The most consequential change in Kashmir may be the widening gap between generations. The elders still speak a language of honour, of izzat, of patience and endurance. They remember when the community was a living organism, when a wedding was everyone’s business, a death used to bring the neighbourhood to its knees; the shared labour of the harvest, the gatherings at the festivities, the proverbs carrying wisdom across generations.But that world is vanishing. Rural Kashmir is being hollowed out, not by migration to the cities but by the collapse of the old life. The paddy fields are fewer, the water bodies dying, the young men elsewhere, physically or mentally. The village ethos of interdependence and unspoken codes has been replaced by something individualistic, brittle and anonymous. Even in the cities, mohalla solidarity is fraying; the door is closed, the phone replacing the shared courtyard.

The young are constructing their own moralities, often in direct reaction to the hypocrisy of their elders. They have watched their parents’ generation speak of religion and tradition while engaging in petty corruption, domestic cruelty and maslaki bigotry. They have seen the ulema fail them and grown up in a turmoil offering no clear answers. No surprise, then, that many are sceptical of every received narrative, religious or  political. That scepticism feeds on social media, an endless scroll of outrage, glamour and despair. The smartphone, which could have been a tool for learning, has become a portal to comparison, anxiety and moral disorientation. They are overexposed to the world and undernourished by their own community.

This scepticism is not always bad; it can be the beginning of genuine independence. But without guidance it curdles into cynicism or aggressive nihilism. Among sections of Kashmiri youth, a new political culture is emerging, borrowed from online discourses, global ideologies of left and right, a........

© Greater Kashmir