Thanksgiving

I wake up at a little past 5 to see my dog staring patiently at me. He wants to go for a walk but he’d been waiting for me to wake up. His tail wags when my eyes open.

The November morning air is crisp and clean in Willow Mount. The ATC Rd. where we normally go has Cliff Chrysanthemums greet the rising sun with shameless exuberance, competing with the soft pastels of morning glories, cosmos and some wild flowers I don’t know the names of, for the love of daylight. The red-and-honey marigolds carefully planted on the roadsides look on with graceful dignity. The dog and I collect our quota of wild hazelnuts against a backdrop of rolling hills washed golden green in the morning light, and we return home.

The family has woken up. There’s coffee and tea all around as the kitchen hums with activity for a 7:30 breakfast. The buzz is broken only for a short family prayer. Then, it’s all systems go again. The house is filled with daylight, the aroma of food prepared with love, and energy for a whole day ahead of good, honest work.

The drive to and through the city is always expected to have traffic jams. There are so many people and so many vehicles. Thankfully they do not honk. There are stories in all the faces I meet. Their hairs, their makeup, their clothes, their gestures, their expressions – all hiding a story, each one of them. This is fascinating. If all this is Maya and we are all One, have I been them in any version of my journey, and what must that have been like?

The office has more people, more stories. Some of the stories are in the pages I read, some in the Ethernet, some in the internet, some right outside my office door. There is a bustling street outside, bursting with life and at times what can only be described as polyphony. There is such life and vibrancy in the air.

November is a month associated with Thanksgiving. In that spirit, I have chosen today to think about all the things I have in my life to be thankful for. These things are personal and much of it is private and I have no desire at this moment to share more than my day till my daily commute to work at this point. 

I do however invite you to muse on it, too, should the spirit so move you.

Re: The Count of Monte Cristo

Bruce Wayne, Edmond Dantès and Mr. Darcy. How can you not love them, right? Smart, intelligent men with kind hearts. The exceedingly wealthy bit cannot hurt either, I am sure. But the brains and the determination on them. If they should look like Jensen Ackles, heaven help me!

I jest. But only in parts. The Count of Monte Cristo was the first full novel I read. Up till then, I’d read story books for children – your abridged versions of full-fledged novels or specific children literature. But Monte Cristo was my first. I read it in Mizo. My uncle got married and when my aunt moved in, she brought with her the Mizo translation of the Alexandre Dumas book, this thick, yellowed white papers with no pictures, filled with words upon words. She said it was a good book. I borrowed it from her and read it. And I loved the book. And fell in love with novels.

There are many things to love about Monte Cristo. On my 2026 re-read (because I saw the most beautiful pub. of it by Rupa and it begged me for a revisit), I checked Wiki before the Amazon delivery and it told me that it came out as a series at first. The final work as published first in 1844 would have five volumes, after all. This intrigues me so much because at one point, I had tried to write a novel myself. And I had to know the ending because otherwise, I didn’t know where I was going. I didn't know how it ended so my novel remains unwritten. JK Rowling did this though. She always knew about the horcruxes right from Book One, for example. But then there are others like Douglas Adams who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide in bits and pieces and comically would quip one day that he never knew where it was going; the characters just sort of went on their adventure and he just wrote that down. Like with the whale and the surprised bowl of petunias. Apparently, Dumas and Adams think alike, or have the same process. I love when my fandoms collide. The more you know!

Another thing I realized to be true, as a much older woman reading the tale again, is that Dantès was right when he said “all things are to be sold to such as care to pay the price.” Simply put: everything has a price. Cynical, but I have since realized this is true of this world. I suppose Abbe Faria taught us all well those of us who chose to learn from him. Even on the count that the world is filled with tigers and crocodiles and that the two-legged tigers and crocodiles are more dangerous than others!

Something I remember well because I was fascinated by the concept of it is when it was revealed that the Count gave himself away a little bit when he would not eat or drink in Morcerf’s home because, as Albert would tell Mercédès, “M. de Monte Cristo is almost an Oriental, and it is customary with the Orientals to secure full liberty for revenge by not eating or drinking in the houses of their enemies”. I have since wondered about the wisdom and depth of this remark. Do we not also believe it to be a more intense betrayal if it comes from people we have dined with? Because after all, do we not always consider those with whom we have dined with, to be closer than those with whom we have not? 

Age brings some levels of perception that youth missed out on!

