The Earbud Economist of Downtown Kashmir

How a Kashmiri engineer traded classroom ridicule for corporate clients and wired the refund straight back to Srinagar’s unemployed.

- Gowher Bhat

Ubaid Manzoor's earliest memory of public speech is the sound of his pulse.

The microphone in the school courtyard waited thirty seconds while the twelve-year-old tried to push air past his teeth.

A teacher finally shattered the silence, “Louder, boy, this is not a funeral,” and the courtyard obeyed: boys clucked, girls giggled, and the day moved on.

Ubaid’s cheeks burned so hard he tasted iron. That taste became a calendar.

For the next decade, every morning assembly, shop-counter transaction, or ticket-window query carried the threat of similar fire.

His father, Manzoor Ahmad, carried rebar instead of opinions.

Each dawn, he walked to the Lal Chowk construction circle, waited for a contractor to point, then lifted fifty-kilo cement sacks until his palms split.

Evening wages, never more than ₹450, were handed to his wife, Naseema, who stretched them across three children and rent for two rooms overlooking the Jhelum.

“Bas duaa karo, humara Ubaid kuch ban jaye,” he repeated, as if naming the wish made it negotiable with God.

What Ubaid became, first, was invisible.

He discovered that if he arrived last to class and left first, teachers forgot to call on him. He trained his bladder to survive eight-hour school days without a toilet break. The lavatory smelled of cigarettes and interrogation. Report cards labelled him “disinterested,” the administrative shorthand for any child who refuses the performance of learning.

Inside the house, he read torn chemistry hand-me-downs by candlelight during curfews, because textbooks, unlike people, did not shout.

The pivot arrived in the shape of a secondhand C primer displayed on a Residency Road footpath.

The vendor wanted ₹120, Ubaid bargained by silence until the price fell to 80.

He carried the book home wrapped in newspaper, fed himself loops and variables, and felt the first non-medical slowing of his heart rate.