In Pursuit of Happiness

What is this life if, full of care, the poet asked, we have no time to stand and stare? It was true in 1911 when W H Davies wrote it to begin his muse on Leisure. It is true today. We just forget to stand and stare every once in a while.

Navigating life is difficult. We are no islands, just thriving on our own in the middle of oceans. We are social beings, interacting with multiple people and seemingly endless varieties of beings and circumstances. But however social we are, there is a part of us that yearns to find meaning and contentment that does not rest on us being social. That indefinable something that is ours alone. Although I suppose indefinable mostly because there is no one stop solution that fits all, and all of us define it in our own ways – the pursuit of happiness, so to speak.

In a close-knit and community-based society as mine is, it is hard to find the courage to define this happiness for ourselves. Most people are extremely eager – zealous might be a better word – to define it for us. Get married, get a child, get a job, get a house, buy some land, buy a car, a bike, an iPhone, gold jewelry… endless lists. Like we have been sent here on earth to fulfil an already-defined role the way Mario is programmed to go on a quest to defeat Bowser and his ilk and rescue Princess Peach.

But are we Mario? And if we are, who is Bowser and where is Princess Peach? We grow up to find that we are no Marios, there is no Bowser and Princess Peach is an illusion. Ecclesiastes was always right: everything under the sun is meaningless. It has always been up to us to define what meaning we choose to assign to things, people and situations. To Life itself. Choice: that’s what it always comes down to – from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to Apostle John in his nightmare of a revelation.

To be or not to be, as the bard would say.

I think it was that mood-killer Nietzsche who warned us to be careful while fighting monsters that we do not become one ourselves, because when we gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back into us. As young men, we fight injustice and inequality with society (and religion usually) as our weapon of choice and the Abyss stares back quietly at us and watch us in the process become that very institution which we fought. Sometimes the years reveal this in people; sometimes even Age never uncovers this veil. What is interesting is that sometimes we may not even be actively fighting monsters but just abiding with society’s biddings to avoid conflict so much so that we get to a point where we become as one with it, losing our own selves in the process. This is perhaps the part where we start obsessing with others, measuring ourselves and our worth solely against theirs, hating the Freedom we think they have, needing to have them acquiesce and be one of us, misery loving and desiring the company. The Abyss doesn’t just stare back; it winks.

Ecclesiastes says there is nothing new in this earth, that what once was will be again. I think this is very true of Life. The more things change, the more they remain exactly the same. We have always wanted to belong, and we have always wanted to come into our own. To find a balance, I would say then, is our alchemist’s gold. Like Santiago would find, when you want something bad enough, the whole Universe would conspire to help you get it. But you need to define your Purpose and start the journey, be that Andalusian shepherd boy who travelled to Egypt to find treasures. There are some adventures you must undertake alone, helped and aided by your support system very much yes, but essentially alone. That sweet spot between being a part of the System and being your own Self at the same time is a delicate balance. Unfortunately, I find this to be a battle most of us in Society deem not worth the fight or the hassle.

We lose ourselves in the system, think we are bigger than we are, or smaller than we are. Yet we do not introspect and our self-awareness becomes limited to a Mirror Image alone of how we think other people see us. We stop to stand and stare at the places in the woods where squirrels hide their nuts, forget to gaze for long at streams full of stars in broad daylight, like skies at night, never pausing long enough to watch the smile in people’s eyes reach their lips. Finding ourselves is a time-consuming and life-altering process and we can get by OK without any true measure of self-actualization so a lot of us don't even try. Ever consumed with the need to be who we think people want us to be, we forget to be us.

To paraphrase the poet again, a poor life this indeed is if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.

12.5.2025 Untitled

Isn’t it sad to grow up and realise 

the world was never as big 

as you thought it was?

And my! How even houses shrink 

from childhood memories, 

revisiting them again today; 

Everything tinier 

and less impressive 

from memories of yesteryears.

Nowhere to hide, 

no place to run away,

All your battles stretching out before you 

in a never-ending war.

Eternal Tuesdays 

stretching out to Thursdays,

trapped in an ever-lasting mundane.

Give me lazy days to watch the grass grow,

To make me see again

Just how big this world is.

Whimsy

A few days back, someone I quite respect said he reads my blogs which was nice to hear. But then he added that I write bleak things and I should use my writing skills to write something positive and, if possible, funny.

I did tell him my sense of humour is more macabre than cute but let’s try for a positive piece. I do enjoy a good challenge. Plus I was named Miss Sunshine in my last year of high school. That has to count.

