Cassandra

Pobody’s nerfect. And nobody likes the bearer of bad news. So it is only logical that people should hate Cassandra when she delivered accurate prophecies for doom. Perfectly accurate; perfectly unbelieved. Apollo is a douche.

Cassandra is a fascinating figure so it comes as no surprise that two of my beloved artists should choose her as a muse. One, ABBA. Two, Taylor Swift. Interestingly, ABBA’s Cassandra, written by two men, was an apology to her because they hadn’t believed her. Taylor’s Cassandra, written by a woman who’s in her tortured poet era, is an angry I Told You So. The men talked to her; the woman identified with her.

The lovely part is they could have been talking about the same story is how well both have written their poems. A woman – not necessarily the Oracle Cassandra, of course, that would be too easy – was warning people about something but no one would believe her. She was alone in her ‘tower, weaving nightmares, twisting all my smiles into snarls’, viewed from the outside by people who were ‘hiding their shame behind hollow laughter, while you are crying alone in your bed’. 

The parallels you can draw between the two songs are beautiful. ABBA talked about how ‘down in the street, they’re all singing and shouting, staying alive though the city is dead’ which Taylor would parallel with, ‘in the streets, there’s a raging riot’. Of course, the Woman was right in the Warning she gave to the people. And when the prophecy was fulfilled, Taylor would sadly croon, ‘When the truth comes out, it’s quiet.’ This would be echoed in ABBA’s ‘some of us wanted, but none of us would listen to words of warning. And on the darkest of nights, nobody knew how to fight, and we were caught in our sleep’. Taylor here would mournfully conclude, ‘I regret to say: do you believe me now?’

Of course, the stories are different. ABBA’s is closer to the Greek myth probably and talks about the Trojan people not heeding the warnings of Cassandra, that when the Greek warriors emerged from the Horse, they were caught unawares and defeated. If it parallels a real-life modern situation, all the better. Taylor sees herself as Cassandra and talks about how people would not believe her when she spoke out about bullies, that she was instead vilified for it by the media and netizens; and similar to, but not entirely alike, when the truth came out, it was quiet. It was quiet in Old Troy because the old Trojans were dead. It was quiet in Taylor’s world because much like Cassandra, no one could believe her, even when she was proven right.

My sister Feli says I should mention her friend Cassandra in this blog. Cassandra is a fellow Swiftie who has been fortunate enough to have her name in a Swift Song, the bitch. I kid. She's really a good egg. And how lucky, though! When TTPD came out and she saw her name in the track list, she told Feli about it. And I remember thinking, ugh why couldn’t my namesake have been a doomsday prophet too that Taylor could identify with? Esther was just another Persian Queen Taylor probably does not identify much with. A great pity, if you ask me.

Well, pobody’s nerfect!

The Book Dragon for Bookworms

I’ve been a bookworm my whole life. People who know me for any prolonged length of time know me as such at this point. It might be because of this very reason that I have often been approached by eager parents to suggest appropriate titles for their own bookworm kids. I find this deeply humbling and also admire these parents for respecting their children’s interests and wishing to nurture their hobbies in a way they best know how. I also think highly of them who involve me in their quest because let’s be honest, that’s just good taste.

However, I do not know if I am the best person to offer suggestions to kids. I am the first to admit that my moral compass does not quite point due North. But there are better people than I who have written amazing books and it is my privilege to recommend these to kids.

My Go-To recommendation for kids, author-wise, would unproblematically be Enid Blyton. She has written about like a gazillion stories so that’s a steady diet of proper grammar, well-behaved kids and good, solid ethics and morals. Additionally, her books range from silly titles like Noddy in Toyland, fairies that live inside mushrooms, to boarding schools, holidays and crime-solving kids. It’s a whole range. You can’t go wrong with Enid Blyton.

Otherwise, there are a lot of fairy-tale books that can be quite fun for kids. However, I feel like a lot of kids these days just come out mature and already old and knowing. This creeps me out but also I feel like there’s something innocent that’s missing in them. 

I believe that if you want to contain this childlike wonder and innocence, you will do well choosing children’s classics for them. Peter And Wendy, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Anne of Green Gables, Heidi and all those wonderful titles. They are classics for a good reason: they’re good. I’d start them out with Charlotte’s Web and The Little Prince myself. 

If the kid is aged 10 or so, they can start reading Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone. They can grow up with Potterverse as they age every year. It is good investment. Potterverse has some very solid world-building and its proper moral code of conduct, anti-Nazi themes and valuation of love are good for children and young adults.

