Maumil Mehraj
Aisha Shafiq
Why So Many Students in Kashmir Cannot Answer What Interests ThemAsk a student in Kashmir what they scored in their board examinations, what entrance exam they are preparing for, or whether they want to pursue medicine, engineering, or government service, and most will answer immediately. Ask them what genuinely interests them, intellectually, creatively, privately, and the conversation often falters. It is not because students here lack intelligence, or because they are unambitious. Many are extraordinarily disciplined, articulate, and capable. But somewhere along the way, many learn how to perform ambition long before they are allowed to develop curiosity.
In Kashmir, academic performance goes beyond the educational and into the emotional, the social, and the moral. Marks become reputation, and professional success becomes proof of stability, responsibility, even survival. A child’s future is rarely imagined casually; it is imagined anxiously. In a place shaped by prolonged uncertainty, anxiety has consequences. From a very young age, students learn that certain futures carry legitimacy while others carry risk. Doctor. Engineer. Civil servant. Something secure and respectable. Something that sounds convincing when parents, relatives, and society demand it.
One student we interviewed laughed while describing how she responds whenever people ask about her future: “I would always answer in a fun way and joke about it because I know if I say what I actually want to do, people will judge me.” Publicly, she says she is preparing for engineering entrance examinations, but privately, she wants to pursue fashion and business. Another student spoke about growing up under the quiet expectation that she would pursue civil services because it had once been her father’s dream. “You can see it in their eyes that they want you to do it, even if they won’t express it explicitly.” That captures something central to academic pressure in Kashmir—much of it is atmospheric. It exists as an emotional climate.Parents sacrifice enormously for their children here. Many have lived through instability, financial insecurity, and disruption. Their desire for stable professions is not irrational. In many Kashmiri households, medicine, engineering, or government service are not seen merely as careers. They are safety nets. Guarantees against precarity. One student put it bluntly:
“Medical and engineering are not just professions. They are insurance.” This complicates simplistic narratives about “following your passion.” Choice itself is unequal, and curiosity often requires safety.When children grow up in environments where usefulness is prioritised early, they begin treating themselves less like people to be discovered and more like projects to be managed. Many students inherit adulthood too early: practicality, caution, self-monitoring. Children elsewhere are allowed periods of intellectual uselessness. Obsessions and phases are expected. But many students here begin feeling, by 14 or 15, that they cannot “waste time” exploring interests unless those interests are economically viable. Curiosity starts feeling irresponsible. “Even in my boredom, I think about the pressure,” one student said. Another added: “Even when I’m having fun, in the back of my mind it’s like I should have studied instead.” An important question is that of boredom. Most ideas emerge out of boredom. But students here are rarely mentally unoccupied. Between school, coaching centres, examinations, and household work, many move through adolescence in a state of constant optimisation. Optimisation changes how people relate to themselves. This is also psychological. Many students become extraordinarily adaptive. They know how to study under pressure and meet expectations. But adaptation is not the same as selfhood. One of the most painful realities is that many students become highly functional versions of themselves while privately feeling absent from their own lives.They know how to narrate achievement, but not always how to describe desire. In many ways, the crisis is linguistic. Students grow up fluent in the language of achievement —marks, rankings, entrance exams—but without a vocabulary of the self. Educational systems built around correctness leave little space for reflection or ambiguity. Students learn how to produce answers, but not how to describe fascination or uncertainty. So when asked what interests them, the hesitation is not just a lack of curiosity, but a lack of practice in articulating inner life.In conversations about education reform, the discussion often stops at rote learning. But schooling frequently rewards reproduction more than intellectual risk. From early childhood, students are trained to understand themselves through performance. One participant recalled that even her younger sister, in primary school, is constantly asked about marks.
“You stop thinking about what actually excites you. You start thinking about what scores the most.” Another student mentioned seeing a JEE topper celebrating with his family. “He was dancing, but there was no emotion in his eyes.” That image captures emotional exhaustion. Philosopher Byung-Chul Han writes about performance culture producing individuals who optimise themselves until exhaustion becomes normal. The students we spoke to understood this intuitively. Their lives are organised around becoming employable and legible long before they have had the chance to become present to themselves. And yet, it would be unfair to reduce students in Kashmir to passive victims of pressure. What emerged most strongly was suppressed interiority, not intellectual emptiness. The students were thoughtful and self-aware. One observed: “Society demands certainty from us in a place where you can never really be certain. As growing individuals, it is unfair to expect that from us.” That may be one of the defining contradictions of growing up in Kashmir.Young people are expected to sound convinced about futures they have barely explored. Many do not feel permitted to be unfinished people. They must become convincing toppers, convincing future doctors, convincing “good daughters.” There is little room to publicly not know, so students begin editing themselves before they fully encounter themselves.This is even more visible with gender. For many young women in Kashmir, intellectual exploration is shaped by mobility, visibility, and respectability. One student described how her brothers pursued business freely while she had to justify her subject choices. “Compared to them, I did not have the same support.” Even risk is gendered. A son pursuing an unconventional idea may be seen as ambitious. A daughter doing the same may be seen as impractical or risky.Then there is infrastructure. Intellectual development needs peers, mentorship, and spaces that nurture talent. Many students grow up without meaningful intellectual ecosystems. There are few debate societies, student publications, arts communities, or extracurricular cultures that allow curiosity to grow. Schools advertise “co-curricular activities,” but students described these as performative.
“They do it because schools had to show they had activities, not because they cared about intellectual development.” Another noted that only high-scoring students were picked for debates and leadership, signaling that you must score well before you are allowed to explore. This matters because curiosity needs ecosystems. A student interested in philosophy, filmmaking, literature, theatre, fashion, or music should encounter communities where those interests feel real. Without that, many experience their curiosity in isolation. They begin assuming their interests are childish or unrealistic. The quietest tragedy is not just limited opportunities, but that many students lose the expectation that they are entitled to an inner life beyond achievement.In places shaped by prolonged uncertainty, intellectual exploration feels like luxury. “First become something. Then think.” But later often never arrives. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wrote about how intellectual confidence is socially produced. Some students grow up surrounded by books and debate.
Others may be equally intelligent but never encounter environments where their curiosity is given legitimacy. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire criticised systems that treat students as containers to be filled rather than minds capable of critical engagement. Listening to these students, one realises how often education here still revolves around producing correct answers rather than cultivating reflective selves. And yet, despite all this, what remains striking is how alive many students still are beneath the pressure. Even within systems organised around performance, something private survives: a sketchbook, a desire to write, a fascination with design, a dream quietly deferred. Perhaps that is why these conversations felt less like interviews and more like acts of listening. This piece is not only about education. It is about memory. About preserving the emotional vocabulary of a generation learning to survive scrutiny while still trying, however quietly, to remain human.Near the end of one conversation, we asked: when students feel torn between family expectations, society, and personal desire, what does that tension feel like? One student answered immediately: “Do you betray your parents, society, or yourself?”This may be why so many conversations carry a sense not of failure, but of interruption. Kashmir has long produced people fluent in endurance. But endurance is not the same as expansiveness. Grief is usually imagined politically. But there are quieter forms too: the grief of unrealised selves, abandoned curiosities, intellectual lives deferred in the name of practicality and survival. Listening to these students, what emerged was not an absence of depth, but an absence of permission. Permission to wander intellectually, to remain uncertain, to become unfinished without immediately translating oneself into productivity. Perhaps the question is not why so many students in Kashmir cannot answer what interests them, but how many were ever truly given the freedom to find out.
Maumil Mehraj can be reached at sheikhmaumil@gmail.com & Aisha Shafiq at aieshashafiq910@gmail.com.
