I Am The Judge

So they made me a judge. Of a dance contest. Either that or a drama contest. To put this into perspective, I have no experience in either. 

I am a terribly boring person when it comes to the stage. I don’t exactly love it. It is true that I have made my peace with the stage in terms of public speaking. I am not good in it but I have refined my 5 minutes extempore speeches. You learn it in the job. Even then, in terms of statesmanship, I probably am not even a camp site.

Take all these into the equation and the other day, I started musing on judging. Believe me, judging is something I do on the daily. I am not always vocal about it, though, because if I were, I’d have a lot of enemies. You learn to keep quiet as an adult. It’s just survival.

So, judging. A lot of times, people say as Christians, we aren’t supposed to judge. I don’t think that’s entirely true. Jesus never said to not judge. He said: be careful not to judge when you aren’t cleared of the same charge. Judge not, he said, lest you be judged by the same measure. And then he said: be pure like me. So essentially, dont judge sanctimoniously. Much more importantly, don’t be a hypocrite.

But me being me, and not always the most morally upright, I have convinced myself that the loophole here is: if I am not guilty, I can judge. And let’s be honest, if we don’t judge, how is society supposed to function?

In college level Sociology, we talked about crime a lot. We always said crime is that which offends the sensibility of the collective. In itself, a person taking bread from a counter is not a crime. But if that bread was on the counter because someone else was selling it, and the first person hadn’t paid for the bread, it becomes a crime because they’d be offending the generally accepted rule that you have to pay for the bread that the second person was selling. That’s how even when you have killed a person, which is easily the biggest no-no of human actions, if you can prove that you have done it in self-defence, it is not a crime; it does not offend the sensibility of the collective.

It's just nuances. Rules sew the society together. Without rules, we fall apart. Sometimes, the rules are suggestions. There’re layers of it even. Norms. Mores. Guidelines. Regulations. Crimes. Sins, too, maybe? Although that last one is very – almost exclusively – Christian-coded.

So yes, my stand on judging is that if I don’t do the crime, I can judge. And I can even judge mercilessly if I do that only with my sisters and my best friends and I know my judgment and righteous condemnation will not be made public. To my detriment. 

One of my favourite go-to clichés about judging is that if you live in a glass house, you should not throw stones. If you can’t maintain your house, don’t try to expose someone else’s mismanagement of theirs. If you have dirty laundry, don’t air out other people’s. It’s just a rule of thumb. You should not try to make yourself look good by making someone else look bad.

So that being said, seeing as I can neither dance nor act on stage, nor do I know anything about dancing or acting, either amateurly or professionally, I think I’ll just go enjoy the art and award points liberally. Ethically coded, no? Score some brownie points with the Universe, even? No?

Kula

There is a Bible verse¹ that says a bribe concealed in the cloak pacifies great wrath. I think people are very well versed in this. Even if they didn't know it was in the Bible. Because it’s very basic social survival skills, I realise as I navigate adulthood. If you aren’t familiar with this and/or aren’t good at it, you don’t get very far at all. Raw skills and education can really only take you so far.

In Sociology, we learned about Kula Rings as practiced by the Trobriand Islanders in Polynesia, observed and studied by Bronislaw Manilowski. Very interesting. I forget the details. It’s not that important anymore outside of college. But the basic principles have remained impressed in my head. 

Gift-giving.

The Trobrianders exchange gifts symbolically and make a big deal out of it. The ritual gifts itself are mostly cowrie shells; not that big a deal at face value and in themselves, possibly not worth anything in the vicinity of the soap-sized rubies Nita Ambani wore as a necklace for the pre-wedding festivities of Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant. But what these jewelry and the gifting of them symbolize has ensured the goodwill and tradition, culture and rituals of these Polynesian tribes for I don’t even know how long.

It's such a subtle but powerful art. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. You give something, you get something. It is very hard to not return something else in kind, of commensurate value, when people have gifted you something. If you, the recipient, does not know enough to return the favour, you’re rather uncouth. No wonder Proverbs already talked about this. Bribes, sure, but in kinder words, it also said ‘a gift given in secret soothes anger’. Which is very true. 

But I guess we also find people who look at gift horses in the mouth. Or bite the hands that feed it. Very ungrateful. And ultimately, stupid. Borderline insane, I’d say. You can’t be very wise if you don’t weigh out consequences to actions. But I guess in life, too many adults are penny wise, but pound foolish. This way, many people have won battles but lost entire wars. And they don’t even know it.

I’m rather amused at the amount of clichés I’ve used in this blog. But they just came to me. And it would have been a waste to not use them. Recent events really have got me to think about all these actions and consequences. I have also ended up procrastinating on a number of things. Eh. I guess I’ll burn those bridges when I get to them; after all, at this point it’s all just spilled milk under the bridge. No?

