Spring in Kashmir
by Rahman Rahi
And there’s a love-torn couple
In the lap of a shikara on Dal
And there’s a vermilion cloud
In a sapphire sky flirting a peak
And there’s a deodar
With kohl-rimmed eyes
And there’s a tulip
With parched lips
And there’s a wine goblet
Bubbling with pearls
And there’s a black wasp
Digging the heart of lotus
And there’s a whirligig
Dancing
And there’s a surge
Rising, naturally.
Oh, spirit,
Amidst all this
If you did not hold my hand
And beat in tune
With my pulse,
Would you know
How my unruly heart sings
And an orchestra plays?
* * *
Abdur Rehman Rahi, b.1925, recipient of several top literary awards in India, is the greatest living poet of the Kashmiri language. He has published five collections of poems and seven books of literary criticism in Kashmiri. Rahi lives in Srinagar.
Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari for 3QD.
“…And now to introduce our second panelist: Martha. Martha does believe that academic philosophy is worth pursuing, and she has – of course – written a book about it. Martha, can you briefly summarize your argument?”
My answering machine whirrs. From an echoing room, the chainsaw-voice shouts into a speaker phone:
One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called “use/mention distinction”. Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it.
I just read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Not every word. It’s over a thousand pages, and there are long “Digressions” (Smith’s term) on matters such as the history of the value of silver, or banking in Amsterdam, which I simply passed over. I was mainly interested in what Smith has to say about work, so I also merely skimmed some other sections that seemed to have little relevance to my research. Time and again, though, I found myself getting sucked into chapters unrelated to my concerns simply because the topics discussed are so interesting, and what Smith has to say is so thought-provoking. Reading the book is also made easier both by Smith’s admirably lucid writing and by the brief summaries of the main claims being made that he inserts throughout at the left-hand margin.
It is fashionable to say that great wine is made in the vineyard. There is a lot of truth to that slogan but in fact wine is made by a complex assemblage with various factors influencing the final product. Last month 
From aviation to zoo-keeping, there’s a simple rule for safety in potentially hazardous pursuits. Always keep an eye on the ways that things could go badly wrong, even if they seem unlikely. The more disastrous a potential failure, the more improbable it needs to be before we can safely ignore it. Think icebergs and 
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I’d been living in Tokyo about ten years, when a friend’s father decided to perform a little experiment on me. Arriving one cool autumn evening at their home in suburban Mejirodai, he waved my friend away, telling her: “I want to have a little chat with Leanne.” Sitting down on the sofa across from him, he poured me a cup of tea. In truth, I can’t recall what we chatted about, but about twenty minutes into the conversation, he suddenly clasped his hand together in delight–with what could only be described as a childlike gleam in his eyes– and said, “Don’t you hear something?”