Three things stood out to me on this my most recent re-read. One, Monte Cristo at one point snapped: “Display is not becoming to everyone.” He was speaking to Albert, of course, but he might as well say it to netizens today using and abusing social media. Display, dear reader, is truly not becoming to everyone.

Two, Pu Lalsangliana who translated the work in Mizo did an excellent job of it. He maintained the integrity of the story while also simultaneously made it easy to understand it in Mizo. Our cultures, advancements in society, and general worlds are so different. It is the mark of someone who understood the soul of the book to have brought out that very soul in another language. Translation is not easy. One must be well versed in both languages, as well as understand colloquial context, to be able to bring out the depth of literature. I am thoroughly impressed.

Three, on the topic of different worlds, it was never clearer to me than this weekend just how strange the world we inhabit today is. In the early 1800s when this story was set in, they were already talking of money as much as 13 million francs and well-established modern banking system, even going so far as discussing the possibility of “unlimited credit”. They had the railways, merchant ships and overseas commerce, art and literature, and global politics, moving from France to Italy to Constantinople and England. The Count was very much a global citizen already. In Mizoram in 2026, we are discussing whether railways entering the borders of our state is a boon or bane. We are reluctant to talk finances and some people still believe to talk politics is to discard religion. Yet in an interesting dichotomy, we have the world in our fingertips via smartphones today. They always say technology has reached the furthest corners of the world. Maybe we are that furthest corner.

Monte Cristo is a story about vengeance. Everyone knows that to be the sum of it. As a big fan of it, I have also wondered idly if I needed to take revenge on some people at some points in my life, and whether or not I should plan for it. All of us are wronged people at one point or the other in our lives. Is that not true? But seeing as I do not possess the means or the countenance or the mental acuity of Dantès, I have let it be. I often think about the Bible saying that vengeance is the Lord’s; as a Christian, perhaps that is mercy. I believe in Karma. I believe that The Universe does not like imbalance and is always seeking to rectify it. Causing unnecessary pain to others, for example, is an injustice and imbalance that Karma will somehow even out in ways we might not even ever know. This gives me peace. 

But a tale of such sweet avenging will always hit right. I will always love Monte Cristo.

I leave now with the last line of the novel here, a quote from The Count of Monte Cristo himself: 

all human wisdom is summed up in two words: 

“ ‘Wait and hope (Fac et spera)!’ ”

An Old-Fashioned World

I grew up in the days when people still dressed up to catch a flight. I can see more and more of that old world disappear every day. It does not make me sad as much as resigned. I have grown up. I am getting older. Life has happened to me. And because the pace quickens all the time, much of my life now belongs to an old-fashioned world.

I have written many pieces on nostalgia but that is all that it is. I have the window to the world on a little 6”x2” gadget on my hands. I have no desire to return to a world where I had to wait for the modem to dial-up and then might take about an hour to download one picture of the Backstreet Boys. Or Leo D. 

However, they do make for nice memories. Whenever I go in major deep clean mode à la Sophie Hatter and her cleaning war on Howl’s moving castle, I come across memorabilia like Chinese bootleg copies of B*witched’s or Steps’ or Aaron Carter’s cassette tapes and they make me smile. It was a simpler world. It took less to entertain people. The world ran on patience and imagination.

And 9PM was late night. Now it seems like not even 11-year-olds sleep at that hour. 10 is the new 9! 

I jest. But only half so. It really does seem like things have changed so much so quickly. In school, they taught us about arithmetic and geometric progressions. It seems like technology has made progressions in the manner of the latter; it jumps in leaps and bounds. And the whole process has swept us right off our feet and carried us along for the ride. I do not object. I am just fascinated that it has happened quite this way.

It does not seem like so long ago when dad and mum would take us out for extra special treats for lunch at the Hotel Ritz. That was the grandest experience us children could imagine. It might seem odd for people who are younger, or for people who entered Aizawl late, but for a long time, Hotel Ritz was the it place where people went to for fine dining. 

On this same vein, when I was in Hnahthial, I often passed by the Highway Restaurant at Chhiahtlang. Back in the day, when we’d travel back and forth between Aizawl and Lunglei, because we were based in Aizawl but grandmother was in Lunglei, we’d stop at the Highway Restaurant. For us, it was always grand. They had lovely cane furniture, and they served us sweet milk tea, omelette and bread on white china, with stainless steel set of fork, spoon and knife wrapped in white linen napkins. We’d eat out on the porch instead of inside, because outside had fresh air and a lovely view of the front lawn. And the toilet was called a restroom. I have not stopped there again. I wonder if all these still hold true.