¹Proverbs 21:14 - A gift given in secret soothes anger, and a bribe concealed in the cloak pacifies great wrath.

Rethinking Failure

Our neighbor kid Jesse came 2nd in class because he forgot T-E-N Ten. He is not happy about it and has decided that he will start making effort when he reaches Class I. He is in Class KG right now. We celebrated by throwing exploding crackers.

Nobody is mad at him because there’s not much difference between coming 1st and 2nd in class. But it brings back to mind the times when Feli would come in close to last in class. I don’t think she ever really flunked as such but definitely she was never close to the toppers.

Feli has always been the apple of my dad’s eyes so even when she didn’t make the Top Ten, he always just laughed. This always felt like high level of betrayal in my eyes because if I didn’t top the class, he’d ask me: why, tho. Feli? She spent 5 years completing her 3-year BA course. Dad’s comment? Your sister is so dedicated to Political Science she’s taking her own sweet time graduating. Followed by a hearty chuckle.

Feli is brilliant with music, cars, her vkil work and general wit. Try not to get caught insulting her. If she gets angry enough, she will decimate you. Academia has never been her friend. This just goes to show how different strengths we have just increases our collective strengths. There is a joke that says if everyone becomes MCS, who will sell zarda paan? Crude, but true.

I remember as kids, Feli never liked to study or even read overmuch. In fact, the only time she ever begged for tuitions personally was the time after her ninth grade Maths exam. Which dad thought about and then he decided: ya, ok. So that was how right after her exams, Feli started attending what in Potterverse they would refer to as remedial classes. Very effective. Not.

I got my lightning-quick temper from my dad. Dad has always been famous in his circles for having a temper. And even with the Apple of his Eyes, the evening of her results, the house would be on edge. Dad’s staff at the time – Pa Ngura, Pa Sangzuala, U Tharpuia and U Thupuana, especially – would be on edgier edges. For her. All tensed and anxious. And of course, Feli never disappointed. She would get nervous and jittery, seeing other people around her so strained on her behalf. The time during her agitated and uneasy walk up the school stairs to collect her results would be unfailingly the hardest effort she ever puts in to get good results. Does it work? Of course it does not. But it is what it is.

After her Political Science stint, during which she appeared twice in Hindustan Times Page 3 for her Western Music engagement, in Delhi University’s Janki Devi Memorial, she discovered Law. She sat for the exams and sailed through the law course at Delhi’s Law Faculty. I guess when you find something interesting for you, you don’t need additional years.

All of this just to say: there is no one right path. I know that a lot of people in these backwaters consider her as unemployed because she does not work for the government. As far as Mizoram is concerned, unless you are employed by the Sorkar, you don’t have a job! They tell her bracingly: don’t worry, you too will some day get a job. She does. She practices in High Court, Aizawl bench. She makes her own money and does her own paperwork. She’s not half bad. I am very proud of her.

I suppose we still have ways to go before things change. Cultural lag, we call it in Sociology. Something like a mandatory temporal delay for the mode of thinking of the general public to catch up on technological advances. And the advance is very fast paced today and picking up tempo all the time. We will always have people who refuse to change and judge others severely for daring to change. I just wish they were less loud.

It is Monday. The start of a new week. I hope we can be a bit kinder to each other, even if we are on different paths. Nevertheless, I am reading up on voodoo because honestly some people sometimes? Yup.

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?

The Royal We And God’s Pronoun

Mal min sawm turin van khuaan ro a rel, is a lyric I have known since forever. We do sing it every year multiple times around November and December after all.

However, one Delhi December got me interested in the song in a new way. One of our leaders Pu Lalchuangliana gave a little sermon over how it was supposed to be read as: Mal min sawm turin van Khua-an ro a rel. Capital K for Khua. As in state. As in the royal We, a nosism, a pluralis magistatis. Khua here would mean the state as much as its monarch, each referring to and representing the other. I don’t know if it is true or not, but I found it interesting.

A majority of my interest was less spiritual than it was socio-historical. Perhaps anthropological. Or maybe linguistic. Or simply just inability to turn off the Sociology nerd in me.

In any case, it made me think about Emilé Durkheim saying how society is more than the sum of its parts. Simply put, when you abstract society to such high levels, it becomes bigger than the very people who comprise of it. It begins to become an Entity unto itself. (He argued society is basically god for a tribal society, abstracted as it is to idealized image, with the ability to penalize and reward its members. That’s also basically how you say Man created God in his own image, in a subversion of the Genesis statement. Perhaps also in a Nietzcschean POV, how God is dead, because we killed him. Possible, if we had indeed birthed him. Reminiscent also of American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Ah but I digress. That is a different topic.) Administratively, mob mentality.

