Career

If I could choose any career I wanted and support myself, I’d have been a full-time author. I’m not nearly talented enough or brave enough to risk it, so I became a civil servant. It makes logical sense this way. SWOT Analysis, I've since learned. I’ve always loved reading which is adjacent to studying and even though the latter isn’t remotely as pleasurable as the former, it has served me well enough for me to do well academically, so that’s a Strength. Weakness I got tons so let’s leave that be for now. Opportunity-wise, I got family that supports my academic inclination and I was in Delhi where I could pursue civil service coaching at my convenience. Threat-wise, I could not really afford to pursue most anything else.

So Civils it was for me.

I rant and bellyache, but at the heart of it, I know that if not for Civils, in this economy, and knowing myself, what else could I have realistically pursued? My interest is all related to the arts. I like painting and I like music and I am good at neither. I love stories and I enjoy writing but I don’t have the discipline to come up with my own stories and chase that dream. I adore Nature and hiking and trekking and I can barely stand up straight in a trail. So this is it. I never did a SWOT test on myself but I suppose my dad did for me and he chose Civils. And I just went along with it because it was a rational choice.

I mean, think about how lovely life would be to be a woman in a flower shop in Stars Hollow, going to work in a white bicycle with floral decorations on it, picking up a coffee from Luke’s on the way, wearing a pale blue frock and pink sunglasses, listening to Jewel in her florist paradise that also, let’s say for the heck of it, sells vanilla cupcakes and strawberry shortcakes? Divine. But that’s not real life.

I think about career options for kids a lot these days. Mizoram is changing fast and opportunities are not the same as it was in my day, which was not even all that long ago. Not even a decade. The economy now supports affordable living for local entrepreneurs like cutesy home bakeries, pretty beauty parlours, aesthetic barbershops, boutique-y seamstresses, fancy little cafés, customized crockery and what-nots, even aside from the traditional businesses. Of course, with recent events and ties to drugs-smuggling, the very term entrepreneur has come to be snarky and comedic in Mizoram context. Besides, there appears to be a number of these enterprises that spring up from people who have too much money and too much free time and Images on the line, not from being enterprising in and of itself. Nevertheless, the fact remains that these career options would have been unthinkable for many of us to follow it and still be considered not only respectable and honest work, but also a matter of quiet pride.

So now I no longer think of Doctor/Engineer, IAS, or pastor when people ask me of career advice. I give Civils advice if they specifically ask that of me, otherwise I volley back with: what interests you?

Which is what was on my mind when DC Hnahthial agreed to host a career awareness programme for kids. I was excited. I thought about age-groups and decided that High School (HSS too) kids are ideal because they’ve probably not thought about it much before and this is a good time for them to do so. I thought about who should speak to them and decided that the strength for this programme would rest on diversity. I thought: two government employees, two private business owners and two people from the digital age of content creators. I wanted the speakers to be people who could speak from experience. I wanted the programme to be multifaceted because I know from my own experience that as respectable as my job is, and as much as I do enjoy it from time to time, I know that it is not for everyone who cracks the exams, because if you don’t like the service, it hardly seems worth the status and the paycheck.

The day was dead humid and I was in formals all day. But I enjoyed the speeches of every panelist who spoke on that podium. I listened and took mental notes and I hope the kids did too. Even if all they got from that day was to do a SWOT test on themselves to figure out their next steps to be productive members of society, to abstain from alcohol and drug abuse, and to work hard in whatever road they ultimately choose, it would have been worth it. Those three were the recurring themes that day. None of us on the panel discussed our topics with each other beforehand; I myself as Host met some of them for the first time on that Hall on that day itself. But I suppose all of us thought those three things were important enough.

I learned about NEET exams and life as a government employed doctor in Mizoram from our CMO Dr R Lalsanglura. Of everyone else, I could relate to him the easiest because we follow a similar pattern – study, crack an exam, get a government job, be salaried. But I’d not thought of Science as a subject to study since I was in 10th standard; a lifetime ago. This was interesting.