Maybe not. Maybe they’ve changed how things are served. Or perhaps the menu has changed. But some of my best childhood memories of travelling are from that restaurant.

People don’t dress up very much anymore, I think. The ones who do still do, of course. But you’re no longer expected to wear your good clothes to catch a flight; many people turn up in flip flops and shorts. Or crocs. I remember waving my parents off at Tuirial Airfield as they board a Vayudoot, travelling to some place I no longer remember, both of them in semi-formals from head to toe, complete with Ray-Bans. The dress code has changed. As has the formality of a bygone era. Actually, even the airlines have shrugged and moved on as well. The first time I was on a plane, they served us food and gave us stainless steel cutlery with a thick paper napkin, inside a ziplock pouch. Today, they serve us cup noodles, if you pay for it. It’s not the same.

Like I keep saying, I am not sad that these things have happened. I just find it interesting that they have. 

In a few more days, we’ll all be setting up Christmas lights again. And maybe I’d muse about Christmas Cards again. And how we spent days upon days writing Christmas Cards, delivering them, buying extra so that if we missed out on any family, we could rectify our oversight. The world has changed so much.

I consider it a privilege to have watched it change.

Dinner Parties and Societal Norms

When my parents attended dinner parties, it was understood that we were going to have a few unsupervised hours. But all of us liked to pretend that things would continue as they normally would. So when the children’s schedule said 7PM to 8PM study hour, everyone accepted that yes, it would still be Study Hour, with or without parental supervision. Of course, everyone knew that no studying would take place that night. The pretense was just the genteel societal thing to do. What separates us from animals, yada yada.

It was also a given for us, when we waved goodbye to them, as they drove off in a white Ambassador car, to say, “Hey, call before you come home.” 

It was a widely transparent move on our part because at the time, we were too young to have mortal concerns for our parents, so the concern certainly was not that; we simply wanted an early warning system. But my mother, ever the gentle lady, wanting to keep peace and maintain the same delicate societal pretense as with Pretend-Study Hour, always complied. She always called us from wherever the party was held and we could calculate how much time we had to put the house back to order and get back to our study desks, or bed, whichever was appropriate.

The system worked.

Once the Ambassador was out of earshot, the entire house would descend into chaos. We did whatever we thought was best anarchy. It was always unpredictable. It could be a tame night when we just played Student-Teacher, still pretending to study; or just read comic books; or listened to audio tapes of Mizo Drama Clubs. TV did not always have cartoon on (because we are that old) so we played Fantasy a lot – Miss World (I was always Costa Rica, by the way), War, Batman, Business (that one always cost us a whole notebook whose torn up pages served as currency notes), or something. That, or, of course, it could be a night we all jumped from one sofa to the other and for two to three hours no one’s feet touched the floor at all. Or it could be a night where all the Barbies got decapitated, the GI Joes get quartered, and all the dynamos in all the battery-operated toys get extracted. Or just a wrestling mania which ended up in everyone crying.

I’m just saying we did OK. I mean it was dark. We had no neighbours. We had a baby-sitter and usually one more orderly in the house to make us dinner. There were sentry guards outside the house. And did I mention it was dark? None of us wusses who were dead scared of ghosts would dare to go outside anyway. Mortal threat-wise, we were fine.

A reflection of society, really, if you think about it. We don’t see it with our own eyes or actively participate in many activities in society but we all have a general understanding of what goes on. Many times we just like to keep up with The Pretense because it is what holds society together. If we just all did whatever we each wanted to do, society as we know it would collapse. And every now and then, we all like to let off some steam, choosing our own poisons. The war between the Individual and Society forever wages but mostly, we toe the line. Either that or risk ex-communication, or worse. Not for nothing did Albus Dumbledore say the youth cannot know how age thinks and feels, but old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young. We all conform, whatever degrees, one way or the other. Society beats us down. It is bigger than we are. The madman or the artists’ pain, and all that.

My parents no longer call us when they go out. They don’t really do dinner parties anymore either. These days, in their retirement years, they go out in a little grey Maruti 800, driven by my dad, all over Aizawl. They never call. In fact, these days, it is us who often call and ask where they were. My my how the turn tables.

We seem to live a very Live And Let Live policy these days. I wonder if that, too, is reflective of society today.

Forcing The Strange

I have only been abroad one time in my life. I enjoyed it. I went to the USA, stayed in Riverside California, then travelled to see Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, New York, and came back home. 