In a charming American comedy-drama film called Flipped, a young girl is told by her father: some people could be more or less than the sum of their parts. I understood it as to mean that some people cannot simply be broken down to their parts, like their flesh, bones and sinew; they are more (as is the society); meanwhile and unfortunately, some people are so devoid of character and/or morality that they are not worth or do not even make up the sum of their physical selves broken down to their parts.

In any case, Pu Chuanga’s comment sparked my interest in nosism in the Mizo language. We do use it continually, which is not a surprise seeing as how absorbed into society as we are. Once I became employed, I realised that nosism also applied to the Office and the Head of it. Some of the best leaders I’ve served with have accepted credit with the plural We, but have often shouldered blame and responsibility on the singular I. I think that is commendable and encouraging. Leadership is a very difficult role. Not many get it right. Some people just end up very narcissistic and playing to ego and status in the end. Because inferiority complex just does not go away simply because you got money and status, does it? I don’t know. In my experience  somehow some of the richest and most powerful people remain seriously under-confident. They constantly need to prove themselves. Must be exhausting. The lord knows it is exhausting to serve with or under them.

Or, you know, Pu Chuanga could be wrong. It could be that nosism plays no role in this song. It could be that the existing line: Mal min sawm turin van khuaan ro a rel, is perfectly correct. The English translation remains pretty much the same anyway. But I feel like if it is not the capital Khua that applies here, I am guessing ro a rel should be ro A rel? Because this pronoun a/A is referring to God. No? Or is that grammar just for English?

Genuinely asking.

Of Society, Gods and A**holes

Society is a weird god. Like a really weird fecked up god. Like our own cells level god of functionality and marching to its own rhythm. See something you don’t like? Kill it. But it’s part of the body! Don’t care; don’t like; kill. Conversely, see something you like? Grow it! But it’s going to kill us! Don’t care; me likey; grow it.

God – with a small g, I guess – rewards and punishes. Society really is not that far different. Setting the spiritual aspects of religion aside, as we do when we study religion in Sociology, society is pretty much rudimentary religion. It is birthed from the collective of humans banding together but once born, it takes on a life of its own and becomes, in the words of Emilé Durkheim, greater than the sum of its parts.

You never feel the full force of society as when you go against it. I would not recommend. Especially in a society as rooted in the community as the Mizo society, you never want to stand out. You want to blend in, live in peace and do your bit.

Society does not seem to ask for very much. Say hello to your new neighbours with a gift if you can, or offer to help out. Drop your life and go to comfort grieving families. Throw a feast when you come into good fortune. Maybe, for example. In return it does a lot for you. It would lend unpaid helping hands when you need, celebrate with you when the going is good...

It also acts as a gatekeeper. This is probably the area where we have the most rules. It probably started out as a means of keeping the community safe but again, rules take on a life of their own. In time, societal rules become all about In-Group versus Out-Group. You have to be like the people in your group. You cannot stand out. You cannot.

What can society do to you? Realistically? You are not entirely sure but you never want to find out. Ostracism, I suppose. That is not a sanction you want imposed on you, believe you me.

Chhura in our folklore went to Mawngping Khua. I often use the phrase Khaw Mawngping because there are multiple villages in Champhai where the road ends (usually in the village fields). I never really gave it much thought but on my walk this morning I thought about how amusing the phrase was – Khaw Mawngping: Village With A Closed A**hole? Not the same as the one in Chhura’s travel diaries; Mawngping Khua: Village of Closed A**holes? I don’t know. Literal translations are hard for me. TikTok and internet memes say at one point, we were only a**holes and our whole bodies develop from there. They slyly suggest some people never grow out of this beginning phase. And they are the ones who gatekeep the most.

You can’t do this. You must do that. Why? It’s the way it’s always been done. Scary words. No reason. No logic. Just “the way it has always been done”. Surely that’s how fundamentalism is born.

Take language, for instance. Speak Mizo! You use too much English! Stop acting hoity-toity and speak proper Mizo, and speak it the way I know it. You’re not better than me just because you speak more languages than I do. Mizo must remain pure. Don’t pollute it with English/Hindi/Korean! I mean holy shit, not even Shakespeare’s English has survived unblemished! Language must grow. It must evolve if it is to survive. I’m sorry but unless it is organic, you can’t impose words on people and expect them to willy-nilly use it. And unless Mizo organically comes up with words for say Science or Technology, to name just two words, Mizo must adapt and adopt other languages and fit it in our mould. Damn, we don’t even have the group word for ‘colour’, do we? I’m pretty sure “rawng” is Mizo-ised Bengali for colour. This is the way Mizo will survive and thrive, not by gatekeeping it via fundamentalism. Change is the only constant.