I learned about following the route of family business and learning both from the job as well as enriching it further with formal degrees and building an increasingly illustrious social capital from Aaron Rosangzuala Ralte of RTP Holdings.

I learned about a small family-owned bakery that operated locally in 1961 when a couple learned from their white employers in Serkawn, building from that reputation using some good old elbow grease and learning to build a modern-day KT Bakery in 2018 from K Vanlalhruaia.  

I learned about expanding on particular interests and sticking to that with dedication, unmoving of criticisms and developing thicker skins to combat online trolling, seeking new ways to be even more innovative, learn from the audience and emerging from it all with a growing sophistication in online content creation from Ramboss.

I learned about taking an art form such as comedy which is not usually seen as a formal trade among the Mizo, studying it with deeper interest, realizing what the people wanted, creating stories that deliver punchlines at a pace that increasingly limited attention spans of today could consume, and delivering exactly that to them in a format that is digestible from Mastea Rinkson.

I don’t know what the others learned but I liked what I learned. And this is my deepest thanks to the people who responded so positively to my request to have them on my panel. I learned from them a good deal. Interacting with them over lunch and a cold coca-cola later was enriching. I believe they expanded my worldview and that was wonderful.

Careers are boring shit that are always necessary evils, whatever paths we ultimately take. But for what it was worth, I am grateful for the event DC Hnahthial hosted on May the 27th 2025, the people who made it successful and the lessons I learned from it.

In Pursuit of Happiness

What is this life if, full of care, the poet asked, we have no time to stand and stare? It was true in 1911 when W H Davies wrote it to begin his muse on Leisure. It is true today. We just forget to stand and stare every once in a while.

Navigating life is difficult. We are no islands, just thriving on our own in the middle of oceans. We are social beings, interacting with multiple people and seemingly endless varieties of beings and circumstances. But however social we are, there is a part of us that yearns to find meaning and contentment that does not rest on us being social. That indefinable something that is ours alone. Although I suppose indefinable mostly because there is no one stop solution that fits all, and all of us define it in our own ways – the pursuit of happiness, so to speak.

In a close-knit and community-based society as mine is, it is hard to find the courage to define this happiness for ourselves. Most people are extremely eager – zealous might be a better word – to define it for us. Get married, get a child, get a job, get a house, buy some land, buy a car, a bike, an iPhone, gold jewelry… endless lists. Like we have been sent here on earth to fulfil an already-defined role the way Mario is programmed to go on a quest to defeat Bowser and his ilk and rescue Princess Peach.

But are we Mario? And if we are, who is Bowser and where is Princess Peach? We grow up to find that we are no Marios, there is no Bowser and Princess Peach is an illusion. Ecclesiastes was always right: everything under the sun is meaningless. It has always been up to us to define what meaning we choose to assign to things, people and situations. To Life itself. Choice: that’s what it always comes down to – from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to Apostle John in his nightmare of a revelation.

To be or not to be, as the bard would say.

I think it was that mood-killer Nietzsche who warned us to be careful while fighting monsters that we do not become one ourselves, because when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into us. As young men, we fight injustice and inequality with society (and religion usually) as our weapon of choice and the Abyss stares back quietly at us and watch us in the process become that very institution which we fought. Sometimes the years reveal this in people; sometimes even Age never uncovers this veil. What is interesting is that sometimes we may not even be actively fighting monsters but just abiding with society’s biddings to avoid conflict so much so that we get to a point where we become as one with it, losing our own selves in the process. This is perhaps the part where we start obsessing with others, measuring ourselves and our worth solely against theirs, hating the Freedom we think they have, needing to have them acquiesce and be one of us, misery loving and desiring the company. The Abyss doesn’t just stare back; it winks.

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new in this earth, that what once was will be again. I think this is very true of Life. The more things change, the more they remain exactly the same. We have always wanted to belong, and we have always wanted to come into our own. To find a balance, I would say then, is our alchemist’s gold. Like Santiago would find, when you want something bad enough, the whole Universe would conspire to help you get it. But you need to define your Purpose and start the journey, be that Andalusian shepherd boy who travelled to Egypt to find treasures. There are some adventures you must undertake alone, helped and aided by your support system very much yes, but essentially alone. That sweet spot between being a part of the System and being your own Self at the same time is a delicate balance. Unfortunately, I find this to be a battle most of us in Society deem not worth the fight or the hassle.