There is a lot of bad in the world. But also there’s a lot of good. The trick is to not dwell on the bad. And by this, I do firmly mean being slightly delusional intentionally to focus on the good. There is even a Bible verse on this that says: He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous¹. I find this deeply comforting. Life is a mixture of good and bad things. And everything is relative.

My life, too, if I muse on it, has been a salad bowl of fun and woe, of mirth and sorrow, of anxiety and hope, of joy and anger… so many things. And I’ve taken a gamble on a lot of things that have sometimes yielded results that I liked. I don’t like regretting things. Even the risks I’ve taken that have not ended happily have been memorable lessons and sometimes, experiences I cherish, even though those happiness have been long gone.

You can’t live life and expect to be happy when you can’t be your authentic self. A lot of times, you find yourself blaming other people for the unhappiness in your life, the stress and tension, the poverty and the misery. You can never expect all the people you meet to be good. Sometimes you just have to move past. And if you’re lucky to find people with whom you can be your genuine self, you are luckier than most.

Some families and relatives are not good. Some friends turn against you. Significant Others may betray you. Sometimes people you don’t even know will cause you pain. You can’t dwell on that. Allow yourself to hurt. And then you heal. I don’t even think there is a formula for healing from trauma.

But sometimes you are just that lucky to have family that supports you. You have friends that laugh with and howl at the moon with you. You find someone to kiss you and battle Life with you. You find strangers that will offer you food and gossip while you wait for a bus to arrive.

Life is a series of whimsy. Best to just enjoy it.

¹ Matthew 5:45 NIV

Dislike 👎

Someone asked me recently the kind of people I dislike. I’d never really thought about that. But upon encountering the question, I decided to muse on it. So I thought about the people I do not like and I had an epiphany then, which was so simple yet I'd never considered it a unifying factor among the people I dislike. Which is not surprising because I don't normally spend my time thinking about people I dislike. In any case, the grand epiphany was this, that I deeply dislike people who fixate on problems!

It's not so much how we solve problems. I just don’t like people who see problems instead of thinking about the possibility of solutions. Not all problems have solutions. And we don’t often have the answers. But it is a failing in personality, in my opinion, when people don’t care how problems get solved and fixate instead on the problems. More often than not, these are the people who would immediately look for someone or something to blame. That is the main reason I don’t like them.

You can solve 99 of the problems for people and yet they’ll find a reason to blame you for the 1 problem you couldn’t solve for them. Which might actually be out of your powers. Sometimes, the “out of powers” are, in fact, Natural and would require you to be God to solve them. It still won’t absolve you from blame. If people want to blame you, they will.

I deeply dislike these people.

In contrast, I find myself very favourably disposed to people who think of solutions. Sometimes the solutions they come up with do not work. Sometimes they’re actually funny. But I deeply appreciate the effort and the character trait. And funnily enough, even the “stupid” suggestions can be part of the Answer, when you can cross them off the list of possible solutions. By a process of methodical elimination of things that won’t work, you can actually reach the Solution! A basis for collective wisdom, I suppose. A very democratic trait. Perhaps one of the best traits of democracy – collective wisdom.

So there you go. It would not have occurred to me to voluntarily make a mental list of people I dislike just to find a common feature among them. And on thinking about them and finding the common ground, I realise I was smiling. They’re horrible people. It would just be the thing that as varied personalities as they have, that they do indeed have a unifying factor.

Fat Pigs on a Farm

On my way out to enjoy a little R&R on a random Saturday at 5 in the morning, I passed by a host of women gearing up for the Inrinni Zing Bazaar. 

I was up early because I wanted to enjoy a cup of dark, bitter coffee in a rustic old steel mug, with hot water from my brand new vacuum bottle, on a hilltop, just staring out at God’s good earth before humans wake up and spoil the day again. And, of course, take pictures that might end up on Instagram.

The women were up because they needed to make a living. 

We were not the same.

I started to think then what I think often about: how all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. And how sometimes I am less equal than others but dear lord, how often was I so much more equal than yet more others.

I never wish to be defined solely by the circumstances of my birth and I also do not wish to be limited by it. However, I have always been acutely aware of how privileged I am. In contrast with others, even more so. 

