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.