We lose ourselves in the system, think we are bigger than we are, or smaller than we are. Yet we do not introspect and our self-awareness becomes limited to a Mirror Image alone of how we think other people see us. We stop to stand and stare at the places in the woods where squirrels hide their nuts, forget to gaze for long at streams full of stars in broad daylight, like skies at night, never pausing long enough to watch the smile in people’s eyes reach their lips. Finding ourselves is a time-consuming and life-altering process and we can get by OK without any true measure of self-actualization so a lot of us don't even try. Ever consumed with the need to be who we think people want us to be, we forget to be us.

To paraphrase the poet again, a poor life this indeed is if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.

12.5.2025 Untitled

Isn’t it sad to grow up and realise 

the world was never as big 

as you thought it was?

And my! How even houses shrink 

from childhood memories, 

revisiting them again today; 

Everything tinier 

and less impressive 

from memories of yesteryears.

Nowhere to hide, 

no place to run away,

All your battles stretching out before you 

in a never-ending war.

Eternal Tuesdays 

stretching out to Thursdays,

trapped in an ever-lasting mundane.

Give me lazy days to watch the grass grow,

To make me see again

Just how big this world is.

Autumn Goodbye girlies to August's salt air (and the rust on their door)

I never connected them until May 1, 2025 when Spotify shuffle played Britney Spears’ Autumn Goodbye about three songs after Taylor Swift’s August but oh dear lawd, the feels.

Autumn Goodbye was a 17 yo girl, cocky and vibrant, full of life, eager to experience. She never promised a happy ending and was never told they wouldn’t make her cry. Her youth, counting on days to come that she probably felt she had, simply accepted that the summer love that bloomed from April through September will keep them warm long after their seemingly inevitable autumn goodbye.

In contrast, August was a 31 yo woman, longing for love and companionship, who never needed anything more than salt air and the rust on their door, only to realise that they were destined to be lost in memories as August was sipped away like a bottle of wine. Why? Because that time was never hers to lose.

As she processed her break-up, Autumn Goodbye realises that she wants to hold on to a faint hope because ‘my heart has a place for that smile on your face’. Through red leaves and blue tomorrows, she hopes that time will give back the love that they shared on the time that they borrowed.

They say you never forget your first.

August no longer really hopes for a reconciliation. Wiser and older, she chooses to linger in memories from back when they were still changing for the better and wanting was enough. Because for her it had been enough to live for the hope of it all. I imagine her reminiscing of an August that slipped from her like a moment in time, saying: ‘So much for summer love and saying us’, actions of a younger woman, because she now knows he hadn’t been hers to lose.

They also say you can’t lose what you never had.

Summer loves. That’s what was similar about these two songs. Summer loves as told by a 17 yo girl and a 31 yo woman. Who hasn’t been through that?

Problems

I think about it often and I’ve come to believe that if you want to rule over a people, you have to create a problem first, a solution to which only you can offer, and then offer it to them at a price.

It works like a charm, albeit you need to be a little charming to pull it off.

If you’re in government service in Mizoram working in rural areas or really anywhere outside of Aizawl town, I feel like at least one time this thought would have crossed your mind: that we should have less villages than what we have now.

It’s not a feasible solution unless you want a revolution on your hands. People are attached to land in a way that they aren’t to anything else. We are very concerned about where we get buried, sometimes even more so than where we live. Recalling a nice philosophical tangent of heaven here and now versus heaven in the afterlife, but that’s a topic for another day.

846 villages spread across 11 districts, where some villages only have 20 households. Twenty! It would be a different story if they were big producers of some item and they don’t really need the government. Like Liechtenstein which is tiny, land-locked and didn’t even have its own Post Office till 2000 and even now only has one prison, but is also the world’s leading producer of dental products. If Liechtenstein wants to have multiple tiny villages with tiny population, they can afford to!