In my line of work, I often dine with people for whom a lakh is pocket change. But I also often have tea with people for whom a thousand bucks is good money. It is interesting to navigate between the two and try to think of ways to solve all their problems. The only conclusion I have come to is this: there is no one size fits all solution. To every single application of Law, and even societal mores, there are exceptions. You cannot treat the outliers as the norm and try to change the entire system because often the system does work (except for them) but it would be a great disservice if you forced them to the same standards as everyone else.

In Political Sociology, we often say a hungry man knows no politics. I think it is an adaptation of some remnant Reaganomics from the 80s. I find it incredibly succinct. You can’t judge people from the comfort of a concrete building, safe from the elements and a comfortable few lakhs parked in the family accounts. Even the idea of how corrupt and unethical people are that they are easily bought by politicians for a small sum. But I have started to wonder whether or not this speaks more favourably of people who would take a mere 2000 bucks from party workers on Election Day, then go to anonymous voting compartments and decide that their words actually mean something. Unethical, yes, but it is a strange real world variant of principles. Twisted and bent, but principles nonetheless.

Therein lies the issue. Real world problems often cannot be tackled from ivory towers of theories and ideals in real time, no matter how well they do abstract it given some space and distance. People in the real world, be it policy makers or executives or ground beneficiaries often have to make non-choices. Choices between rocks and hard places, devils and deep blue seas, Sophie’s Choices, whatever you wish to call them. 

It would be irresponsible to believe that a strict moral code and adherence to it are all that people need for society to function. Even morals are biased to our lived experiences. How do you negotiate that? Things that seem so good on paper sometimes fall completely flat on ground. Pencil pushers would never understand how fieldwork works, in the same way ground workers cannot see the forest for being engaged with the trees. It is where we are planted where we get to specialize in topics. Perhaps an evening out of workers or at the very least, a commune of the two are necessary for a programme to work. Not accusatory snide comments thrown at the other for not knowing things.

The funny part is (well, not funny ha-ha, funny like hmmm) is that all these things are just burgeoning stereotype solidification. Clique formation, maybe. Created evil, you could even say. When you place someone in a more comfortable situation, very often because they suck up to you, they start to thrive. As they are wont to, unless they are complete wankers. In Mizo society, they may start dressing better, maybe use Minglish, raise their living standards, consume brands, develop an increasingly impressive social circle from hobnobbing that comes with being placed in optimum company, become “Mi Thil Ti Thei”… and then the same people who first indulged them start to be convinced they are more than they are, and start sycophanting to them. Vicious road.

We are to bloom where we are planted, we always say. But sometimes the soil we are given is sparse. And we can’t live on weeds and expect to be as fat as people living on sweet, sticky, multi-coloured maize. It is an unfair competition. We shouldn’t expect it of us to be on par with some other people, and in turn not expect others to be on par with us. There’s a really nice Mizo proverb that says even a boulder can’t stand unless propped up by pebbles. Maybe sometimes we are boulders, maybe sometimes we are pebbles. It is what it is.

I suppose in the end, what is really important is how much we contribute to this extra equality to pigs. In other words, how big a pig we are. No?

LAYGA

Some people peaked in high school and would never quite fully recover.

 

However, in today’s materialistic culture, unless they occupy some sort of a substantial post, they are more a nuisance than real hazard. It is the people who topped their high school classes, graduated and got the good jobs and now can’t understand a world in which they are not the only smart people that you have to watch out for. Now these are hazards.

Most of us grew up in college and came to the realization that we don’t know jackshit. In fact, the more we kept learning, the more we realized there was even more we didn’t know. It was the shit that kept shatting. We of course do our best to what I call LAYGA – Learn As You Go Along. But that is not a 100% foolproof plan. Some of us have learned better to quietly LAYGA when we are faced with challenges and new adventure. Every adult is just adulting the best way we know how because none of us really know what anyone of us are really doing.

But there are just some people who will always think of themselves as above the hoi polloi. And many people would thoughtlessly agree (because we don’t have time to reflect on things and we mostly just accept Image at face value; that, or to avoid confrontation) even as they sneer at them behind their backs and thank their good fortune they don’t have to be in constant touch with them. Meanwhile, these delulu populace will think about how they did well in school, and earned respectable degrees, and got good jobs that pay well and earned them social status, you know the drill. They will pat themselves on the back for having done everything right.

After a point, all the praise and adulation go in their heads. Somehow they can’t seem to get down from Cloud No. 9. They start thinking of themselves as mini-rajahs and minor-maharanis. Distinguished from the great unwashed. The Elite, as it were.

