Tides of a Digital Ocean
Somewhere between the Chinar trees and the walls of houses, a new kind of silence has settled over Kashmir. It is not the feathered quiet of snow. Not the pause between “azaan “and the first sip of morning “nun chai”. This silence is heavier—like a blanket woven from neglect and questions nobody dares to ask.
I have seen it bloom in the eyes of parents who come to attend parent teacher meetings in schools. They sit on the chairs, hands wringing dupatta ends into thin, fraying ropes, their gaze floating somewhere above my head, fixed on a ceiling fan. I tell them their child is restless, distracted, more alive inside the glow of a phone screen than in the sunlight that spills through their window. They nod. Nodding has become cheaper than words. As if speech is no longer part of their inheritance.
I have walked through the courtyards of Kashmir’s Sufi shrines of Kashmir and seen mothers cry the kind of tears that don’t wet the skin but soak the soul. Not the loud grief that splits the air, but a slow seepage that stains the heart from the inside. They tie little rags—green, red, white—to the latticed ceilings. Each a whispered bargain with God: Save my child. Bring them back to me. But the child is not in another city. They are in the next room, their face lit not by faith but by a touchscreen, fingers tapping as if survival depended on it. This is a new kind of distance—one without roads, without trains, without the possibility of a warm return.
We were once a people of watchfulness. Mothers could hear the shift in a child’s cough overnight. Fathers could sense the worry in a daughter’s bent shoulders. Now, that watchfulness is dulled. Parents no longer ask where their children wander online. They do not know the midnight friends who send emojis like coded charms, or the strangers who drip compliments like sugared poison into their inboxes. They do not hear the rehearsed laughter that passes for joy. They do not see the long shadows stretching across their children’s minds.
It is not only ignorance—it is fear. Fear of the new alphabet of the world. The one that begins not with A for Apple but A for App. Parents stand at the lip of this strange ocean, unwilling to learn the tides, praying the waves will be merciful to their children.
The televisions in our homes still blare dramas and news bulletins. But the real conversations have migrated into little glowing rectangles. Mothers stir “hareesa” in the kitchen while upstairs their children scroll through lives they cannot live, desires they cannot name, and loneliness they cannot speak.
Once, a child’s secrets were pressed between diary pages, hidden under pillows. Now, they vanish into voice notes that expire after 24 hours, or images that dissolve like mist before dawn. Parents believe they know their children because they share a roof, a meal, a surname. They don’t see that they have become polite strangers, living parallel lives inside the same house.
In staff rooms, we trade stories like small, sharp stones. A boy who plays games till dawn, then dozes through class. A girl whose bright smile hides a string of insults swallowed like bitter pills. A boy whose online friends know his dreams, his fears, his blood type—while his own parents don’t even know the name of his best friend. We write notes in report cards and send them home like paper boats, praying they won’t sink before they reach the shore of a parent’s understanding.
And still, the mothers keep tying rags to the shrine ceilings. The fathers keep working, believing money is armour.
Kashmir was once a place where the smallest detail mattered—the fold of a shawl, the tilt of a teacup, the flicker of a guest’s smile. We understood the art of noticing. But now we notice the wrong things—marks on a paper, the neighbour’s gossip, the price of apples—while missing the tiny tremors in our children’s hearts.
And yet, I have learnt that the same device that steals can also give. My own iPhone has been a lantern in my palm. Through it, I have never missed a single talk or reflection that carries forward the teachings of our Sufi mystics and “Bhakti saints”—voices that still hum with the music of compassion, surrender, and oneness. From them I have gathered Sanskrit mantras and Kashmiri couplets like beads—ancient syllables polished by centuries, each carrying the weight of discipline and light. In moments like these, I see another face of technology—not as a thief of innocence, but as a wandering saint in the smallest room, opening the largest sky.
Khursheed Dar is a columnist and author.
