The K-Blog

I woke up early in the morning to activate my Instagram for the weekend (had deactivated it only yesterday). Partly in a hangover from a late night binge on Dinero-Alpacino classic ‘Irishman’, and partly because of the impending migraine from not having worn my kan toppa in sub-zero of the unfaithful snowless winter- I popped a paracetamol, poured a double black coffee, and opened the app, expecting my usual balm: some Dostovesky quotes, unrequited Urdu poetry, brooding photography, and the familiar content that usually steady my nerves.

The medium is the message… In an electronic environment, we are bombarded by all-at-once sensory experience, which numbs critical thought. –Marshal McLuhan

However, the moment I logged in, my world turned topsy turvy, mirroring exactly the state of my feed.

My feed had mutated! While I expected dark alleys of Pitsburgh or the twangs from the unfulfilled promises of old Delhi, I was met by an unnerving cacophony of noise and glitter. My feed had curdled into a parade of men lacquered in pink and burgundy,  malnourished bodies shouting challenges without causes and transvestites masquerading identities that never really arrived; and all this frenzy of painted mouths and starving bravado was only briefly interuppted by an army of famished “models” trying hard at absolutely nothing.

The real is no longer what it used to be; it is replaced by signs of the real. -Baudrrillard

I was unsettled- not by the vulgarity of it, I have existed long enough to know that vulgarity always existed- but by the precision with which it had completely replaced what I once sought or who I once wanted to become. Initially, this chaos seemed very random to me but once I dwelt into it a bit deeper and thought over it a moment longer, it turned out that this chaos was not chaotic at all. It was curated and its randomness was intent!. What I should seek was cleanly edited out of it by an algorithm that shed substance very conveniently like unnecessary weight.

What I was witnessing was the real face of Kashmir instagram: a cultural asphyxia where nuance could not compete and all attention was seized by a loud throat. My feed was reset to reality of a cringe industry: fake lifestyles, a tawdry vainity and an endless pursuit of a second rate virality. This reality that was driven by a computer code that favoured shallowness over subtelities.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation… we are deceived by the distractions of the world. -Henry David Thoreau

If you ever endured an acute episode of migraine you would be well aware of how the aching nerves heighten receptivity and how sensations arrive amplified and often impossible to ignore. The aching head compells you into contemplation, something that you try your best to resist.

The cheap show of color and shoddy music worsened my headache and stripped me off my defenses. I was pulled into the abyss of thought about the emptiness of K-Instagram.

Does noise anasthetize?

Sensation leads to reflection but excessive sensation faitgues meaning; it short-circuits reflection; suspending self awareness without realisation of loss. Noise dulls conditions where debate and arguments could occur. It anastheticizes; not by overwhelming at once but by never stopping. You are not givem a quiet moment where you could address, arrive or simply question

In The Life of the Mind (1978), Hannah Arendt argues that thinking requires a temporary withdrawal from the world of appearances to reflect on the meaning of things. This withdrawal is a solitary, silent “two-in-one” inner dialogue that removes the thinker from the immediate, sensory-driven common sense reality. It is not a permanent escape but a necessary step to evaluate and understand the world before returning to it. 

Thinking aims at and ends in contemplation, and contemplation is not an activity but a passivity; it is the point where mental activity comes to rest. –Hannah Arendt

On similar lines, Simone Weil explains how the afflicted do not need, and are often harmed by, the “middle values” of discourse, rights, or pity. Instead, they require the silence of those who want to deliver justice—a “creative silence” that allows their voice to be heard. This silence is not passive apathy, but an active, “negative effort” (a strenuous surrender or waiting) that empties the self of its own ego, judgments, and desire to impose solutions.

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. –Simone Weil

A creative slilence and a regenerating withdrawal; Spectacle of vanity annihilates both by denying the pause in which the conscience shapes.

The age of haste, its cinematographic succession of point-like presences, has no access to beauty or to truth. Only in lingering contemplation, even an ascetic restraint, do things unveil their beauty, their fragrant essence. It consists of temporal sedimentations emitting a phosphorescent glow. –Byung Chul Han

This narcotic of vanity sustains in mutual re-inforcement where the performer thrives in viewer’s gaze and viewer thrives in performers display, both reflecting only the surfaces they want to show, trapped in safe, controlled feedback loops of cheap dopamine and emptiness driven by views, likes and comments.

Power is exercised not only through law but through the regulation of daily behavior and attention– Michel Foucolt

Social media is sold as a window, but in context of Kashmir it works as a curtain. The Instagram reels misrepresent reality and at the same time pull the viewer away from any conscious effort to seek what is real. Reality in Kashmir is slow, layered and often exhauting. It mostly resists neat captions and dwells on ethical ambiguity. The loudness of the reels replaces lived complexity of life with digestible drama where politics is traded off with performance. The impetus that drives this profanity is retention, it does not care about truth and justice. The young viewers instead of engaging with real social world are compartmentalised into tribes of spectators and performers who operate within inconsequential realm of presposterousness. Social media offers them emotional release without any responsibility. In this realm nobody risks anything and identiy and truth of people are mis-defined; aspirations suspended between mehandi designs and bridal make-ups.

Social media did not invent escapism, it simply industrailised it. This monetised escapism is particularly dangerous when social truths weigh heavy: unemployment, suspended futures, broken institutions, surveillance fatigue, and generational trauma that does not fit into a 30-second clip. With the algorithm that favours the death of nuance, fleeing into cheap digital theatrics is not just harmful, it is falling to an onslaught; intellectual as well as existential.

After the taking over of X by Elon Musk what became increasingly clear was that unlike the Orwelian power systems, the systems of current era not only suppress, they also flood. In the post-Orwellian era of control and manipulation, subjects are never barred from knowing but are not allowed to stop scrolling long enough to know. The energies are distributed across the spectacle, where senses become heightened and agitated, but never contemplative and anchored. For any power system it is easier to corrall distraction than to confront independent thought. Therefore, this spectacle becomes a curated sedation. The algorithm becomes a soft power that shapes or deshapes perception before any word arrives.

The drug crisis in Kashmir is not separate from this digital culture: it is its dark twin. The reels offer emotional escape, substances offer chemical escape. One numbs the mind, the other numbs the body.  The logic is identical: don’t process, just drift.  When the social realities fade into background, like with heroin, the senses are saturated with agitated performative colors, little energy is left for reflection and inquiry. In between, a generation quietly dissolves.

The only journey is inward… silence and solitude are the soil of true insight. – Rainer Maria Rilke

Modern world does not suffer from a lack of voices rather it suffers morbidly from a surplus of noise; a noise that is detatched from emotion. What is needed today is not performative rage, but sustained thought, not gaudy lifestyle reels but more reading. Our pursuit should not not be a second rate virality but moral stamina to crticize.

What is needed today today is to resist needle and scroll alike.

With these thoughts I felt almost nauseus as my phone kept on rage baiting me. How often I too fell for this noise- the spectacle and hollow commotion of Instagram? I took a moment and looked outside the window at the patches of snow that had hardly managed to cover a few twigs on a nearby walnut tree. Depth, nuance and reflection were like these few patches- rare, fragile and fleeting against the flouroscent tyrrany of performative chaos. I turned off the app to let the feed roar on without me and stepped out naked feet into the silence that still belonged to the world outside.