An excerpt from an article titled “No More Friday Afternoons in the Old City” published in the Viewpoint section of Greater Kashmir by Carin Jodha Fisher.
“The main sources of my own frustration, and I am sure of many others here, include many things besides the curbing of personal freedoms:
– smug bureaucrats who have the power to endlessly delay developmental or any projects, making us squirm while trying to push them along;
– friends who seem to lack truthfulness and commitment to an idea;
– acquaintances who appear to be one thing but turn out to be another;
– politicians who promise economic salvation in low level governmental jobs instead of encouraging people to take their fate into their own hands;
– the young who seek but cannot find hope in a future that they dont believe will be determined by themselves;
– divided local communities who fight each other instead of the various outside forces that are keeping them down;
– leaders of different ideological persuasions urging change with rebel rousing slogans while assuring that their own existence remains unchanged and protected;
– widows and orphans who attract media coverage but little other attention;
– timber smugglers who loot the forests in connivance with greedy government officials;
– authorities who lack the will to protect the precious resources of a place that could move towards economic self-sufficiency, instead of environmental disaster, if those resources were managed with greater transparency, sincerity and skill;
and last but not least,
– the sometimes seemingly empty pursuit of achieving nationhood in a nation that has yet to be built or else may one day become only a wasteland of the free.”