Mizoram

The third best thing about Mizoram is how intensely beautiful the scenery is. It is not ideal for a great number of things – the road, for example. Travelling is a pain because sometimes you see your destination straight ahead but it will take you an hour to reach it because you have to go round the fat portions of a hill, or two – or three! – to get there. Anyone who has ever travelled to Siaha from Lawngtlai will testify – three hours to travel 10kms as the crow flies; not a funny joke.

Building on this, it is not ideal for development. Anywhere that roads aren’t ideal cannot presume to have it easy with development projects. It is not ideal for fun escapades either, especially when monsoon lasts and lasts until the earth is pregnant with rainwater and always threatening to leak water and heavy chunks of clay all over the roads for close to a majority of the year. It is definitely not ideal for agriculture and for nearly half the year, the hills look like they’ve been through hellfire; probably not that far off, to be honest. Huge scars left behind bald hills and black soot raining down every March? Magnificent blemish on the beauty of the hills.

But on the whole, beautiful scenery. It soothes the soul to see green hills rolling over each other. Even cliffs are gorgeous, except you do not overmuch want to be close to them or god forbid, hanging off of them. It is lovely to see the hills change colour as they grow more distant from you – different shades of green that taper off to blue until they merge with the blue of the horizon or stopped by fluffy white clouds in impossibly blue skies. Any walk in the woods is blessed by the sounds of the forest and the melodies of the birds, the insects, the animals, the water and the wind. Just be careful not to walk into a snake or leeches and you’re golden.

Full moon nights are magical. I’ve watched the moon burn bright orange one October night in 2010 driving back from Lunglei to Aizawl. You should not experiment with this probably, but we could travel by moonlight, which is to say even with our headlights switched off, we could see the earth illuminated in the golden glow of the October full moon. I’ve sat outside in cold December nights in Champhai counting stars and admiring the only three heavenly objects I can identify – Orion’s Belt, Sirius and Betelgeuse.

Sunsets are majestic; I’ve stopped my engines on my evening drives multiple times just to watch the explosion of colour on the sky behind black hills. It is a spiritual experience, like you are observing the face of the Creator in front of you.

Of course, in the age of the curated happiness of social media – your Instagrams, Facebooks and WhatsApps – people would often care more about Digital Likes than basking in the glory of the Now. Phones are whipped out at every glorious moment, in the hopes of capturing happiness which inspirational quotes have already taught us was like trying to capture a butterfly in flight; rest and let the butterfly come to you, right? But I’ve noticed sceneries are notoriously hard to capture in all their magnificence. Ultimately, you are subjected to tons of pictures on your Wall of unfocused and confused angles of the sky, flowers, hills, what-have-you. Nature photography is a precise, artsy skill; not possessed by many.

In fact, I’d even suggest this is akin to amazing singers singing songs and making it look so easy that everybody starts thinking they could also do it and then suddenly, cacophony all around! I knew this for a fact when back in November 2022, Michael Learns To Rock came to play in Aizawl and thankfully, my DC and SDO(S) smiled indulgently and said I could go see them and gave me a bunch of official Aizawl errands to run while I was home. I was in the crowd that night, “belting” out their songs along with them, which is to say I was screaming the lyrics out instead of matching the tune because obviously, I am not the best singer in Aizawl. Not even in my family, if I’m honest. But Jascha Richter on stage could make the notes seem so effortless. Incredible. In any case, it was alright because although my throat was hoarse from the singing and the sore throat that I was deliberately ignoring, and although I skinned my knees because I fell down and had a shiny bruise as a souvenir for the night, I sang with MLTR and Jascha Richter liked my IG post the following day. Any chance to tell this story. Carefully curated happiness indeed!

Nature aside, what is wonderful about Mizoram is the sense of society and belongingness, however real or pretend it may be. It is enough that the society is big in Mizoram. There is a lot to be said about it but as one of my JNU seniors put it, there is no other society I’d rather die in than the Mizo one. I suppose that makes Community the second best thing about Mizoram.