But not Mizoram, not today.

See there’re so many problems today that could completely have been non-problems. If we had lesser villages but concentrated population in bigger geographical areas, a lot of the problems we have now would automatically be fixed and a number of systems would fall in place. 

Take education, for example. India cares for its citizens, especially kids. So we need to have primary schools accessible for children within a 1 km radius. When the population is spread so thinly, but you still need these schools, and yet you can’t increase fund flow, it follows that the schools that do exist are under-staffed, under-funded and under-developed. It is a zero sum game. It can’t work another way.

Following from this, even the high literacy rate we have in Mizoram does not seem to translate into everyday empowerment. We still allow ourselves to be ripped off by every smooth-talking salesman that crosses our paths. Sometimes in my most cynical moments, I believe that the only reason we have such high literacy rate is because we are Christians and we need to read the Bible and the hymnals. We don’t seem to use the skill for much else. 

We don’t even use education to think to put things in writing to secure our stance. Or to ensure that opposing parties remain trustworthy. Even in finance, the low level of financial literacy as operates in the state is something that will ensure that your flabber is properly gasted.

We don’t like to exercise our mental faculties and instead choose to wallow in poverty of the mind. Even our theology is centred in the pious suffering and pain of Good Friday and not even nearly enough in the buoyant joy of Easter. Because while Good Friday is passive acceptance of a sacrifice someone made for us, Easter demands that we live and to live means we engage with the world we live in, which also essentially brings with it problem-solving. We would always choose to dream of Pialral or Vanram where problems are absent rather than play an active part in the Here-and-Now where we set about finding solutions to the problems we have.

I suppose the crux of this blog is an epiphany that we are content to be passive in our approach to life. We will take what comes, complain if things get rough, rough it if we must, but to actively engage in a solution-finding mission for its own sake isn’t innately in us. If we have always been this way or whether someone realised this about us and employed it as a means to keep us under all this time, and everyone else also just maintained the status quo, I don’t know.

But I think we willingly keep paying the price to keep us chained.

In The Court of Me

My friend and I have been discussing Natural Justice since around about December last year. We’ve never really argued with each other, so I don’t know how far I can call it a debate. Per se. I think why we have needed to circle back to it time and time again, however, is because of the consequences of it.

As you can guess, without straining your mental faculties overmuch, the debate started because we were discussing Punishment. Or the possibility of one. And the consequences of it. 

If I don’t punish a Wrong, how does that make the people who do Right feel?

If I don’t reward Right, am I rewarding Wrong?

If I let Wrong slide, does it naturally follow that I am punishing Right?

In a world where all of us can slip, make accidental mistakes, and do Wrong, how many times do I forgive? How many times do I warn? When do I let the hammer fall?

When things stop being theoretical and you are accountable for the actions that you take, suddenly these questions become very real. And decisions do not come lightly. When your decisions have real world consequences, everything becomes that much more difficult. And you don’t often win popularity contests when you mete out punishments.

So should you?

Should you bother yourself with such cumbersome musings and possible fallouts only in an effort to bring about fairness and justice? And believe me, not many people will see it your way.

Because we talk a lot about two sides of a coin. In Mizo parlance, Side A and Side B. This is indeed a start but as is well-known already, a little knowledge is sometimes more dangerous than outright ignorance, so also it is never enough to simply get two sides of a story, especially if they are polar opposites. Especially if you're only in it for the tragedy porn. Life is not a series of Black & White. In fact, most of life operates in the grey. It requires insight to consider and muck about the grey areas and emerge with some sort of ruling.

And you can't even know if you're right.

Natural Justice. When God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they were given a Law – don’t eat of The Tree. I think it’s a simple Test of Free Will, because you can never know if someone is obeying you if there is no consequence for if they don’t. And the couple chose to disobey. And God said: What have you done? And therein lay the principle of Natural Justice.

