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.

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.

Uncharitable Sunday Thoughts

A pastor’s wife mortified me once and I’ve never been able to forgive her. Every time something happens that reminds me of the incident, I get triggered again and I feel the same revulsion. It is quite hilarious to the people who know about it. It amuses me too but also, I am still upset about it.

It was a seemingly innocuous incident.

I am nosy. And I am curious. Call it a character trait. If there is drama, I could pop out of my blanket in the dead of winter just to go check it out. And when there are performances in church, I go early and scoop out the best seats so I can get the best view.

Which is what I did one Easter Sunday in Delhi, back when the whole DMI would meet as a congregation at Green Park. I was there before the church bells rang, excitedly sitting in what I considered the seat with the best view. The actual performers had not even reached the church for rehearsals, is how early I was for church.

And then the congregation filed in one by one until the church was buzzing with activity. The church soon filled up with churchgoers and someone started singing and everyone joined in. A few minutes before church actually started, the pastor’s wife from the first paragraph walked in, made her way over to me and my sister sitting there on our very good seats, tapped my shoulder and said: “This is my seat; I always sit here. Kindly go find some place else to sit.”

I was very young, only in college. I was also pathologically shy and an introvert who had not found her way out of the cocoon even for short bursts of social energy. When a grown ass woman asks you to move out of your seat in full view of an entire church, and catching more attention every minute because it is the Law Of Societal Attention-Grabbing that the more sombre the affair the more pronounced the effects of any single feckin’ deviation, you just do.

I am ashamed to say I moved out of my seat and searched for another seat in the by-now-crowded room. If the same shit were to happen to me today, I would not have moved. I would have created a scene right then and there. The quiet rage I felt when I realised the woman was a pastor’s wife has since coloured every single feckin’ view I’ve held since of anyone who is a pastor’s wife. My first thought is invariably: Are you also an entitled Good Christian Bitch?

Uncharitable. But also imprinted in my brain. Unfortunate, isn’t it?