I cannot say for any other group outside of my own, but for the people inside this group, Mizoram and the Mizo community is amazing. Socialism is alive in Mizoram even when as a political theory it is rejected by many in favour of the more shiny ones like Capitalism. Not all facets of Socialism, obviously, but the idea of equality and egalitarianism, very definitely, even when it is denied its name. It is true that unfettered equality/egalitarianism is impossible to maintain, or truly, not to be actively desired, but an element of it is certainly to be applauded.

It is often said that the real measure of bonds are found in trying times – it is not the people who make it to your celebratory days; it is the people who are there when your world is crumbling down. Mizoram and Mizo society have their flaws and their extreme shortcomings, but in our deepest moments of grief, there is nothing like people putting aside their own chores and coming to grief with you, the community making arrangements for you that are difficult for you when you’re shrouded in loss and feeling disoriented; and friends, family and neighbours acting as solid anchors when you’re floundering in the sea of sorrow. All this, despite who you are as a person. Because the society was always bigger than the sum of its parts.

Society being what it is and we being who we are, a valid question that often arise is how much is too much? How much of society do we want or need in our lives? How far should society dictate our lives? Death is very final and hence cannot be the only measure of a society. It is indeed true that hard times test you and your relationships, but it is also equally true that many people will find it easier to commiserate with you than to celebrate with you wholeheartedly. Every time there is an accident, a mob arises that is often uncontrollable, in a matter of seemingly seconds, like something out of a Stephen King story. People with a morbid fascination for the gruesome, indulging in tragedy porn. That aside, even when no gore is involved, how often have we felt like people have been waiting for us to make even a single mistake? Not that alien a feeling, is it? So in the grand scheme of things, how much society is too much society?

In the winter of 2022, a man unfortunately drowned in Keilungliah dam in Champhai at around 1:30 in the afternoon. By 3PM, the place was filled with spectators. It wouldn’t be farfetched to assume that 99% of those gathered could not swim. Yet there they were, even as the evening wore on into the night, curiously hanging around the 40-50 feet deep body of water, excitedly chattering away, from gossip and the cold. Shit, if anyone of them fell in, there’d be multiple casualties and possibly even more loss of life. When I asked the spectators to go home for the night and not cause more troubles for police, rescue ops, divers and the society leaders, one man snapped at me intoning that that was inadvisable because those gathered there were volunteers and if we refused them their place here, we would kill the spirit of altruism in the soul of the Mizo – the sacred tlawmngaihna – and we’d not find any more volunteers later on in other incidents. I cannot say I was right and he was wrong, but as a magistrate and a sociologist, but more importantly, the hoper of far flung hopes and dreamer of impossibly optimistic dreams, I replied that Mizo tlawmngaihna was not so fragile that it would die if a government-cum-non-government-organisation’s Search & Rescue op that required specialization (in this case, swimming and in particular, diving) would request they gave them space. Indeed, this graceful stepping back is a lesson in tlawmngaihna we need to learn in the society; sometimes, our good hearts and our curious heads really do hamper certain jobs – controlling fire outbreaks, for example, is sometimes made difficult by spectators jamming up traffic or using up water; it’s weird.

People often make the mistake of looking at society through myopic lenses. You cannot pick and choose one ideal standard to measure anything in its entirety, leave alone an entity as great as a society. You have to try to look at the Big Picture or succumb to inevitable toxic environments myopic, narrow thinking leads to. Mizoram is wonderful in many ways, it is sorely lacking in others; so are the Mizo. So is everybody else, too. Besides, Mizoram is very young. Someone born in the 80s went through a very dramatic time when a phone was a solid green box in the living room to Now where your watch can look for your phone! And why would it do that? Because the world is in your phone, just a click away. Doctors today can implant plastic in your eyes to help cure your myopia; we can allow for some leeway in the way we look at Mizoram and the Mizo and try to be less myopic. If Mizoram has a lot to learn, let her learn. In about a century, she has undergone such changes as to witness head-hunting rituals to technology at her fingertips!

Which brings me to the best thing about Mizoram which obviously is that it attained statehood in 1987 which is the same year I was born which makes Mizoram as old as I am which is cool.