In High School when I read Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Mr Weasley had trouble with the Muggle money, and Harry had to help him pay the Campsite Manager, or in Order of the Phoenix, and Mr Weasley was taking Harry to the Wizengamot for his Underage Magic trial, and Harry had to marvel at how incompetent Mr Weasley was managing muggle money, I always thought JK Rowling pushed the Otherness of Magical People a little too far. This was the British pound currency notes and coins we were talking about. And they are British people, living in, to tell the truth I don’t really know but, in and around Britain.

When I was in the USA, and I had to make payments, I realized dear lord, I was wrong to be so harsh on Mr Weasley, after all. Also, JKR, I guess. You'd think – logically – it's numbers, you just read the numbers. But it turns out it's not that simple. It turned out it was familiarity that counted. I was always confused when making payments.

Back home in India, even when I don’t have a lot of money, I can easily tell the currency notes apart (even the coins, sure), because I know their colours, their sizes, their feel. Even when they whipped up a new ₹2000 note overnight, it was still easy to tell it apart from the rest. Actually, now that the new notes have been in circulation for a while, the smaller, violet of the ₹100 has become so much more familiar than the light blue of the earlier, slightly larger note. No?

This got me to thinking – what else have I become familiar with? What have I simply normalized? How can I look at the world differently? 

I have recently mused on this and have forced myself, from time to time, to look at Aizawl as someone who just got here. If I were a tourist here, or someone travelling on business, or on a class trip, or a student, what would I think of Aizawl? Would I like the scenery? Would I like the food? Would I like the people? Would I like the weekends? What would I think of the infrastructure, the distance, the local hangouts and hotspots? What would I think of Aizawl if I were here only temporary?

It’s not very easy at all, given how this is my home. But sometimes it happens. The pretense gets very real and existential. And it feels like Aizawl is different than I one I knew. There’s something in the air that shifts. And then I feel a little like how I feel when I travel to different places. Like a shift in photographs, or even in the scent as carried by the wind. 

The way everyone has their own homes, and families, and lives, and work that I will never be privy to. In Aizawl, as was in Kasauli, as was in Goa, as was in Trivandrum, as was in New Delhi, as was in Riverside, as was in Srinagar, as was in Mumbai. Life has its very own definite way of being. It is, despite you. It can make you feel very inconsequential to think of the sheer micro level of your existence, but also it can make you feel like a little atom that is part of what makes up an entire universe, being where you be, part of life, the universe, and everything. Kind of cool, to be honest.

Familiarity is comfort, and that is good. Sometimes it is also good to be unfamiliar, just so you learn empathy, to consider a world that is wholly alien to you. When the home you’ve always known feels foreign, it is weird. But it does make you think. 

I kind of like it.

Now That The Dead Are Gone: Mizoram

I scored 92/100 in Lushai in ICSE 10th Standard Boards. For someone who routinely scored 63/100 in MBSE Mizo, and that too under proper tutelage, that was something to brag about. To make it clear, I had no Mizo teachers in Roorkee. The school administration gave me the reading list for Lushai Paper-I and Paper-II. My mother sent me Pipu Len Lai, among others, through the Indian Post and I read this tiny cyclostyle book alone and gave the exam thus. I’m telling you, I am proud of that score.

Pipu Len Lai (appearing in the syllabus as Pipu Lengai, by the way) taught me about Mim Kut, and the path the dead take on their journey onwards. In later years, I would learn more nuances. But much of what I remember about how the Mizo think of the dead are from that book. And where my memory is faulty now, I can’t help it. I think about the Mizo dead, I think about Pipu Len Lai.

When you die, as a Mizo I suppose, maybe pagan Mizo, you go to either one of two places – Mitthi Khua or Pialral. Your soul leaves your body out of the top of your head (your ludip), stretches and straightens itself up I guess on the bedpost (your tungchaw), and then perform some acrobatic exercise along the cross-beam (your khanchhuk), passing over the wall plate (your liang), and then leave your house through the thatch roofs (your ditip). I think maybe the dead are not supposed to set foot in the house again. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been dead before.

