Of Tawlh Loh Puan and Weretigers

I don’t know if people know this bit about the Tawlhloh Puan but apparently it was designed by the wife of Pasaltha Darhnawka who was like, Ya OK listen honey they way I live my life, I do not see myself dying in the comfort of our home so you got to make me a shawl unlike no other so you can recognize my corpse among the slain others because I feel like it might come to that. And she was like, Yes darling I’ll get right to it. And she did.

She came up with a new design and he loved it so much he was all like, Ooh ya I look really hawt in this macho red-white-yellow-in-black shawl I’m never ever backing down from a fight again. Hence the name.

So anyway, this guy was a living legend, as living legends go. One of the greatest of the Great Hunters to walk this good earth, apparently. I mean, he might be a little Johnny Bravo-esque but it’s all good. He was already fabled in his own lifetime. One of those guys who spored epic myths and lores about themselves.

And like any good celebrity, he decided he need the X-Factor and he grew himself a goatee. Understandably, given his Great Hunter status and the whole living on the edge with human enemies and wild animals eTcetErA (eyeroll) the goatee turned white before its time. So he was left with two distinct white lines on both sides of his mouth.

One time, he chased after a bunch of Pawih invaders. During lunch, he sat on an open boulder, taunting anyone to dare challenge him as he ate, wearing his famed goatee and his Johnny Braco worthy stylish shawl of red, white, yellow and black.

When he detected slight movement, he gave an almighty roar and ran headlong in the general direction of the rustle, lunch abandoned without thought. The poor Fanai dudes were so terrified – I mean this was lunch time – they were all like, What use are our guns now when feckin’ Darhnawka is after our bloods?! and they threw away their guns and ran for dear lives.

One of the guys was so frightened his blood froze. Darhnawka caught up with him. Poor petrified dude is just standing there while his BFF watched from the trees, unable to leave his friend behind, too terrified to confront Darhnawka.

And the Legend did three things: he first shot the guy, then hacked him with a machete, and then, inexplicably, him. Power of three or something. Must have been the adrenaline rush. He was still full of energy so why not do something weird, dramatic and extra?

So picture this scenario. A dark forest, deep deep woods. Your best friend is frozen to the ground and this beast of a man catches up with him, huffing slightly, grinning manically. After using a gun and machete on him, Beast Man slouches and feckin’ bites him! Beast Man who through the few rays of light, shadows of the thick canopy above flickering, is covered in colours of red, white, yellow and black. And when he raises his head, two long white lines running down either sides of his mouth like sabre-tooth fangs dripping with blood.

How would you not rationalize that as the paranormal? I would. Easily. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t the first were-tiger of Mizo folklore. The Keimi.

This one man Pu KC-a of Vangchhia told us this incredibly out of control gossip (good story, though) one December joyride day in 2020 when we visited Kawtchhuah Ropui. I love the story. I thought you might, too.

Let’s all hope for less Out Of Control gossips that make for good urban legends and more happy little miracles in 2024.

Happy new year!

What's In A Word?

Translations are a bitch, especially with jokes. Too many finer points and subtleties get lost and you’re left with a skeleton.

The problem with skeletons is that you can know only so much out of it. You can maybe know the rough dimensions of an animal. But you don’t know just how the flesh would wrap itself around it. Paleontologists are now saying more dinosaurs were feathered than reptilian. Which could mean that a T-Rex, always depicted as a fearsome reptile with tiny arms and powerful legs, could have been something like a 6 foot tall fat chicken. Very fearsome. Because birds don’t feckin’ fear anything and chicken are easily converted to cannibalism. Yeesh.

The same with words. When people take everything too literally and start translating works word for word, the art dies. Something happens there that kills the soul of an art-piece when you fail to take in context. You will have a very direct translation but it no longer serves the purpose. Art is weird that way.

Take JF Laldailova, for instance. When he translated William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, there is a scene where Mad Hamlet goes: Words, only words. JF translated it as: Thu chauh, hla chauh. It is very poetic and it conveys what English-speaking Hamlet meant in Mizo context. Because Mizo literature has a different approach in Prose and Poetry. You’d notice sometimes a word in prose is inverted in poetry because there is a different grammar there. Mizo literature is not complete with just the Prose Word; you need its sister Poem Word. When Mizo-speaking Hamlet said, translated back to English, Only words and songs, it means nothing in English but everything in Mizo.

The trouble with people understanding translations recently is that we take everything at face value. While that could work well for Economics, maybe, it does not work for Art at all. The grammar and approach to English and Mizo are different, yes, but also the contexts and expressions are vastly much more so.

