There are moments in life when we look back and wonder where the years have gone. The calendar tells us one story; memory tells us another. A decade may disappear in an instant, while a single day of grief, joy, love, or loss can remain alive within us for a lifetime. Perhaps it is within this disparity that one of the deepest questions of human existence resides: What is the relationship between the time we measure and the life we actually live?The answer may lie in a fundamental contradiction at the heart of human existence. Chronological time is measured, standardized, and universally shared. It advances with precision, regularity, and indifference. Life, however, is experienced differently. Our joys and sorrows, hopes and disappointments, attachments and losses cannot be measured or systematized in the same manner.

A tension therefore emerges between the passage of clock time and the passage of lived time. We instinctively seek to relate the two, assuming that as years pass, life should unfold in a coherent, meaningful, and predictable fashion. Yet human experience obeys no such orderly logic. It expands and contracts, lingers and accelerates, revisits old wounds, and opens unexpected possibilities. The deepest problem is not simply that time passes, but that we attempt to reconcile two distinct orders of reality: the measurable flow of chronological time and the immeasurable flow of human experience. Much of our dissatisfaction arises from this uneasy relationship.In recent decades this tension has become more acute. Social systems have developed asymmetrical pathologies produced by both external interventions and internal distortions. For Kashmiri society, particularly after the 1990s, these years have been marked by profound uncertainty, disruption, and unpredictability.

The crisis, however, is not merely the weakening of family or neighbourhood networks, for such transformations are visible across much of the modern world. The deeper rupture lies in the gradual erosion of continuity with lineage, collective memory, and inherited bonds of belonging.In earlier times, when a young person left Kashmir, he carried with him an enduring emotional attachment to home. Even while living outside the Valley, he remained deeply connected to parents, elders, neighbours, and the extended family. Physical distance rarely diminished the desire to return, contribute to, or participate in the collective life of the community. Home, together with its........

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