Your soul knows instinctively that it has to go to Rih Dil. Afterlife bureaucratic nerve centre, perhaps. Hopefully it can tell directions because you can’t communicate with anyone anymore to ask which way to go. Let’s assume it does. So it travels eastward and reaches Rih Dil. Interestingly Rih Dil exists in earthbound geography so perhaps Afterlife Admin Centre is in another realm but in the same general location. Let’s assume it is. There’s something called Mitthi Kawtkai, something like an Entry Gate for the dead, some stone with an overhang that the souls step on and it makes a bopping sound or something. Very haunting-like. I think of it as an announcement system. When I was posted in Champhai, they told me someone had broken up and taken the actual stone (the Lung Rah Buk) to the Aizawl museum. Hopefully this does not affect dead traffic if it is indeed an announcement of arrival of a newly dead soul. Maybe this announcement opens up the portal into the Other World because herein we enter mythical geography.

Now that the soul has done the necessary paperwork and the shock of being dead is now processed, it travels on. But it starts thinking about the Life it left behind. Afterlife diaspora, you could say. I bet nobody is more Alive than the freshly dead. In due course it reaches Hringlang Tlang, some hill from where you have a good view of the Land of the Living. There your soul sees a beautiful flower, the legendary Hawilopar, and it has a strong urge to pluck it and wear it on the hair or the ear somewhere. Once it wears the flower though, the view means nothing to your soul anymore. Then it continues on and sees a little stream of sparkling water, I imagine, the famed Lungloh Tui. The water is very tempting so of course you drink it and once it touches your lips, you not only not care about the Living anymore, but you forget them altogether. Anesthesia and Medicine, I’d say.

Then it reaches a junction. One road is to Mitthi Khua – the Land of the Dead, which is pretty much the same as the Living one, except fishes in the Mitthi Khua are dry leaves in the living world, something of that equation, makes no sense, supported by no logic. The other road leads to Pialral – paradise, where you can rest. To get to Pialral, you need to have been rich in your life. Either that or you need to have killed a shit ton of animals because the Guardian of Pialral, this dude named Pawla, is apparently a Loki-like demigod who delights in torturing souls just for his amusement. But he lets the Thangchhuah people in. Those would be the elites, the rich who’d thrown grand feasts in their lifetime. Or if you as a Great Hunter (Pasaltha) has killed your necessary quota, those dead animals escort your soul towards Pialral and Pawla steps aside to let your soul pass on. Everyone else he shoots with a pellet bow (Sairawkherh) with pellets the size of hen’s eggs and it takes a long time for the maimed soul to heal to even make the journey towards Mitthi Khua. Ass.

If only all you need to do to get to heaven in Christian Afterlife is to throw a feast, too. No? But we have St Peter, and not Pawla, guarding the Pearly Gates. And a book of accounting to deal with. Christian Heaven has a lot of paperwork. Bureaucracy survives. Did we trade up? 

Apparently your soul hangs around your house for forty days after you die. So some people set out plates for their dead relative. I think that is creepy. I think there is also a theory where souls hang around until Mim Kut season – your August and September – and then they leave. Maybe the journey to the Afterlife is not taken alone. I don’t know how to feel about that. The company would be nice but complete strangers during such a momentous event? I don’t know.

I think about the dead hanging back sometimes because twice in my life – once in Aibawk, and once in Hnahthial – when two persons I know died, there were firm knocks on my door. One time I was roused from deep sleep by the knocking, and I was sleeping inside my locked bedroom some few feet away from the main door. The other time, we were watching TV and my dog barked in warning/welcome and I flipped the curtains open but no one was there. Creepy. If you die, please don’t visit me.

I think about all these today because for October 1st, it is a gloomy day. I needed headlights to make it through the Durtlang fog at 8:30 in the morning. The rain was beating down. It took me an hour to make a 7 kilometre journey to my office. August and September can be gloomy all they like. They are Thla Serh, unquiet months when the dead hang around. But after September moon, they should have left. But what do I know?

Yep.

Of course, I jest on the first para. ICSE Lushai was ridiculously easy. It had nothing on the escape room of an evaluation as in MBSE Mizo. Funny because otherwise ICSE was tough; when I switched to CBSE in eleventh grade, I never needed to study very much till 12th grade Geography because we’d covered most of that syllabus in 10th grade. Anyhoo. 

I do remember in the exam hall, (and I hope the statute of limitations has expired on this little ethical conundrum, if any), the invigilator, this small Anglo-Indian gentleman, with a fine ass mustache and impeccable English formals, glanced at my paper (it must have been Paper-II: Grammar), saw all the English words in it, because even then I was writing in Minglish, bent and said: “If you translated all those English words to Lushai, you’d get more marks.” I did a double-take. This was marvelous tip, especially for someone like me who venerated teachers and their words. I changed every single English word to Mizo; my “telephone” became “biakhlatna”. Literally none plus none per cent of the population uses “biakhlatna” in vernacular. But it was there in my paper. 

