Forgetting the soul

Once upon a time, not in a fairytale but in a small house somewhere in Kashmir, a child would cry—and a grandmother would whisper a story. Not a loud one. Not a cartoonish one. But a story sewn with silences and ancient breath. About a bird who carried grains across mountains. About a girl who watered a dead tree until it bloomed. About kings who cried, and saints who slept on stones.

The story wasn’t an escape. It was the way back home.

Today, when children cry, we give them a cellphone. And the moment their little fingers touch the screen, the world changes. The mother breathes a sigh of relief. The father returns to his scrolling. The silence is no longer magical—it is mechanical.

The child, barely able to tie his own laces, now watches YouTube shorts for hours—algorithms pouring fast-cut fantasies into a sponge-like mind. Violence in candy wrappers. Consumerism disguised as innocence. And no one—not mother, not father, not teacher, not state—knows what the child is truly watching.

We are raising a generation that doesn’t know the name of the tree outside their window. That has never watched a spider build a web or heard the call of a bulbul at dawn. Who no longer look up at the sky. Because they’ve been taught that all answers lie within the screen. And no one has the time—or the courage—to contradict the machine.

I remember, not so long ago—ten years, maybe less—in the valleys of Kashmir, children played games that didn’t require batteries or subscriptions. They ran through orchards, collected wildflowers, built pretend kitchens with pebbles and twigs. There was no money involved. Just breath, just dirt, just joy. And when they fell, the earth taught them resilience.

Now, children no longer fall. They sit. They scroll. Their world is a small, hot rectangle, lit up with other people’s voices, other people’s bodies, other people’s greed.

When relatives come home, children no longer sit near them, eager for attention or mischief or storytelling. They disappear. Into corners. Into headphones. Into digital exile.

What have we done?

We’ve outsourced parenting to screens. We’ve allowed attention spans to collapse like paper walls. We’ve turned our children into lonely emperors of empty kingdoms—kings of nothing, heirs to isolation.

And still, we call it “progress.”

But let me ask you—when was the last time your child looked you in the eyes and asked you a question that didn’t come from Google? When was the last time they traced a butterfly’s flight with wonder? Or brought home a broken-winged sparrow and whispered that they wanted to fix it?

When we hand our children to machines, we should not be surprised when they forget how to be human.

It’s easy to say this is the world now. That everyone is doing it. That we can’t escape technology. These are half-truths. Convenient lies. The truth is: a child still craves a lap more than a like. A story more than a screen. A voice more than a video.

The truth is: parenting was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be sacred.

And what we choose today—whether to look away or lean in—will shape not only the child, but the very architecture of the world to come.

So let’s start small. Switch off the phone during dinner. Tell them a real story. Show them a moon. Plant a seed. Watch it grow together.Let them be children again. Because once childhood is lost, no algorithm can bring it back.

 Khursheed Dar is a teacher and author from Langate.