If the kid is on the threshold, something like High School graduation, I’d strongly suggest Very Good Lives by JK Rowling.

If these older kids still want to pursue literature, perhaps more classics – The Bible, Pride & Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Dr Faustus, The Wizard of Oz, The Time Machine. Although to be perfectly honest, those are more for general lit. awareness. They’re very good to have read because a lot of people like them and quote or reference them. 

For humour and pleasure’s sake, Douglas Adams, Bill Bryson, Andrew Kaufman, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pritchard. A lot of people also put a lot of stock in Mitch Albom, Paulo Coelho, Alexander McCall Smith; good authors, all of them. Young Adults have a good selection – The Hunger Games series, Eragon series, Tales of Earthsea, Howl’s Moving Castle. And, of course, for general nightmares and scares, Stephen King.

I love recommending books. Books allow you to live out multiple lives, make multiple mistakes, die a thousand meaningful deaths, and even roam the world as an immortal. There is a sense of wonder and adventure that no other artform can match. Movies have their magic but they can’t match the pure thrill of actually being the characters as when you’re reading them. Can’t.

Of course, I read fiction almost exclusively. So my suggestions tend to be that. If we have to pick only three books, though, let’s go with:

1. Ages 10 and under: Charlotte’s Web by E B White

2. Ages 10 to 15: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

3. Ages 15-17: Very Good Lives by J K Rowling

Water

Psalms 120:7 says I am a man of peace, but when I speak they are for war. Always I seem to encounter this. Taylor Swift was right, and I fervently concur: I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me.

I gave this a thought the other day. And my thoughts led me to water. Very specifically how water is soft, till it’s rough. Water is gentle, till it’s brutal. Water is Elohim, Phanes, Brahma until it’s Satan, Perses, Shiva. Water is Terra Mater when she’s merciful and when she’s angry. Plato had philosophized on this too a long time before I did: what is the shape of water? He’d said that in its purest form, water takes the shape of an icosahedron. An icosahedron is a 20-sided polyhedron. I supposeit means things like beauty, humanity, love have many faces. You can't judge a book by its cover, we say in a cliche now. You can't neatly box people by your own limited worldview and restricted interaction with them. Things have a way of being more than what they seem. Like how water takes the shape of what contains it.

But dear lord, how water breaks the container sometimes! 

There is no place on earth that can be a nice haven that does not have sufficient water supply. In all the places I’ve ever travelled to, I’ve noticed that my peace of mind has depended largely on whether or not I have water at my disposal – to drink, to wash up, to whatever. No village is ever nice that has scarcity of water. And my stars, how amazing to just sit by a babbling brook, listening to the music of water flowing over smooth rocks the entire day. Zen.

The nature of duality has always fascinated me. The binary code even of life and death. We cling on to life so desperately and yet we get closer everyday to the day we die. Ends of spectrums. The nice grey shades in between are something of acceptance and/or tolerance. Even in bureaucracy – the Law that stands, the Deviation that is the M.O., and all the variants that necessitate or justify that deviation. Very interesting!

Water though. The shapes it takes. The roles it assumes. The life it gives. The destruction it leaves behind. The destiny it shapes! 

I once saw an IG reel saying perhaps God is Water. Life-giving. Death-bringing. Everywhere. Assumes all shapes. Be all. In all. It makes me remember all the times I’ve ever been captivated by the omnipresence of water. Even in religion. Christian baptisms are with water – immersion or not; it’s supposed to symbolize death of a life and birth of another. Hindus would bathe in the Ganges; or otherwise symbolically bathe in it by pouring a little water on their heads to begin the day. Water is a portal of change; it is how you leave one realm and enter another. Even in sci-fi and fantasy fiction, like Mirror Mirror for one, magical portals would often be water or water-esque. Even the rebirth of Lord Voldemort was water-adjacent, in a cauldron, simmering with magic potions that gave him new life.

You have to respect water. Because water is patient. It will outlast all of us. All the smooth rocks in rivers have been smoothened by water, is all the proof you need that water will beat you. Because it will always play the long game.

I heard recently that scientists have found traces of water in Mars. Doctor Who fans will tell you to stay away. Respect.

Jesting aside, water is a force that can not be tamed, no matter how much we fool ourselves into thinking we can and have. And with all the life it gives, to me, to talk of water is to talk of Nature. You can’t tame Nature either. We think we can only at our own peril. To paraphrase Gandhi, the earth has enough to satisfy our need, but not our greed. With all the necessary civilization we are expanding on our piece of Earth, we really should consider making nice with Gaea while we are at it. Mother Earth? Khuanu? Whoever you want to call her.

