The Long Nights of Study

For thousands of students in Kashmir, reading rooms are more than study spaces. They are places where time is traded for hope, and where ambition often meets its limits.

- Khursheed Ahmad Shah

On winter nights, the Allama Iqbal Library at Kashmir University glows like a lantern in the dark.

Rows of students sit in silence under its fluorescent light, their eyes swollen from sleeplessness, and fingers tracing the same pages again and again.

The night outside is thick with frost, but inside the room burns with a different cold, the one that seeps into the heart when the future refuses to unfold.

Every face here carries a private war. A boy bends over his books as though each line could lift the weight his father has carried for decades. A girl keeps vigil through the hours, her dreams tied to an exam that might throw her family out of poverty.

Between them, hundreds of other young men and women sit with open notebooks and closed throats, speaking only through their silence.

Kashmir has always lived with silence. In its reading rooms, that silence feels charged with expectation.

For years, these halls have multiplied across towns and villages, offering desks, lamps, and WiFi. They look like shrines of ambition from the outside. Inside, they resemble battlefields, where students fight fatigue, anxiety, and time itself.