God already knew what Adam had done. But Adam was given the chance to explain his actions. And it was true what he said that the woman God gave him asked him to eat of The Tree. A defence counsel, I suppose. It shifted the blame of Adam’s actions on God; unintended consequences and all that. So while Adam was given the chance to defend his actions, and God did hear him out, he was still punished.

Actions and consequences. These days they call it: fuck around and find out.

You have to hear people out. It is a basic principle of Fairness and Justice. But the fact that you’ve heard them out, and granted they might have done what they have done out of ignorance or a myopic view of further ramifications, does not give them a Pass. They’ve done Wrong. They need to face the Repercussion. You could always lessen the sentence. But if a society fails to exert sanctions on Wrong, it will always lead to More Wrong.

The fact remains that Adam in the Garden of Eden broke the Law. There was just the one. And he broke it. He had to go. Sounds harsh, but sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

I suppose, all things considered, just hope you never have to apply this shit in your time.

AI and Art and the Human Soul

Some time ago I saw a very thought provoking internet poster that spoke on art. A very tiny discussion but extremely intriguing to me.

Someone very snidely posited that every time you have wealthy kids that don’t need to work, they become useless and they play at and waste good money on some form of the arts. And precisely because not everybody can be very good at the arts, we get subpar artists. Besides which, they don’t move society along because they’re not productive members of the society as their illustrious sires.

To which someone countered, and I concur, that instead of being disparaging, why don’t we examine how curious it is that when humans don’t need to work for survival, we naturally gravitate towards the arts?

Doesn’t that speak at something primal within the framework of our very being? That over the course of history, perhaps moved along by the industrial revolution, we have somehow got to a point of evaluating all our lives' worth by how productive we are. Is this what we were made for? Is work all that there is to us? Are our lives to be measured solely by the economy and science of it all? Cogs in a wheel. Until the day we retire. And then die. Which, bleakly, is the best case scenario. Some people don’t even make it to retirement, after all.

In Sommarøy in Norway, as a publicity stunt for tourism, the locals have decided to do away with conventional time zones. The 24-hour clock is discarded. People do what they do. I’m sure there are some rules in place to stop society descending into chaos, but for the greater part of it, they apparently don’t operate in the strict 24-H rhythm. I mention this because of one very important outcome: they survive. Things still work.

So why are we so obsessed with being productive that it seemingly becomes all that there is to us? People should have some time to themselves. People need to de-stress, de-toxify, de-clutter. There are always more important things than things – people, family, friends, us.

And art.

It’s funny I was chatting with Atu the other day and Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli came up in the conversation. Miyazaki has proclaimed his disdain for AI art. He calls it an “insult to life itself”. This goes out for ChatGPT and all those other AI products that imitate life but without soul. Very sci-fi territory.

I think it is curious that we somehow thought with the rise of AI, we were imagining robots and the computers doing our calculations and our manual works for us. Sci-fi imagined lifelike robots of various designs that have rendered human labour unnecessary. Sci-fi dreamed of androids that could do the menial works of humans at better speed and strength than flesh and blood ever could. And what do the humans do? They turn to arts. Sci-fi is filled with beauty as far as the human society goes. Human society becomes artsy and fancy again because the machines are doing everything for us. Of course at some point, we enter dystopia but that’s the other end of the spectrum. Inevitable, one might even say.

In real life, however, the rise of AI has come to mean rise of AI art! What is human art that is time consuming and imperfect and expensive going to be valued at when AI can mass-produce art? How is a human artist going to compete with an AI that can combine the works of oh I don’t know Vincent Van Gogh and Sandro Boticelli and Leonardo da Vinci maybe in a matter of seconds and come up with its own Master Painter, with its own USP no less? Depressing to think about.

Art is how humans become immortal. Art is how we still remember William Shakespeare and Whitney Houston and Maggie Smith and Michaelangelo. It is not an indication of a person gone soft. Art is the soul of humans. Whenever humans don’t need to hustle and fight for survival, we have always naturally turned to the arts. Science and arts are not even all that different. It’s only when we quantify science that we divorce them. 

It is interesting to think about what that soul will evolve to when it is AI that produces our art for us.