Dastageer Sahib Shrine: Crackling Cries and White Noise

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.