The Unseen Heart

What is the value of a lullaby sung in the stillness of night, offered softly by a mother to her baby not recorded, not preserved, not meant for anyone but the silence and the small breath beside her? What price could we possibly place on the weight carried by a father’s-tired shoulders as he walks through the door, hands empty but heart open, ready to help with homework or simply sit in silence? Is there any currency that could capture the comfort of your grandmother’s faded shawl on a cold evening, or the way a friend lingers for a second longer on a call not because you said you needed them but because they knew?

We live in a world now increasingly governed by visibility. Our thoughts are posted, our joys filtered, our grief tagged. Emotions, once personal and messy and uncontainable, are now curated, optimized, and often monetized. Love can arrive via subscription. Grief trends under hashtags. Joy is edited for engagement. In the space between content creation and audience approval, the human heart is slowly learning to beat in marketable rhythms.

The question, once poetic, now becomes alarmingly urgent: If our emotions carried a price tag, would they still move us? Perhaps the greater tragedy is that we are slowly finding out the answer.

Across the valley from the foggy hills of the Himalayas to the ceaseless tide of the rivers, from the snow-covered pines to the dusty heat of the plains millions of untold stories unfold every day. Stories of yearning, love, loss, ritual and memory. Not because they lack beauty, but because they lack an audience. Because they cannot be monetized. Because they are not shareable.

In Baramulla, a mother still prepares an extra portion of food each afternoon, despite knowing her son, who disappeared twelve years ago during a period of heightened conflict, is unlikely to walk back through the door. She does it not for closure. Not for performance. But because she doesn’t know how not to.

In Pulwama, a student takes a longer route to class each day just to pass the tea stall where he once saw a girl who changed his world for a moment, though he never spoke to her. He doesn’t know why he still does it. But he does.

These small, private rituals quiet, uneconomical, invisible once defined who we were as a society. But now increasingly what cannot be turned into content is at risk of vanishing from public consciousness altogether. In this new emotional marketplace, if you didn’t post it, did it even happen?

We are being nudged gently, persistently almost invisibly towards a life where everything must be shared to matter. Love must be documented. Loss must be tweeted. A poem in a diary feels insufficient unless it has good lighting. A heartfelt message is only complete if it can be screenshotted and reposted. Even tears, once the most private form of grief, are now presented for validation. Mourning, birthdays, apologies all are filtered through the prism of social media.

This isn’t to suggest that technology is the villain. It isn’t, it connects, it records, it remembers. But there is a difference between using tools to express our feelings and using our feelings as tools. That line, once clear, now barely exists.

What becomes of love when it’s scheduled? Of sorrow when it’s branded? Of friendship when it becomes content?

A society that commercializes its emotions doesn’t just distort them it dilutes them. It teaches us to mistrust even our own hearts.

We begin to question sincerity. To doubt generosity. We wonder if someone’s affection is genuine or strategic. If someone’s sadness is real or performance. If their presence is comfort, or content. Human beings in this climate are no longer fully human. They are increasingly digital commodities, personas. But not everything that matters should be visible.

A few months ago, I was waiting for a train at the Nowgam Srinagar railway station. Amid the swirl of noise and announcements a man dropped to his knees. He wasn’t loud. He wasn’t disruptive. But his body folded in on itself in a way that made people stop. His hand clenched his shirt. His face contorted in grief. No one knew what he had lost. No one took a video. But the silence that fell in that corner of the platform was telling. He wasn’t data. He wasn’t a reel. He was a man. Breaking open and we saw him.

That moment was real. No filters, No hashtags.

Today, we live in an emotional economy where attention is the coin of the realm. But attention is not empathy. Going viral is not the same as being remembered. And algorithms, for all their mimicry, do not love you. They don’t hold you. They don’t mourn with you. They study you. They segment you. And they sell you—back to yourself.

Watch a sad video, and your feed drowns in heartbreak. Search for comfort, and you’re buried in pre-packaged self-help mantras. This is not intimacy. This is surveillance.

In Kashmir, we often say: Jo dil se diya jaaye, uska hisaab nahi hota—What is given from the heart cannot be measured. But even this sentiment, born of centuries of poetry and pain, is being reshaped.

In Kupwara, I met a woman who had lost her brother during the pandemic. They had been close once but drifted apart over the years. On his birthday, she baked his favorite cake. No photos. No status updates. Just her, her grief, and the scent of something once loved. “I didn’t want anyone else to know,” she told me. “I just wanted him to.”

What do we call such moments? They do not go viral. They are not designed for engagement. But they are the very essence of what it means to be human. Acts of unacknowledged love. Quiet grief. Unspoken forgiveness. Deep feeling, shared with no one.

We are now sold curated emotions. Spotify offers “healing” playlists. Instagram suggests captions for heartbreak. Brands peddle “emotional detox kits” and “mindfulness candles.” Some startups offer companionship, where machines simulate empathy. The loneliness of our era is being mined in real-time and our most delicate emotions are being sold back to us polished, packaged, and impersonal. We must resist this tide. Not by logging off. But by remembering.

Remember what a real hug feels like, when it lasts too long. Remember the letter you never sent. The joy of hearing your name from someone who loves you. The warmth of being understood without explanation. The eye contact that lingers. The awkwardness that becomes familiarity. The poem that no one reads. These moments though unseen are sacred.

Kashmir, with its sprawling emotional traditions, must not surrender this heritage. Our music, our literature, our cinema, our everyday interactions—all have always been saturated with feeling. Whether it’s the melancholy ache of a Habba Khatoon ghazals, or the spontaneous laughter of strangers sharing chai at midnight this is a country that knows how to feel, and to feel completely.