Malik Aabid’s poem offers a profound meditation on the changing landscape of Kashmir with the advent of modernity and its consumerist ecosystem. These verses provide a musing of sorts about the changes from the last few decades with uneven yet constant construction that has sidelined the poetry that inherently exists in the land and in its natural beauty. The poem inspired by a rainy day reflects nostalgia and a melancholic awareness of a passing and the resulting loss that it brings with it. The poet invokes the late Agha Shahid Ali to trail back to a time when the simplicity of life in Kashmir was not so conditioned and suffocated by constant acceleration and movement. A rainy day certainly seems to create a pause that the poet employs to recover a poetic depth from rain, one that is lost to the mundane and to those preoccupied with routine. In fact, this poem itself is that pause, manifest in verse.
Kashmir: An Elegy to the Memory of Rain — by Malik Aabid
read more