I think this line of thought is extremely worrisome in a small social and economic backwater of a hill region as Mizoram. I think it also could be a symptom of Insecurity. If I have this Image, people will think it is real. I must work on The Image. It becomes all consuming. And then no one benefits. Because literally no one can know everything and no one person or group can be the best at everything. We have to realise some people know things we don't, so we have to team up and learn from each other. But that is a pipedream. Because with zero self awareness, there is zero growth.

Damn that’s some cynical thoughts so early on a Friday morning! Maybe all of this is just me.

Happy weekend, everyone!

Inkhualtelem Life With Real Money

The Barbie I remember most from when I was a kid was the one called Pretty Hair. I don’t know if it was a genuine Barbie Barbie, if you know what I mean? I’ve realized a lot of things we get in these backwaters are knockoffs. Today in the age of the glocal and the internet, we can usually tell the difference. Although authenticity and ethics and wallet-friendliness tell different stories.

I mean, come on, who wouldn’t laugh at the twin of Puma’s black cat jumping over a lovely calligraphy “Tiger”? It is an art! Con art, maybe, but art nonetheless.

On Barbie, I remember Pretty Hair because she had such beautiful long hair. Of course, when you’re only about 12 inches tall, even hair that reaches your ankles would only be about 11 inches long and then there’s only so much you can do with that hair. But she looked good. And that was what mattered. Her whole purpose was to have long hair and be pretty. She was a doll. She was not real. And whatever role she had in this life, she fulfilled.

Growing up, I came to realize that Real Life was just a world of play-acting for grown-ups. With real money, of course, so the stakes are infinitely higher. It seems like the purpose had shifted but the totem remained the same – to appear nice, to look good. Call me cynical but I’ve come to accept that the totem of Society is a giant non-existent emperor’s robes. Necessary evils aside, how far should we allow invisible linen to dictate our lives? The robe of the emperor is invisible. There isn’t even an emperor!

Yet, we persist on back-breaking sycophancy. Some of us bow so low to money and perceived authority our noses must surely touch our knees. We sacrifice principles at the altar of Acknowledgment of the Rich and Powerful. Mouthful of an altar. Many times, we don’t even hobnob with the R&P; we just want them to know us. We would always rationalize it as acts of not ruffling feathers unnecessarily which is understandable, god’s honest truth! But of basic decency, dignity and loyalty, we can no longer claim to be practicing members. It is always the choice between what is easy and what is right. Always with the choices since the bloody Garden of Eden. What a pain!

Anyhoo. I discarded Pretty Hair the moment my sister cut off her hair to satisfy her curiosity or maybe to test her barber skills. I’m sure Feli would have felt the sting of cutting Barbie’s hair, though, because surely I must have avenged Pretty Hair for such a heinous crime which must not – could not – go unpunished.

Of course, real world punishment for heinous crimes against decency and principles are not as swift. But I believe Karma will out. And actually, constantly does so. Whether or not we choose to see it. I guess for now, we stick to ass-kissing and generally just throwing people to wolves whenever it benefits us. Ah well, c’est la vie!

Greta Gerwig is making a Barbie film and I can’t wait to see it. I want to see what she makes of the doll and her plastic world. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with Barbie when I was girl. I absolutely adored Barbie Girl as performed by Aqua. There’s never really been a Barbie news I’ve not been interested in. Barbie is in a world of structural non-functionality as I call it because she has seemingly everything but in a weird, incompatible size to her and also, essentially inoperative. Yet somehow we accept it. Like real life, really.

Inkhualtelem life... with real money.

Pretty Hair is a distant memory. The plastic remnant of her must lie in a dump somewhere, waiting to decompose, maybe. Hazard to the environment, no less. I wonder where the totem of Real Ethics rest.

Imaginations. Or Not.

My parents sorely lack imagination. Their thoughts are centred on facts and their dreams are rooted in reality.

Funny they made me.

In one of his in-service trainings, my dad was asked to close his eyes and imagine a completely different life for himself. One of those irritating, time-consuming HR soft skills classes that are designed to throw you for a loop, sure, but he was at a loss. He did not know how to do it. So he closed his eyes and slept. He came back and said: we had a nap today. The story only came out when we pressed for more details because it seemed unlikely that a bunch of senior IPS officers would be gathered in a room mid-day and asked to take a nap.

