When fairness feels uneven

The recent storm that swept through Kashmir Valley rattled roofs and windowpanes, bent trees in courtyards and along highways, and moved with the same force through crowded neighbourhoods and quiet outskirts. It did not stop to consider who lived where, who was powerful, who was ordinary. Like most forces of nature, it was vast, impersonal, and indiscriminate.

Then came the snowfall.

Soft, silent, almost hesitant — but selective. One locality woke to white rooftops and hushed streets, while another, just a short distance away, found only frost and expectation. Zaldagar wore winter like a shawl;  Karannagar stood under an empty sky. A snow-clearance machine had to be rushed to Kralpora, while nearby Kakapora did not receive a single flake. The difference between inclusion and exclusion was measured not in miles, but in the invisible movements of drifting clouds.

In purely meteorological terms, this is unremarkable. Snowfall depends on temperature gradients, moisture pockets, wind direction, and altitude variations so subtle they escape daily notice. Weather is governed by physics, not fairness. Yet, when  an uneven  natural event happens soon after people are already upset about human decisions, people may begin to believe the second event is sending a message – even though it is just a chance.

Around the same time, the results of a judicial selection process stirred debate across the region. Numbers were scrutinised, comparisons drawn, and questions raised — some openly, others in private conversations heavy with concern. For many, the issue was not confined to statistics. Representation, in a place with a long and sensitive history, is never merely arithmetic. It touches deeper anxieties about voice, access, and belonging.

When natural randomness and institutional outcomes that feel unequal arrive together, the human mind instinctively searches for patterns. Across cultures and centuries, people have read moral meaning into the sky. A red horizon once signified divine anger, an eclipse was seen as a warning, a comet as a sign of upheaval. Science has since explained these phenomena, yet the instinct persists. When confidence in human fairness weakens, people look to the universe for signs that justice still exists somewhere.

It is in such moments that a storm that spared no one, followed by a snowfall that seemed to choose its ground, begins to feel as though that weather is reflecting what people are going through.

But nature is not a moral force. It does not reward or punish, endorse or condemn. Storms follow pressure systems; snow follows temperature and moisture; clouds obey wind currents indifferent to human borders and grievances. The sky does not discriminate. It simply moves.

Institutions, however, are another matter. They are not shaped by pressure systems but by policies, procedures, and people. Their outcomes are not inevitable; they are constructed. When sections of society begin to perceive those outcomes as uneven, the issue is not atmospheric but institutional.

If injustice is seen as written in the clouds, it feels beyond question. If unfairness is believed to be part of some cosmic script, accountability dissolves into fatalism. Yet the crucial distinction remains: weather is beyond human control, institutions are not. Snowfall cannot be debated, but selection processes can. Storms cannot be reformed, but systems can.

Perhaps, then, the real significance of these coinciding events lies not in the sky above but in the mood below. When public trust is strong, uneven snowfall is just weather. When trust weakens, even drifting clouds make people feel that events are saying something about their situation. The symbolism people perceive says less about nature and more about the state of confidence in civic fairness.

The storm was only weather.

The snowfall was only climate.

But the unease that followed belongs to the moral atmosphere of society. And unlike the sky above us, that atmosphere is not beyond our influence. If fairness appears uneven, the answer is not to search for signs in the clouds, but to restore balance on the ground — where justice is meant to live, and where responsibility cannot be shifted to the wind.

Farooq Ahmad Khan is an advocate practising before the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. He writes on law, justice and public affairs.