and husband’s brother, are waiting for her to prepare tea and dinner for them. She is unable to take tea before 7.30pm .  Kitchen odour must not spread to irritate anyone in the house and she must be very careful in the kitchen. Another has to buy the milk she boils that curdles for no fault of her own.  Another is caught between two dictators – mother-in-law and husband who make it...

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...

Life lost in living, knowledge lost in information, and wisdom lost in knowledge. What for do schools, colleges and universities exist? We all know they are for education, and comprehensive concept of education would include teaching or developing skills for earning a living or vocation. Now our educational institutions fail on all the grounds. They don’t fashion souls or make us better humans. Ethically, in terms of vulnerability to corruption or harbouring a selfish, mean, sadistic personality, educated persons including the best educated PhDs don’t score better than uneducated rustics. They don’t teach the most important thing – the art of thinking (critical thinking, difference between opinion and truth, facts and interpretations, divine and human views, self and Self etc.), scientific and unscientific attitude (recently some sermons against weather prediction legitimacy were heard!). They are not, excluding some professional colleges or institutions, oriented to vocational train...

I think we have a good future for Urdu criticism in Kashmir if we continue our current zeal and keep ourselves updated Literature, understood as criticism of life, and criticism as refusal of any attempt to write off alternative possibilities of meaning are central to the current postmodern project of understanding the world. We need good critical works to document the mess we are passing through and the book we discuss today is an attempt to show that Urdu literature and literary criticism has insights for all of us to consider how we live in a pluralistic, open ended world of texts and contexts.   Postmodernism is many things for scholars and critics of it. We can’t avoid engaging with it as we are living in the postmodern age. I think we can agree that it is among other things, avoidance of extremes of binary polarities that define language based discourse or ideologies, skepticism regarding any claim of finality in interpretation, distrusting all narratives of progress, ema...