Commentary

An affidavit to the ‘Invisible People’

Someone would have said:

You people don’t know how beautiful you are. The beauty of your souls goes unnoticed, and one thing would be it going unnoticed by others, and even by those who surround you, day by day.

But that beauty within your souls and spirit goes unnoticed by you yourselves, nevermind others.

You are the lost children of this forgotten yet ever-impending war, its toxic fumes blur the vision of your mind’s eye. 

All this works like capitalism, consumerism, ‘modernity,’ society and ideology. We all exist within these, we operate within all these in our daily lives and transact with them, and like the beauty of your ancient souls, it all goes unnoticed, present yet untraceable.

Present and untraceable because constructs and ‘systems’ are ever-elusive and cannot be tangible as ‘totalities,’ only their residual fragments and pieces can be held within our your hands and studied through observation as synechdoches, metonyms and metaphors, mere devices for representation. 

And here precisely, is that narrow line where scientific and empirical discourse becomes fascism with its rigid definitions and categorization grounded in research, testing and theories as laws.

Now they want to even define and categorize the human soul and the emotive and affective nature of a cardiovascular engine called ‘heart.”

But you, you are not lab rats, nor test subjects, and you most certainly are not ‘constructs.’

You are flesh and bone human beings of heart and soul, who at the drop of a hat surrender individual agency and behave like social animals in this human animal farm, much like sacrificial lambs offering themselves up for slaughter to the values of your culture and that cold and heartless idol of ‘log kya kahenge’ that everyone seems to worship here to a far greater extreme than people do in other places. 

And then, you feel oppressed, stuck, at times in more severe affective ways than the overarching sociopolitical system that polices your lives and destroys those of others, at the most immediate receiving end of war.

When the soldiers go back home, you will most probably be occupied by yourselves and each other, and by the constructs you’ve set up among yourselves, as an all pervasive unquestionable book that you use to beat yourselves and others on the head.

With the colonial hand far removed, the people here with their ‘cultural capital’ completely misused will find other creative ways to keep the penal colony going, so best wishes and warmest regards for when, if at all, that happens.

Someone could have said all that, but someone would rather write about it.

That certain someone will retrieve our collective loss from personal memory, of who we once were, of who we once used to be, and that too may go unnoticed.

But at least it will be written down as testimony, as an S.O.S. (save our souls) note sealed into a bottle and dropped into a mixed sea of “salt water misery” and “sweet water joy”.

With that said, a mask cannot be shaped without the contours of a face.

Someone knows all your faces, by memory now, and regardless of how many masks you may or may not choose to wear, the heart and the soul cannot be disguised nor embellished, only tarnished, broken and then put back together and healed.

Hopefully this note verbale sealed in a bottle by someone, who could be you, could be me, will reach some of you waiting on the other side of the shore.

In a Valley tucked away in the left side rear-end pocket of the Himalayas someone dreams of a sea with its tropical “Eid Mubarak beaches.”

That someone is you, that someone is me.

 

Amjad Majid is a fictional play-pretend senior level secret agent and founder of a fictional play-pretend organization or think-tank called KCIS (Kashmiri Civilian Intelligence Services) tasked with the mission of spreading “intelligence” to Kashmiri civil society through tools such as education, critical thinking skills, immersive engagement with different art forms and refinement of  intellectual aptitude.

Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position and policy of Free Press Kashmir.

 

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