Kashmir Is Online. But Are We Still Connected Offline?

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Kashmiri kids glued to screen. Representational Photo

By Meer Shahzaib

Mornings in Kashmir begin with a blue glow. Not the sky. The screen. The first breath is not breath. It's a refresh. Our thumbs swipe before our eyes open fully. There's no pause, only feed. And somehow, in all that speed, we've forgotten how to sit still. How to just be.

We know the world. But do we know ourselves?

Ask anyone on the street in Srinagar how many times they touched their phone today. They won't know. Ask them how they're really feeling. They'll hesitate, joke, deflect. That's the story now: a generation fluent in trivia, but tongue-tied in the language of the self.

We're overflowing with information. Flooded. Drowning in articles, apps, updates, alerts. Everything explained, nothing understood. We know the signs of climate collapse but not the cause of our own coldness. We can recite steps to happiness but forget what our own laughter sounds like. Our memories now live in cloud folders. Our emotions, in archived chats.

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There's something tender and tragic about it.

Take Arooj, nineteen, from Rainawari. Her phone speaks ten languages. She's read about love, grief, healing, and quoted it too. But when night falls and the silence thickens, she writes one line in her diary:“I feel like I don't live in my own life.” She is a digital scholar. But her soul? A locked screen.

Or Inaam, the coder from Sopore. His days are precise. Clean, efficient, debugged. His nights are anything but.“I can fix code,” he says,“but I crash inside my own head.” He can silence errors on a screen. But what about the ones that scream at 2 a.m.?

We've become museums of noise. Curated. Branded. Broadcast. But beneath the captions, the reels and the story highlights, there's a stillness we're scared to enter. We scroll like miners, digging for meaning in pixels. But meaning isn't cached and clickable.

Here's the sharp truth: our attention is not ours anymore. It's been sold, sliced, gamified. We're not browsing. We're being browsed. Algorithms know us better than we do. They predict our next question before we've asked the first. And in that convenience, we've lost the hard work of introspection.

Scroll fatigue. That's what psychologists call it now. The brain, burnt out not from labour, but from stimulation. You read twenty articles. Remember none. Watch ten self-help videos. Feel worse. Productivity hacks pile up while the to-do list grows moldy. Stillness is a tab we never open.

We're not alert, we're anxious. Not awake, we're wired. There's a difference. Alertness twitches. Awareness listens.

Sometimes I wonder: do we even know how to feel anymore, without filters?

We post about healing but refuse to cry. We write about love but won't sit through heartbreak. We celebrate solitude in captions, yet panic when left alone for five minutes. Our vulnerability is performative. Our privacy, performanced. Even grief is streamlined now. Google“What to wear to a funeral,” and you'll find it. But what about what to feel?

We've mistaken the mirror for the self. But the digital mirror is warped. It shows us not who we are, but who we wish to appear. And we've grown so fluent in appearances, so polished in projection, that we forget: healing happens off-camera. Real life, the kind that aches and transforms, has no comment section.

In Kashmir, we know the value of silence. Our elders sat by fire without words. Our mothers whispered truths in the spaces between chores. But now, even in Gurez or Pulwama, the silence buzzes with signal. We're never really alone. Not with our phones breathing beside us, lighting up with every ghost of a message.

Solitude used to be spiritual. Now it feels like failure.

What does that say about us?

We save screenshots of things that once moved us, but never return to them. We hoard quotes about self-love while ignoring our own mental mess. Our minds resemble our photo galleries-cluttered, nostalgic, disorganized. We call it memory, but it's just digital dust.

And so, I ask you-not through a tweet or a thread, but like a friend across a cup of noon chai-what would it take for you to turn inward again?

Maybe not much.

Five minutes. A page, written by hand. A walk without music. A room, phone facedown, silence allowed in. Maybe it starts there, with the ache you've been avoiding. With the boredom you've been filling. With the self you've been outsourcing.

Google won't tell you who you are. It will try. It will offer 7.2 billion answers in half a second. But the real answer doesn't live in results. It lives in reflection.

And reflection takes time. Slowness. Repetition. Grace. The world will always demand your opinion. But your awareness, that's yours to keep. And to protect.

Because in the end, the smartest phone can't feel your pain. The sharpest AI can't hold your truth. The cloud won't carry your soul. Only you can do that.

So pause. Let the screen sleep. Let your senses wake. Breathe. Then ask yourself:“What am I feeling right now?” And listen like it matters. Because it does.

• The author is a BA Honours student of Economics and Political Science at Amar Singh College, Srinagar.

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