A Reading Room In The Hills Of Kashmir

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Open Air Classroom.

By Muntashir Kifayat Hussain

It was around 1:30 in the afternoon when we arrived. The sun hung low, casting soft shadows on the green hills of Narabal, a village in Budgam district.

A few of us, academic monitors, had come to visit one of the government middle schools perched in this part of Kashmir. From the outside, the campus looked still, almost too still. For a moment, we hesitated. Was school already over?

Then we stepped closer. Through an open window, I saw something unexpected: a room full of students and teachers, all silently flipping through books. Some leaned back, lost in thought. Others followed words with a finger, lips moving slowly. Nobody spoke. Nobody checked a phone.

Twelve feet by twelve, that room may not have looked like much. But inside, it held something rare: a working school library. Not just a cupboard with textbooks or a locked trunk filled with unused novels, but an actual space for reading.

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The wooden shelves were packed. Fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, poetry, short stories. Someone had even arranged the books by genre. It felt like a place built with love.

I slipped out, not wanting to disturb them. The head of the school came after me and we sat on a low bench outside under a walnut tree. I asked him,“When do the students get a break?”

“From 1:00 to 1:30 they have lunch,” he said.“From 1:30 to 2:00, they choose if they want to read. Most of them stay back for books.”

I've visited dozens of government schools in Budgam. I've seen how books, when they exist at all, are kept in tin boxes labeled“library.” You might find a few English readers, old Urdu storybooks, maybe a science text from ten years ago. They sit there, untouched, as if just being present was enough. No shelves, no space, no plan.

So I asked the headmaster: what difference does this reading room make?

He smiled.“The internet gives you speed,” he said.“But books give you depth. Our students read slowly. They think more. They ask better questions. Some even started writing their own stories.”

I asked about the kind of books they had.

“It's not just math or grammar,” he said.“We bought fiction to build imagination. Nonfiction to open their minds. Biographies, adventure, poetry. Books about animals, space, forests, feelings. Stories from Kashmir. Things they can relate to.”

He paused for a moment, then added,“It's like watching a garden grow. One child, silent and shy, now reads aloud in morning assembly. Another started a wall magazine with handwritten reviews of her favourite books.”

I thought back to the rooms I've walked into where books are counted only to fill registers. Where dusty cupboards are locked with rusted chains. Where the idea of a library is a line item in an audit report.

But in that small reading room, it was different.

A few weeks later, I visited another school in the plains. It had space, four unused rooms. Still, their books were packed in a tin trunk, unopened for months. When I asked the teacher about it, she said,“We're planning to use one room for library, but we're waiting for furniture.”

Why wait?

You don't need mahogany shelves or big donations to build a reading habit. A few plastic containers, a mat on the floor, a dozen borrowed books. That's enough to start. What matters most is intent.

And the need is urgent.

A recent education survey showed that nearly 65% of students in rural Jammu and Kashmir struggle with basic comprehension by middle school. Add to that the endless distractions of phones, reels, and screens, and you've got children growing up in a world of noise, not meaning. A world where attention is fleeting and depth is lost.

But something changes when a child sits with a book. They learn to pause. To listen. To imagine. They learn to feel things that algorithms can't feed them. Stories teach them empathy. Pages teach them patience.

I saw it with my own eyes: a girl no older than ten, holding a fantasy book in one hand and her chin in the other, completely still. Next to her, a boy reading about mountaineers. Behind them, a teacher marking his favourite line from a biography with a pencil.

This wasn't a scene from a private school brochure. It was a government school. And it was beautiful.

The school education department in Jammu and Kashmir has talked about digital classrooms, smart boards, and e-learning. That's fine. But let's not forget the power of a paperback. Let's not leave books to die in tin boxes.

• The writer is a teacher at Boys High School Narabal, Budgam.

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