There is a famous joke comment that the Mizo for “the moon, the stars and me” is “a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em!” Which of course is nonsensical because a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em! directly and literally translates to: I have no idea at all. Both are song lyrics, the English one being Dolly Parton’s excellent The Moon, The Stars And Me, while the Mizo one is Min Hriatpui Ve Asin, sung by Zosangliani but I don’t know who composed it. The song is the Mizo version of the Dolly song but I appreciate this translation immensely because while the composer maintained the whole story and vibe of the song, it is put entirely in Mizo context. It could have been written by a Mizo, the way it is so elegantly translated! The Moon is my witness, the stars would agree/ They all heard you promise you’d always love me/ I know that it’s true but it’s hard to believe/ You lied to the moon, the stars and me became in Mizo Chung chhawrthlapui leh siar leng zawngte khian/ I tiamthu zawng kha min hriatpui ve asin/ Tunah then nan biahthu min hlan ta si/ A ngaihna ka va han hre lo em! It is the same song, the same story, the same sadness. But when arranged in Mizo, the lines were interchanged. And that was how “the moon, the stars and me” became “a ngaihna ka va han hre lo em!” in Mizo. But all jokes aside, whoever translated this song was goddamn talented and probably feckin’ fluent in both English and Mizo. It is so graceful!

You see it all the time these days. Take frost, for example. Some people now say we should not say ‘vur tla’ to describe frost but instead call a spade and spade and call it ‘dai khal’ (frozen dew) because it has not fallen from the sky to justify the word ‘tla’ (fall). But what is dai but condensed water vapour? And dai doesn’t fall from anywhere but we still use “tla" for it because it is in the language now because clearly the Old Mizo didn’t know about condensation to scientific accuracy and assumed dew fell from somewhere. If dai can fall, surely frozen dew i.e. vur (because we have only one word for frozen water in Mizo) can also fall? So call it vur tla. Translate it as frost. It is already perfect. You don’t have to adjust and change Mizo to suit English. It has its own grammar and its flow.

Mizo also has its own context, especially social. Like hotels and restaurants. People have a problem with roadside eateries being called hotels these days. It is true it might be confusing for the English speaker with no Mizo context, because hotels denote availability of beds while a restaurant is an eatery. But in Mizo, we use the two words very loosely and often call restaurants ‘hotels’. I suppose the Mizo customary way is to lodge with relatives/friends before contemplating an impersonal paid room. Counter to this, the modern Mizo often prefer paying for lodging to inconveniencing anyone. Perhaps a bit of this old custom had bled into the idea of the impersonal hotel/restaurant too. Anywhere that’s not owned by a familiar face that you have to pay for is the same. What difference does a hotel or a restaurant make? Perhaps. I am speculating wildly. But honestly, I do not think it a big offence if someone uses hotel as a Mizo word that’s been borrowed from English rather than as an English word and in this context, means a restaurant instead. I think when we borrow some words, we completely change their meanings. The Mizo word Hotel means an eatery which could have a bed too, even though in its original English, it would definitely refer to accommodation before and above all else, dining included. It is what it is.

Of course sometimes, we don’t do borrowing and just straight up describe things. Like bricks. You have to Google it to define it in English. In Mizo, it is called leirawhchan. The whole thing is in the name. Lei – Clay. Rawh – Fried/Roasted. Chan – Hardened. Hardened Fried Clay. I always find this word amusing. Everything is described in the name.

What’s in a name? For a brick in Mizo, apparently, everything.

Suicidal Goats and 6 Ft. Tall Chicken

Some time ago, I moved to a new place. It was my first time living alone in my own house and all that adult stuff. In addition, it was a rural area, which was a slight change of pace from New Delhi. So my cousin Ramthani came to stay with me.

One day, we went out for a walk and we saw a fat goat. I was mesmerized by it. I floated the idea to her if whether we should also get a goat. She sighed and looked at me. Then she flatly said: Goats commit suicide.

I had never heard of this phenomenon so I laughed incredulously and asked her to repeat herself. Just in case I heard wrong. But I hadn’t. Apparently, goats aren’t very bright and if you tie them up with a rope around their neck and to a (let’s say) stump, sometimes they walk and walk in whatever random direction and increase the tension of the rope to its max and suffocate. Or fall off a precipice with the rope still on.

And die.

Goat suicide.

On the other hand, if whether they are aware they are being bred for meat and this is their way of entering the arena with their head held high and ending shit on their own terms, I wouldn’t know. It is a possibility. Although I doubt it.