My mother is no different. She hates people who play dead persons onscreen or onstage. Other than this aversion to playing dead people, she is a terror to watch movies with. She makes nasty side comments all throughout movies. God forbid if the actors cried. She gets really pissed when people act like they were sad when they were probably not. Or vice versa. Acting! she’d exclaim; all lies!

Last year, one quiet afternoon at home in Aizawl, I told them a story about stars and demons. They listened in captive silence for length. Then they asked me where this happened. I said I had not come up with the details concerning locations. They understood then that it was fiction that I had personally made up. They stared at me. I stared at them. We blinked once or twice. Wordlessly, they returned to their chores.

This is by no means an isolated event. One time, dad joined me for my morning walk along the North Khawbung road in Champhai. We reached a beautiful clearing from where we could see a jungle thicket. I remarked how very like a giant broccoli it looked. He stayed politely silent. He did not see it. Talk about failure to launch!

Or there was that time the pair of them saw an old, almost-dead jackfruit tree by the river Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. They made the driver stop the car. Together, they mused about how lonely the tree looked, how much joy it must surely have given so many people in its time, and now it was dilapidated and standing where only the sun would see it. They tried to weave poetic around it and compose a song. They failed. They just got back to the car and left.

I make a big deal out of this because the both of them are deeply religious and spiritual. Whatever difference between the two you want there to be. It is paradoxical to me that someone operating with that kind of faith system should lack imagination to this degree! Or maybe they just don’t want to indulge. Maybe the latter.

I think about myself in respect to them a lot. I live my life in my head and only return to reality when I must. Even so, even operating on such different systems, they’ve supported me swimming in fantasies and helped me build my library of fiction. Only last week they saw my moonwater and were baffled but they simply accepted it as a me thing. I think I still have a lot to learn from them.

Chengkawl Policy

I was thinking about how Jesus taught us to give to God what belongs to God. Seems easy enough. Who would dare to steal from God? The counterpart is where it gets tricky: to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. And Caesar has so much! And Caesar demands so much! I don’t know who came up with the analogy but it is a very popular saying with the cynical Mizo Christian that a person who wouldn’t dream of taking one paise from the church would not have the same qualms when it came to taking money from others or the government. Would that it were not true!

Nothing is ever truly black and white because the world is blue.

Jokes aside, in adult life, one of the saddest things I find is that you just have to, by necessity, learn to lie. And you get to be so good at it – toeing the line, stopping at white lies and gossamer cover-ups, never fully hot, never fully cold; exactly what the Bible teaches people not to be. Be hot or be cold, it says. (Deep sigh) The Bible is a very difficult book to live by.

Unless you want to be a rather unpopular celebrity, sooner or later, you learn to keep mum. You start to selectively choose the ears you pour your tea into. Otherwise you keep mum. And because no matter how much someone revolts you, you might one day need their help, you learn to look the other way. And keep mum. The Stepford husbands got one cynical thing right – if you want things to run perfectly smooth at all times, you have to sacrifice your ethics along the way and lobotomize (or robotize?) everyone who stands in the way. Life just isn’t designed to be perfect.

And, as always, you keep mum.

Like snails. Snails do not indulge in auditory communication. It’s a very solid policy to abide by, given how much the tongue can land one in trouble. The Bible would concur. Do like chengkawl. It’s a good policy.

Acclimatizing

When we first started driving, my sister Feli and I would take turns sitting on the passenger seat, capturing the Big Driving Moments of the other on camera, both stills and videos.

It has been a long time since we’ve done that.

In one of the stories I’ve read about a witch, she was asked whether she needed to remember a lot of spells. She thought about it and replied that it was like making a pot of tea. When you started, you had to think of all the steps and maybe even talk yourself through the steps: take a kettle, put water in, place kettle on the fire… that sort of thing. But once you master the art, you just do it as part of muscle memory or something. It just comes to you naturally.

I really like this analogy.

I can blind type on keyboards I am familiar with. This has come about after years of assisting my father as he brought work home with him and insisted I helped him on the typewriter, and thankfully, later, the computer. People think it is a nifty skill. I rather like it, too. My thumbs are pretty fast on the QWERTY keypads as well, when they came about. But then again, my thumbs were also pretty fast on the pre-QWERTY keypads, when you had to press 2 three times to get a c, for example; remember?

Things become commonplace. We get used to things eventually. The dust settles. Time closes wounds; actually sometimes events cauterize wounds; hurts like a MF but effective. Even heartbreaks end. Neither happiness nor tears last forever. That way lies madness.

And you know what? It is a good thing.