A society begins not when people merely live beside one another, but when they acquire the difficult moral discipline of saying “We”. Civilization itself emerges from this fragile transition - from the sovereignty of the isolated self to the ethical imagination of collective existence. The journey from “I” to “We” is perhaps the most profound accomplishment of human society, for it transforms biological proximity into a moral community. It compels individuals to recognize that vulnerability is never private, suffering is never singular, and responsibility cannot remain confined to the narrow circumference of the self.But societies are not guaranteed permanence. The moral architectures that sustain them can erode. The grammar of collective life can quietly fracture. If civilization begins with the emergence of we, social decay begins with its exhaustion.

The deepest anxiety confronting Kashmir today may not merely be political uncertainty, economic fragility, or institutional distrust. It may be something far more intimate and therefore more dangerous: the gradual privatization of social life itself- the slow displacement of “we” by “I”, of collective obligation by private survival, of ethical reciprocity by emotional withdrawal.Certain tragedies disturb us not because they are unprecedented, but because they expose truths we are reluctant to confront. The recent incident in Budgam, still under investigation and demanding factual restraint, belongs to this category of moments. Its legal truth will emerge through procedure. But its philosophical significance lies elsewhere. It compels an uncomfortable sociological introspection into what kinds of moral worlds contemporary Kashmir is producing.

For the most unsettling question before us is not simply what happened. The more difficult question is: what has happened to us? This is not a rhetorical question. But a civilizational one.Kashmir continues to imagine itself through the language of intimacy. We still invoke the mohalla, kinship, neighborhood ethics, shared grief, and collective belonging as if they remain intact social realities. We narrate ourselves through nostalgia: the elder who intervened, the neighbor who noticed, the collective vigilance that rendered vulnerability socially visible. The image of society that persists in our imagination is one where children belong not merely to families but, morally speaking, to communities.Yet societies often perish first in imagination before they collapse in reality. We continue to speak the language of community long after its ethical substance begins to disappear. The uncomfortable truth confronting contemporary Kashmir is that society increasingly resembles not a moral collective, but an archipelago of private anxieties.

People remain physically........

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