WRITE-UPS

By a young farmer, B.Sc Agriculture  I studied agriculture not to leave my village but to stay and serve it, not to dream of a job in the city but to protect what my father and grandfather built with their hands. I wanted to bring knowledge home, to improve our land, to strengthen our roots. But knowledge alone cannot irrigate a dying field. And now, even with my degree, I have failed to save what mattered most. We are dying here. And no, this is not metaphor. We are watching our fields dry, our orchards rot, our backs break, and yet your cameras do not turn, your pens do not move. You find drama elsewhere, but ignore the slow death in the soil. I have watched our family go from sixty kanal to ten. The rest was sold to a brick kiln. My father cried as he signed the papers, and I, des...

The martyrdom of Hamza ibn Abd al-Muttalib at the Battle of Uhud, 15 Shawwal, 3 A,  marked, not only a military loss for the nascent Muslim community but also a profound emotional rupture in the life of Prophet Muhammad. ﷺ Hamza was not simply an uncle; he was the Prophet’s close companion, protector, and an early convert who stood firm when Islam was most vulnerable. His death, and the manner in which it was inflicted, left a wound that never truly healed. The Prophet’s  grief was not fleeting, it was sustained, recurring, and expressed subtly over the remaining years of his life. Despite the Prophet’s well-documented emphasis on patience in times of loss, the case of Hamza offers a complex picture of mourning: one where love, loss, restraint, and memory coexisted. During the Battle...

Alima Altaf What should have been a routine visit to SMHS Hospital for pending blood tests turned into a troubling reminder of how easily suffering is brushed aside in a system weighed down by apathy. On Saturday, I accompanied my father to the hospital, hoping everything would go smoothly. But the brief interaction at the ticket counter revealed a different reality — one where negligence and casual indifference to duty overshadow the pain of those seeking help. While waiting in line to pay for the tests, I noticed a woman ahead of us who had already been waiting over ten minutes. The staff member at the counter, however, seemed completely unbothered — engaged in light-hearted banter with colleagues about silver rings, footwear, outfits, and even lunch orders. Everything, it se...

Suhail Dar Mohammad Sultan Ganie, a farmer from Batengoo, surveys his cracked and parched fields. “The river is a shadow of itself,” he murmurs—his crops withering in the scorching sun. The skies remain silent, the Jhelum’s flow diminished, and the land begs for water even as river and sky seem indifferent. A record-breaking heatwave has gripped Kashmir since April 2025. On June 23, Srinagar recorded its hottest June day in two decades at 35.5 °C, with nighttime lows of 23.2 °C—the warmest in over thirty years. The valley has endured 5–8 °C above-normal temperatures, and the government shut schools from June 23 to July 7 to protect children from the brutal conditions. Across villages and farms like Batengoo, the land lies bare and cracked, with no airflow to bring relief. “E...

Javid Ahmad In an age where sectarian rifts are deliberately widened, often by regimes and powers that benefit from Muslim disunity, the legacy of Dr. Qazi Nisar Ahmad offers a timeless and urgent lesson. His model of Shia-Sunni unity, born in the politically turbulent and religiously complex landscape of Kashmir in the 1980s, wasn't a rhetorical plea for harmony — it was a lived, organized resistance to both internal division and external domination. By early 1986, in the heart of South Kashmir, something rare unfolded. Different Islamic schools of thought — Deobandi, Ahli Hadith, Jamaat-e-Islami, and others — began offering joint Friday prayers, rotating between mosques across Anantnag and Sherbagh. It was neither symbolic nor ceremonial; it was a political and spiritual stand against ...

Irshad Ahmad When Ayatollah Khamenei appeared on Iranian state television on June 18, 2025—calm, composed, and unmistakably alive—he wasn’t just delivering a speech. He was fact-checking a week’s worth of speculative Western headlines with the subtlety of a surgeon and the precision of a statesman. For anyone who had read the barrage of English-language news reports in the preceding days, his 15-minute address felt like watching reality puncture a well-inflated media balloon. Some of those outlets had him mentally unfit. Others had him removed from power. Some even suggested he was pressured into ceasefire talks. But as the Supreme Leader confidently asserted that “Our people will not submit to an imposed war, nor to imposed peace,” it became evident—Western media had been reporting ...

Syed Zeeshan Ali In the winter of 1978, as revolutionary fervor gripped Iran and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini faced expulsion from Iraq, an unusual letter reached him in Najaf—from the Himalayan valley of Kashmir. It was sent by Aga Syed Yusuf, one of Kashmir’s most influential Shia clerics, offering Khomeini refuge and spiritual kinship in what he described as the “ancestral land” of the exiled leader. Khomeini, then on the brink of returning to Iran to lead the final stage of the revolution, declined the invitation. Yet in his response, he acknowledged something remarkable: his connection to Kashmir. This exchange was more than a personal footnote—it reflected the survival of a shared memory, a deep-rooted cultural and spiritual kinship that had endured across centuries and mountain...

Advocate Sanjeev Sirohi In a powerful affirmation of individual autonomy and legal clarity, the Supreme Court of India has ruled that a consensual relationship turning sour or emotional distance between partners cannot justify invoking the State's criminal machinery under rape charges—delivering a landmark judgment that seeks to curb the misuse of sexual offence laws. It is extremely refreshing to see that while striking the right note, the Supreme Court, in a learned, laudable, landmark, logical, and latest judgment titled Amol Bhagwan Nehul vs. State of Maharashtra & Anr. in Criminal Appeal of 2025 [Arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 10044 of 2024], and cited as Neutral Citation No.: 2025 INSC 782—pronounced recently on May 26, 2025, while exercising its criminal app...

On April 10, 2025, former U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to engage in nuclear talks with Iran for the first time in years. This initiative follows a period of heightened tensions, including Iran's direct retaliation against Israel for an airstrike on its diplomatic compound in Damascus—a rare and overt confrontation that brought the region close to a broader conflict. Trump emphasized a preference for diplomacy but warned that failure to reach an agreement would lead to severe consequences for Iran. The proposed talks are centered on Iran's nuclear program, which has been under intense scrutiny since the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018. Since then, Iran has expanded its nuclear capabilities, enriching uranium to 6...

Dr. Shabir Hussain When I stepped inside the house last month, I could still hear the echoes. Not voices, no. But echoes. Of wooden slippers clacking on the staircase. Of my grandfather’s slow cough before Fajr. Of my mother singing in the kitchen while scraping dried turnips with a blunt knife. The house, even in its ruin, remembered everything. I grew up here in Tral. Back then, we didn’t call it “rural.” We just called it home. There was no electricity in winter. We kept our milk in clay pots, tucked near the earthen walls to stop it from freezing. My sister and I would scrape ice from the inside of the windows and draw crooked hearts with our fingers. Outside, the sky was heavy with snow. But inside, there was warmth—not just from the fire, but from people. Especially durin...