Srinagar, May 26 -- "Kashmiri youth have become wayward." This may be a statement of the obvious. But the question is: what accounts for this?

Broadly, does this mean or imply cultural disintegration, a fragmentation of the self and its eventual dissolution? Is Kashmir losing its cultural soul?

And, more provocatively, did Kashmir ever have one?

These questions, as salient and important as they are, beg a further set of questions: what makes me, as an observer and student of culture in both broad and specific terms, raise them? What is their premise and predicate? Are there larger economic and global forces at work whose scope is so expansive that they throw cultures across the world under the proverbial bus?

An explication warrants a...