By Iqbal Mehraj

For years, schools in Kashmir welcomed children with a promise painted above the gates: Enter to learn, leave to serve.

The slogan was meant to inspire, and imbue purpose. But it hangs heavier now, like a faded oath.

Many students don’t leave to serve. Some linger in waiting rooms of bureaucracy, scores vanish into silence, and others wander from one exam to the next, hoping something will click.

The failure of that promise isn’t hard to trace.

It begins in the classroom, the first place in Kashmir where dreams often start to shrink.

From early school years to university corridors, students are nudged into a single lane. They’re mostly taught there is one respectable destination: the government job – Medicine, Engineering, or Civil Services. Anything else is seen as a compromise.

It has already become an inheritance: what one generation believed, the next is expected to follow.

Ask a parent what they hope their child becomes, and the answer is likely scripted. Ask the student, and it will mirror that hope, because no other possibility was offered.

Careers in art, writing, coding, design, craft, or entrepreneurship are still treated as last options. Real jobs are salaried and secure. That is the measure.

This mindset, repeated across households and classrooms, has created a generation stranded in between: overeducated for work that no longer exists in its traditional form,........

© Kashmir Observer