Nine-two, babes. That was cool.

Mizoram: The White Man’s Burden

I follow Mizo Facebook pages to keep up with what Mizo netizens say. Some people will swear by Instagram reels but I prefer for IG algorithm to focus on my various little niches and conspiracy theories. The true story behind who replaced dragons with dinosaurs, and all that; you get the picture.

I often discuss over-correction with people. We swing hard, us Mizo folks. We are either flying high or sinking fast. We don’t do sweet mids. It has to be end of the spectrum for us – stark black and white. High contrasts. Always. Nevers. The greys where we actually really operate IRL is supremely ignored in the face of what we want to convince ourselves is true.

This is endlessly entertaining when whatever the Hot Topic is does not concern me personally. The Mizo Facebook world has a lot of “Us Mizo people always…” or “We Mizo never…” – absolute statements and highly generalized. Like we are operating as a hive with one Queen Bee and no detractors. Sometimes, it is even as the occasion fits. Or the mood, whichever. They sometimes even clash magnificently. We Mizo always drink too much; we then always stir up trouble. We Mizo used to never drink too much; public drunks never existed. Neither is wholly true. Neither is wholly false. We just make mountains out of molehills is all.

To prove our points, we like to exaggerate. And that exaggeration becomes a humongous exaggeration when we don’t even fear repercussions because we are anonymous behind the screen. Triau Trackx recently released a song called Kutzungpui Michael Jackson, a new moniker for keyboard warriors. I was very amused to see these KMJs prove Triau Trackx’s points in Facebook comment sections. I will allow that this is a very Taylor Swift move, art with in-built design for haters for when they come for you – your “haters gonna hate, I’m just gonna shake it off,” or a “all the effort you’ve put in (to hate me) it’s actually romantic”. Makes the critics seem petty, yk.

Anyhoo.

Back in college and Uni, we talk about the white man’s burden quite often. That the white man is selfless and moral and it is his burden to drag the uncivilized world and its barbarians into civilisation. Never mind how it achieves that. Never mind how much culture it suffocates. Never mind that there are entire civilisations and history it doesn't even understand because they are different. Never mind that it is white-washing history at its best, pardon the pun, for having pillaged empires and kingdoms in the guise of morality.

Doesn't matter after some point. History has happened. It is what it is.

I mention this because I see this reflected in Facebook comments. When we joke about our women, for example. It irks me when even from such a venerated place as the church pulpit, our own men would diss their own women for their small eyes, their short legs, their flat noses, their long torso, their dark skin, etc. And the crowd would laugh. Why do we laugh at our features? Who decided that those features were “ugly” and to be laughed at when compared with perhaps Caucasian women? Why do we follow their ideals? Do we really think we are ugly? From whose point of view?

People who forever see themselves only through the eyes of the white man colonizer will never be free of this attitude. We can never succeed as a Mizo, only succeed despite being Mizo. There is such intense self-hatred because the gaze is that of a Colonizer’s. It sees the white man and the white woman as The Standard. So many years of India being “free” has not changed that. 

And I think it is rather sad.

Many Mizo people would still feel better about themselves if they were not seen as “too” Mizo. Or rather, “Zo”. Literally, the word itself just means Hill. But it has a connotation of being backwards in our heads that seventy-plus years of not having white people ruling this place has not yet erased. Or even diluted much. We may not accept it of ourselves – self-awareness is a rare attribute – but it will often be humble-brag more than anything to ‘dismissively’ recount a story of when we were mistaken as “foreigners” or “Korean” or “Japanese” maybe, or “not Mizo” at any rate. A lot of times, it is not even humble brag; it’s just brag. We are often happy to not be Mizo.

And so, unintentionally, no matter how much we profess to be proud to be Mizo, we continue to see ourselves not as we are in true self-acceptance, but as we are through the eyes of the white man. We will support white ideologies and nod our heads wisely and say, ‘yes the POC are a bit much’ when white supremacists rear their heads and strike the POC even unfairly. Because as much as we hate to admit it, we yearn to be white and continue to see the world as we think white people do. And sadly, see ourselves continuously through the lens of the white man colonizer. Unable to accept that we are not the white man colonizer.

Facebook comment sections, man! Endlessly fascinating. Either entertaining, or amusing, or horrifying, or just sad. And somehow, very white man colonizer gaze. And if that the gaze continues to be our standard, I fear we will never measure up. (Look at me using never!)