Scrapping of article 370 - a lonely Kashmir and the funeral of the Public Sphere

Indian Coffee House: Vibrant public sphere?

Scrapping of article 370 was a newsfeed which came when Kaleidoscope was showing Rang De Basanti song "khoon chala" to his students as part of his course on Social Movement. The CBCS system though disrupted to a significant extent the tune of Higher Education system, also brought some space to deliver things that matter to his student's everyday life. Social Movement, although is inclined towards the stereotypic study of tribal movements, but Kaleidoscope thought of showing in what ways his country demands an active social movement to make things going around for a future plural India!

The news floated on the projector screen, thanks to their newly installed institutional Jio mobile connectivity. Suddenly, Kaleidoscope saw faces of a few people who came to his life at different points of time, a friend from a long past workshop, a girl during his days long workshop courses, several shalwalas who were the childhood fantasies to many of his childhood friends of the opposite genders.

The streets, roads are deserted while in the parliament its being shouted out that people were supposedly celebrating there. Seeing these Kaleidoscope recalled his youthful days at the IIM library desperately reading and re-reading Habermas! Kaleidoscope had enough trust to his theory of "Communicative rationality." He constantly believed and subscribed to the fact that communication skill of his species would be able to solve no matter how challenging the situation is, simply because there is a forceless force lying within the communication itself. The vibrant public sphere that transformed itself with the rise of consumerist capitalism was undermined by Kaleidoscope for quite long, so as to even forget that there is a parallel rise of misinformed, partially informed, whatsappised, facebooked public sphere to encounter.

Therefore, what scrapping of article 370 show is nothing short of a major move simply bypassing what people of Kashmir wanted - simply because its very easy to bypass public sphere of the whole country once you can modify it through your IT cell and the sense of Nationalism. Public sphere is dead... so does the "communicative rationality" - Kashmir shows the future, like it or not Kaleidoscope!