There is a phrase we throw around too easily today. Generation gap. We say it like it is a law of nature, something as fixed as gravity, something no family can escape. I want to tell you it is not true, because I watched a man disprove it every single day of his life, and I am still learning to live with the fact that he is gone. I write this not just for my family, but for anyone out there who has ever felt like the older people in their life belong to a different world. I promise you, they do not have to.

My grandfather was born in 1934. He lived through a version of the world most of us will only ever read about. And yet he never once let his age become a wall between himself and the people he loved. He read the news every morning, local and international, not to complain about how things had changed but to understand why. He asked questions the way young people are supposed to ask questions, with hunger, with humility, never assuming he already knew the answer. That is the first thing I want the world to hear from his life. Age does not create distance but stopping your curiosity does.

He taught me history that no textbook ever could, the real weight of Jammu and Kashmir, its wounds, its politics, its people. He did not simplify it for me because he trusted me with the truth. And then he would ask me, a young student who had studied economics for a few years, to explain the same subject back to him........

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