Because as even a mere mortal like me who seeks only to fly under the radar gets caught in drama and then fights back, the life of bountiful peace Water offers will turn into war when we don’t consider the ramifications to our senseless actions. Senseless actions. This is, by the way, to quote Taylor Swift again, why we can’t have nice things.

An Appreciation of Bamboo

There are no bamboos east of Keifang, I was told when I moved to Champhai back in 2017. I had no idea what they meant because I had never heard of such a thing as no bamboos in Mizoram. The idea did not compute.

It turned out to be largely true, though. How weird is that? Bamboos are so intrinsically a part of Mizo life I had just assumed it was everywhere. I even wrote a term paper on bamboo flowering in Uni because it was that unique to me that Mizoram could be bamboo-less.

But even bamboo-less Mizoram was not totally Zero Bamboo. Not all the bamboos flowered and died, even in 2007. Some variants remained and all the bamboos did not die of old age. The same with Champhai. We still had bamboo, just not a lot. And the forest green was largely because of trees, not bamboos. And when we picnicked by the river, foraging for firewood become a little bit difficult because you actually had to use wood. But we still ate bamboo shoots. And we still used bamboo for buildings. One man even used bamboo instead of iron rods for his concrete building and it became a hazard when the bamboo rotted. Long story.

Side note: do you know how I dont need to google the year bamboo flowered in Mizoram? Because there was a novelty song that came out that had this lyrics: "Sanghnih pasarih mautam Zosports," and it's stuck in my head. Not because of the term paper I wrote back in Uni.

When Cyclone Remal hit Chhimphei Range, I decided to trudge through three mudslides to get to Aibawk from Aizawl – one near Muallungthu and two between Tachhip and Aibawk. In the Muallungthu one, people had made their way on foot before so they had left halvened bamboos on the mud. Atop the mud, that is.

Now I like bamboos. I like their shape and their colour. I like the canopy they leave on the ground, especially on merry little rivers. I like bamboo cooking... and this is a three way street: use it to make fire, use it as a vessel, and cook the shoot! I like bamboos in a stew, with pork, in a salad, pickled, or fermented otherwise. I like bamboos.

Bamboo is awesome for its many many usages, primary of which, I now felt, in the Muallungthu slide, was the gentle springiness, enduring plasticity and amazing elasticity of bamboo that allowed it to bear the weight of full-grown people carrying considerable weight atop a river of mudslide. And just bounce back! In the Tachhip ones, we sometimes slid in about knee deep into mud which made it difficult to trudge across. People had left logs behind, sure, but those tended to roll over sometimes and often they become too heavy so they sink. Taking us with it. Not very fun. And energy depleting.

Always it is bamboo to the rescue for Mizoram. Eat the bamboo. Wear the bamboo. Live in the bamboo. Build with the bamboo. Save with the bamboo. Float on the bamboo. It’s all bamboo.

What an awesome grass, bamboo!

In Defence of Young Men

We spoil boys. Until we don’t.

In recent years, a lot of men have quipped that in Mizoram, we no longer need women empowerment, because the men need more empowering than women today. This is because women are visibly making livings out there – in offices, in market places, going out of the state… even venturing gingerly into politics lately. I always say true, but women still don’t get a say in culture or religion and in Mizo society, women have always been bread-earners, that women have always been economic stock-takers. I have never convinced anyone. They haven’t convinced me either. So we stand at a stalemate.

Of late though, I have come to think on a tangent. I’m starting to think it really unfair how we treat young men. It is not really their faults that their parents and society at large didn’t make an effort to teach them. The village raises the kid but sometimes the village forgets what to teach them. It’s all hold the baby boy, kiss the baby boy, molly-coddle the baby boy. And then suddenly all humans at arms-length, no touching, no babying, be manly men. It is a very confusing world.

I mean double standards sometimes work for females in that people expect us to be emotional airheads. So it doesn’t matter if we become bimbos and white-obsessed. Or k-poppers. In fact, a lot of people are happy to berate us for it. Gleeful, in fact. And also people aren’t ever that stressed about women because we anyway don’t ‘belong’ to the culture as men do. We have very little stakes in it. As long as you pop out a Mizo kid, you’re OK. You really cannot expect us to be as invested in cultural wars as the men.

Young men on the other hand, we judge them so harshly when they don't know EVERYTHING about our culture. When all the time they were growing up, we never bothered to teach them!! We spoil them and teach them nothing when they are young. Not even basic survival skills. We teach them that even cooking is a girl’s job. Feckin’. We have grown ass men who don’t know how to make their own fucking tea, man! We shelter boys to a cuckolding stage but then one day they accumulate years and we have adult men who will not last one day in an Apocalypse.