Animals do a lot of things you’d never think they would. Dolphins, for example, sometimes rescue humans and other animals from shark attacks as a team. Apparently, mostly this is due to the fact they don’t like sharks and they just do things to thwart their plans and dinner. However, they also gang rape other dolphins and in captivity, attempt it on human women too. They also often inflate puffer fish for their neurotoxin that gets dolphins high (fatal to a human, though, so don’t try that if you get the chance). Additionally, they pass around the poor, terrified, inflated puffer fish around among themselves like a beach ball. So are they good or bad? Moral or evil? You tell me.

Anyhoo, back to me. And the goat. Ramthani was adamant that we could not keep a goat. She suggested chicken. I thought about it. My conclusion was (and still is) that it was a reasonable venture. Chicken can give you eggs and meat. There was just a tiny problem. I am terrified of chicken. Ever since paleontologists have said that as per fossil records, it is a much bigger probability that dinosaurs were feathered rather than reptilian, in fact. Because it could mean that a T-Rex could be something like a 6 feet tall chicken. Which to me is an infinitely more terrifying image than a tiny-armed, awkwardly proportioned reptile. And in case you haven't noticed, chicken aren't scared of anything. They would calmly indulge in cannibalism even as a human butchers their friend about 3 inches away from them. Nothing fazes them. And that's when they're only knee high so a huge chicken is a formidable thought. Yeesh. Stuff of nightmares, honestly.

I also know myself very well. And I know that if we have chicken, I would name all of them. And spend time with them so they know me and run to me for food and love. And you can’t eat a living breathing something with a name that loves you. So that was out.

Around the same time, one of my best friends from college Atu bought a cow in Nagaland’s Mokokchung. Her mum was the one who bought it. But it was something like a shared venture. For about one morning I was also obsessed with the fantastic idea of owning a milking cow! Ramthani did not even offer me an explanation why we should not engage but she just said no.

In the end, we got two huge grey bunnies. They peed and pooped everywhere.

Timetravel and Sci-fi in the Bible

When you think of sci-fi in the Bible, Ezekiel is your go-to guy. He is, after all, the guy who saw a wheel in a wheel and eyes all around. People have forever thought what he saw was an UFO, by which I very much do mean the classic flying saucer.

But this muse is not on UFOs but actually on time-travel.

So consider this. One fine day Moses the great leader climbed up Mount Sinai and met God. His face shone with the light of God. God and he spoke there and he came down with some ground rules for Christians.

Many years later, the prophet Elijah fled to Mount Horeb. There he encountered God again, as a still small voice. A calm. A peace, if you will.

Many more years passed and Jesus brought three friends with him up a mountain called Tabor. There he was Transfigured. He shone. And Peter, James and John saw with him two figures of old – Moses and Elijah.

There is this theory that floats around the internet sometimes and unless you’re a sci-fi fan, your algorithm would not catch it. One of them is that Moses and Elijah did not appear there on Mount Tabor with Jesus as ghosts. Rather, they had travelled through space and time for a dual purpose – one, to be with Jesus at his hour of need, and, two, to converse with God. And they did both.

In the biblical language, we find a one-day-one-thousand-days equivalency for God. In sci-fi lingo, we’d say that God exists outside the space-time continuum. So for Moses and Elijah to meet Jesus even when they are separated by centuries is an easy possibility. Madame Vastra always said time-travel was always possible in dreams, and would hold tea parties in dreams, calling together for meetings people separated by time and space. The Doctor often sends out the TARDIS to collect people separated by time and space to stand with him. For a sci-fi fan, it’s really not that hard to imagine.

I’m not saying this is real. It is a theory that someone proposed. And I really found it fun, amusing and enchanting.

Of course, while Mount Sinai and Mount Horeb are one and the same place, Mount Tabor isn’t. But if you want the facts to fit your theory, you could always say Mount Tabor was the Main Console and Mount Horeb was where you need to stand so the teleporter or transmitter or whatever thingamajic would ‘beam you up’.

Fun, no?

Suffering, the Protestant Ethics and Capitalism

We can suffer for Christ but not be happy in Christ. I did not come up with that; that had been an observation made by a pastor in my church one time. I just happen to agree with him. He said it during Easter when we could not sing one happy hymn properly. He went: it is a matter of concern when we can cry for (and with) Jesus during Good Friday but can’t rejoice in His resurrection at Easter.

Piety in the Christian world is a strange desire to be persecuted just so we can show how good a martyr we are. Up to a reasonable degree, of course. No one should die or go to jail, but basically someone should suffer.

