The Kashmiri phrase “Zaer booz baeh wehir Budshah moudh” (The
Deaf heard after twelve years that Budshah died) actually represents the flow
of information and news in earlier times. That it travelled a distance and
reached in a certain time span is obvious. I can feel the shock that Zor (deaf) would have felt of Budshah’s
death. He might have died after the news about the event. One can imagine Habba Khatoon reciting a poem and the
way it travelled orally from place to place and person to person, and also the
joy and pain the lyrics brought with it. The introduction of mechanical media
changed the scene altogether. The news still travelled but a bit faster. Chrar-i-Sharif happened and the next
morning we had newspaper informing us of the shock. But, this time it was
different. My mother called me early in the morning and informed me about
Dastageer Sahib Shrine. After moments of uneasiness, I logged into my Facebook
account and there it was; Photos with commentaries, comments, arguments and
what not. Dastageer Sahib Shrine was burning and I was being updated
continuously through various social networking and online sites. It was not a
shock neither news. It was the murder of the event instantaneously. The event
did not unfold as it should have been, neither did it enter our lives as it
should have. We did not get enough time to let it sink in, let alone mourn.
Next day our impetuous intellectuals,
journalists and writers were ready with the news and its interpretations. While
the emotional aftershocks of the event were still felt by every Kashmiri heart,
they were ready with terse headlines, hyperbolic wisdom and witty pieces. It
felt so mechanical as if a person whose whole family and home burned and the
very next morning took his suitcase, went to the job planning to find a new
house and new family. The whole day you could see the news, articles, Facebook
statuses, comments, discussion topics in various groups piling up so much and
so fast that you lost track of it. The immediacy and excessiveness of
information and interpretations murdered the event. The event was located
within a cultural context and had meaning only in that sociality as it was of
immense symbolic significance to that culture. But, the etching of that event
from time, space and culture to the surface of media murdered the event. Rather
than communicating it resulted in non-communication and only emphasized the
efficacy of technological connectedness and intrepidness of tech-savvy.
Before the event could
unfold its natural course and have its natural consequences it was hijacked by
mass media and inflated with information and personal interpretations so much
that the event got asphyxiated of its singularity. The reality of the event was
killed by the excessiveness to which it was directed and disappeared not
because it was lacking in reality but because there was excessive reality
mediated.
The event no longer
remained real as it was murdered to live into the hyperreal. I am reminded of a
Hadith from Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim where Prophet S.A.W told his
companions that there will be a group of people who will be more pious than you
and in comparison to them you will hold your religiosity insignificant but still
they will be doomed. Their doom, I believe, is brought by their being
hyperreal. They are more pious than pious and that is what kills them. In the
same way the event did not happen for the excess of it.
P.S: Earlier the
tragedy of Kashmir was that it had few intellectuals. The tragedy now is that
it has more of them.