Why wait for an Apocalypse? It feels like at some point, we expect boys to just know shit. Like that Maybelline ad, maybe he’s supposed to be born with it. But no one is born with the innate talent to say, kill a chicken, or clean a chicken gizzard, or make braids of chicken intestines. Chicken chopping skills are learned. And if no one taught them, how are young men to know? Side note: this is a skill we judge them on.

We teach them nothing, and then judge them when they know nothing. Which seems a tad unfair. Just a bit.

We call them names when they can’t butcher a pig. Or harvest a bamboo shoot. Or (gasp) dare be freshly dressed and smelling nice for office. God forbid they speak in English and not know every single phrase and words in Old Mizo. Minus points if they’re not tanned. The horror! I’m sorry but for a lot of these young men, that is what they know. And they’re not even bad things. Per se. And some of them are just fair-skinned! Besides, they would have known, had they been taught. And some of them do know.

I think we really ought to stop generalizing. Also perhaps not judge people on an Operating Standard that we had not used when we were teaching them. If we want them to be a different way, perhaps we should consider rethinking the Syllabus. Our boys aren’t so fucked up that we no longer have men. We just have a different breed of them. We will yet survive.

The Madness of Hamlet

The job of an MCS was not something I had the faintest clue of as an oblivious kid growing up. I was lost in fantasy world and spent my days playing make believe in a world that contained magic and princesses. This was when I was not at a desk pretending to study because my mum was monitoring me. I aimed for good grades because it was easier than listening to chastising and a good grade got me new toys.

The power I knew was of policemen's. I grew up in battalion areas. I understood that discipline. My dad said I should aim to be an IAS officer and he said: it’d be nice if you were DC one day. I took it at face value because my dad said so that IAS people became DC. I didn’t even know MCS people also got to be DC sometimes.

Me being MCS was not because I wanted to be one overmuch. I became one because it was my easy way out being able to engage in the things I enjoy with people tolerating my outlandish quirks. The things I truly enjoy are not often considered adult-like or dignified. But me liking what I like while being MCS renders me some sort of respectability, if a bit eccentric. This is sometimes the biggest perk of me being MCS.

I have always assumed I would be a productive member of society. I have always taken for granted I would work and earn a living. I have always accepted that I would have to do my best whatever my job was and contributed to the economy however I could. When I was looking for employment fresh out of Uni, I applied for several jobs that I thought could give me a decent pay. This includes me giving NET exam which I hoped I shall never have to use because I have never thought I’d be a good teacher and certainly not a good role model. It never hurts to have a Back Up Plan though. My NET exam was at Jamia Uni campus and someone stole my sister’s apple. As in one solitary fruit from her backpack which was her ‘healthy snack’ instead of her wallet. That was amusing.

I still really had not much clue when I jumped ship from MFAS to MCS what MCS people did. Mostly it was because my dad said: how about you become MCS? I was tired of sitting in a Treasury Office passing the same salary bills month after month is really the best explanation I can offer for me applying.

Today, I have a better clue what MCS people do. Mostly because I do them. I still don’t know more than I have experienced because my intellectual curiosity really does not stretch out to the real world. I could spend hours and days sitting alone or discussing with like-minded people sci-fi or fantasy fiction, theorizing about possibilities and explanations, engaging in heated debates about logic and illogic in fiction, even pretend whole-heartedly to be an ant in an online ant colony. But it was not until I assumed charge as BDO, for example, that I asked: what does a BDO do? Which was because I had to now do them.

I realise therefore that I would never be the good officer I might have the potential to be. I am not afraid of hard work so I will always give my job my best. But I will never have that drive, I fear, that motivates some of my colleagues and peers to forge ahead and achieve distinction. Any sort of awards I have ever gotten have all been incidental. No one is ever more surprised than I whenever any office I hold gets recognition. I never aim for any. My main goal is to maintain status quo and fly under the radar. My only criteria and absolute discipline have been to never let standards slip. I like to think I share an affinity with Hamlet when he said he was only mad north-north-west; that when the wind blew southerly, I would always know a hawk from a handsaw.

I take quiet pride in being MCS because it has become my life intertwined. I do not fool myself, however, into thinking it makes me anything more or less than what I essentially am. When I am off-duty and sit down to watch an episode of Doctor Who or re-read the Hitchhiker’s Guide or engage in an online discussion of Harry Potter or some other similar engagement, I am simply Esther Leihang, something of a ridiculous gremlin.