I had this epiphany about the constant desire to suffer back in college during my second year majoring in Sociology. We were reading Max Weber’s Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber talked about how the concept and belief in Predestination – that heaven is reserved for an elite and predetermined few – had necessitated the Protestant church to exhibit God’s favour in this material world. How? By succeeding. Logic being that God shows that He loves people by allowing them to succeed. And how to succeed? Amass wealth. Meanwhile, the Calvinistic God also does not like pompous displays of grandeur and wealth. So what was the pious Christian to do? Invest! Hence, the seeds of capitalism.

I read this book and thought to myself: my lawd, Christians really are pretty much the same worldwide. I would think this again when I watched the excellent US TV sitcom Good Christian Bitches starring Kristin Chenoweth later on. For similar yet not the same reasons. There is a constant need to display piety and God’s favour among Christians. And the easiest path to take is to share in the Messiah’s suffering. It almost seems like we think joy and happiness, especially the kind as displayed by the youth by yells and shrieks, is a sacrilege. After a point, it feels like as though to suffer is to be moral. Like we enjoy playing martyrs. Even when we have no cause.

Rebels without a cause? They got nothing on suffering Christians.

I’m not saying don’t suffer or anything, but just… I mean, be happy in the faith! And in the Salvation. And in the peace. And in the promise of a Good Afterlife. But no, we want to suffer because Jesus suffered. More a grand display than anything else. But then again, Jesus didn’t suffer for 33 years! (Interestingly, I was told during my Srinagar trip by a local there that Muslims believe that in heaven, we all get to be 33 because that is the prime of our lives! I don’t know if that’s true but I found it fascinating.) I like to believe he took some time in recreation; fishing comes to mind. He even had a job – carpentry. Some say he took to travelling; they say he even reached Tibet. He seemed to have liked bread and fishes and wine; no one who didn’t like those foods would ever have multiplied them after all. I don’t mean to treat the situation lightly or contemptuously. I just think it seems to be a misreading of the signs to think the only way to be a good Christian is to suffer.

There is a lot of good and beauty in this world that in no way contradict the fruits of the spirit as the Bible lists them out. Sometimes it is good to just enjoy them.

Birthday Twins and Advices

It is a great statistical possibility, considering there are 8.1 billion of us roaming around in this old earth of ours and only 365 ¼ days in a year, but it is always a happy coincidence when you meet people who share your birthday! It is even more fascinating when these people are close relatives – both consanguineal and affinal, actually also geographic. For me, it is this case with a blood relative and a kin by marriage who live quite close to where I lived, even now still in the same city. One is my mother’s elder sister. The other is my mother’s cousin’s husband.

For some people it might mean three birthday cakes. But we don’t do that very much in my family, except for rare occasions. We’ve never invited each other for cakes or parties. We’ve never sent each other presents. We just acknowledge that we share this birthday, one day before the birthday of Harry Potter, in fact. Although that last bit is only appreciated by me.

My birthday-twin aunt and uncle have each given me tons of advices over the years. My uncle was also my first school principal so advices were general and easy to come by for him. My aunt just likes to make quick decisions in general.

My birthday-twin uncle’s advice is to have integrity and principles. He always says that you will only value hard-earned money. I have extended this to my own life code that no one values money which is not rightfully and deservedly earned. You may enjoy money and the Lord knows how wonderful it is to enjoy what money can give you, but easy money just does not carry the same worth and dignity that your hard-earned money does.

My birthday-twin aunt’s advice? If someone punches you, punch them back.

I’ve also received sound advice from a birthday-twin colleague: always carry a spare pair of glasses with you when you travel. This is actually very sane advice which I recommend to everyone who can’t see very well. It is very real danger when you can’t see and even more painful if you’re in an alien location. Also, helps with motion-sickness, I believe. The glasses, I mean. Which, come to think of it, if you’re thinking of glasses you click with someone, might not help with the nausea. I am talking here of spectacles, my people.

One birthday-twin from my college days (actually even the year of our birth is the same so basically my twin from another parents really), a boy from Nagaland, taught me how to hustle in Delhi’s Arjun Nagar. I don’t remember specific advices from him but from what I can recall, most of his advice could be summed up as: Be aggressive. It is a very handy advice to follow, if you can. Helped me out tons in life in general, I have to say.

Another bit of general advice but not from a birthday-twin: carry a band-aid in your wallet and a pocket-knife in your bag. I follow this (Victorinox has the best SAKs, for reference) and I swear, this has helped me out more than once. Do that, too.

A last advice as a praying Christian from a boy who is not a birthday-twin: if someone asks you to pray for them and you say yes you would, just pray for them on the spot in your head; if you’re waiting for a grand time to include them in your ‘official’ prayers, there’s a chance you’d forget. I like this. I do this now, too.

I start off in one direction and end up in another. Weird.