Srinagar, Aug. 18 -- On winter nights, the Allama Iqbal Library at Kashmir University glows like a lantern in the dark.

Rows of students sit in silence under its fluorescent light, their eyes swollen from sleeplessness, and fingers tracing the same pages again and again.

The night outside is thick with frost, but inside the room burns with a different cold, the one that seeps into the heart when the future refuses to unfold.

Every face here carries a private war. A boy bends over his books as though each line could lift the weight his father has carried for decades. A girl keeps vigil through the hours, her dreams tied to an exam that might throw her family out of poverty.

Between them, hundreds of other young men and women sit with o...