The Backbench Voice
In the classrooms of Kashmir, something quiet but powerful is unfolding. It doesn’t roar like protest, nor march with slogans — it breathes silently through the restless eyes of students who sit behind wooden desks, staring at blackboards that no longer inspire them to think, but to endure. The chalk dust in the air is no longer the smell of curiosity; it’s the scent of exhaustion. Every young mind is trapped in an invisible race, where success is measured not by understanding, but by the cruel arithmetic of marks.
Education was once a candle that illuminated the dark corners of ignorance. Now, it has become a business of numbers — a market where knowledge is weighed, sold, and ranked. The pursuit of truth has been replaced by the fear of losing marks. Grades are now the new gods, and children, their silent worshippers. A child’s worth is printed on report cards, while their dreams are quietly erased in red ink. The system has taught us not how to think, but how to obey.
The NEET 2024 scandal tore away the polite mask that this system wore. The leaks, the bribes, the whispered secrets — they were not merely acts of dishonesty. They were symptoms of something much deeper: a disease of fear and desperation. Behind every student who cheats is not always greed, but terror — the terror of failing in a world that punishes imperfection. When morality is crushed beneath the weight of competition, what remains is survival.
And then, in the far corners of every classroom, there are those who sit quietly — the ones who rarely raise their hands, who stare out the window, who get labeled as “backbenchers.” Society writes them off as failures, yet they might be the only ones who still see clearly. They question what others accept. They resist what others follow. They are not lazy; they are simply awake. Their rebellion is silent but real. What looks like indifference is often intelligence refusing to be confined.
Marcus Aurelius once said, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” In our schools, those colors are fading fast. Students no longer learn for meaning — they learn for metrics. They recite, not to understand, but to avoid punishment. They memorize, not to grow, but to survive. Psychologists call it learned helplessness — when the human spirit forgets it can fight back. Many Kashmiri students are living inside that silent war, where every exam feels like a judgment of their worth, and every low grade feels like exile.
But the backbenchers — the dreamers, the misunderstood, the rebels — they hold the spark that this system forgot. They write poetry in the margins of notebooks. They sketch their own worlds. They dream beyond the syllabus. They are not escaping education; they are reclaiming it. Their quiet defiance is not ignorance — it’s instinct. They sense what this generation is losing: the freedom to question, to feel, to imagine.
In a land like Kashmir, where every young heart already carries the weight of uncertainty, it is time we stop adding another stone to their shoulders. Let education be what it was meant to be — liberation, not suffocation. Let our schools nurture minds, not crush them. Let us raise thinkers, not test-takers.
Because one day, when this system collapses under its own hypocrisy, it will be those same backbenchers who rebuild it — with empathy, imagination, and courage. The real revolution won’t begin in government offices or on the news. It will begin quietly, in the back row of a classroom, where a student decides to think for himself again.
Shahzaib Al-Qudsi is a Kashmiri student and independent writer exploring the psychology of education, youth identity, and social transformation in contemporary Kashmir.