True you can’t take a hot poking iron and start poking holes in people’s bodies hoping it will heal and become functioning a**holes. As Chhura did to the people with no a**holes. People will die. If change is not gradual, it leaves wide cultural gaps in its wake. Perhaps that’s how we have so many junkies and undesirable diseases everywhere civilisation reaches. Of course, the best laid plans of men and mice and all that so culture gaps are something of a given wherever societal change occurs.

Plus, if you do successfully operate a**holes into people, don’t be surprised if shit comes out it because that’s what a**holes are for. That’s how regular people say they hate feminism because simply put, feminism is just a belief that women are people too and they deserve to have rights as human beings, and not be limited simply because of their body parts. But feminism is a modern concept. When you posit it in a society that has operated in “the way it has always done”, of course this new thing is challenged and spat upon and people don’t want to be associated with it. Remember the man who was nailed to a cross because he challenged the status quo?

You can’t have the good without the bad. It is a world of the binary, no?

Society really is a fecked up god.

It Is What It Is

I wrote about murder for my first Creative Writing class. Ms Anita, my English teacher, gave me an A. Then she said she had not expected such a grim tale from a simple picture of a sad young boy looking back over his shoulders. I didn’t understand it then but maybe now in retrospect, the undertone might have been: ‘Are you OK, child?’ Ms Anita was a nice, kind, gentle soul. I was thirteen. She might have been concerned.

But it was not like I dwelt in dark thoughts. The boy in the picture just looked guilty to me and Ms Anita had said: Be imaginative. So I got to imagining. It was just what it was.

I don’t know if my love for fiction fuelled my interest in Sociology but I strongly suspect it. Sociology likes to think it fills up blanks left by fiction by science-ing things up: pick up an ideal, tear it apart, put it back together again but this time, propose a hypothesis. But fiction does this too in a similar but different way: pick up an idea, create a scenario around it, tear the idea apart and then put it back together to resolve it. I love both. It is interesting to me that Sociology dealing with real life is vague but fiction dealing with imagined life is definitive. Strong juxtaposition. I learned that word from Sociology.

Both have taught me this: it is what it is.

I it-is-what-it-is my way through life. What’s the point hurting over something you can’t control? Grieve for what you lost; then heal. Be angry if you must; then get over it. Laugh, but remember it can’t last. It is little mystique that my favourite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes.

In adult life, you find so many things that make you want to maim some people just a tiny bit. I can honestly say I don’t have murderous thoughts but a little laceration and emotional damage thoughts? Those I have plenty. People are fake. It is what humans learn to do to get along with society. Some people overdo it, though, and other people judge them. I judge a lot of people. I hope when people judge me and find me wanting, they call me egotistic than cowardly. Vice for vice, I’d hate to be called spineless more than most negative judgments. Call me a Leo!

Here’s my parting observation: when children get caught red-handed doing wrong, they often try to save themselves by saying they ‘didn’t do it’. Some adults never grow out of this habit except in adult life, people don’t often get accused directly of wrong-doings. So just listen to what a lot of people brag (and humble-brag) about the things they don’t do, and you might see that that it is exactly what it is they do do.

You may disagree. I say: it is what it is.

Memories of a 90s Childhood

In the mid 90s, I was a young kid growing up in a remote police battalion area. School was 30-minutes-on-an-old-blue-jeep-ride-with-no-traffic-anywhere away. Church was a Sunday only activity. TV was only enjoyable for two hours in the evening when Star Plus rolled out kid-friendly shows, your Disney cartoons or sitcoms like Small Wonder, The Wonder Years, and Doogie Howser M.D. I forget what channel played Timeless Tales on Sundays. It was a world in a bubble, in a time before the internet. There was nothing to do on holidays.

Okay I lie. There were a lot of things to do. We climbed hills and giant water towers. We played house atop a giant replica of a table and chair set. We played The Future on a giant broken weighing machine. We swung around on giant swings. (Okay why did we have so many sets of giant things? Hmm.) We biked around the battalion compound with nothing on us but BB guns, pocket knives, water bottles and, if we were lucky, candies. Sometimes people fed us DIY treats in the form of roselle flowers and sugar in little bamboo containers; that was good then and they remain good memories now. Sometimes we had money for Ruffles chips; these would be Ruffles Lays and then simply Lays later. We ran around playing hide and seek with grasshoppers and the family dog. We messed up our stomachs eating stolen fruits aka unripe figs and passion fruits that grown-ups specifically told us to wait for till they properly ripened . On good days, we cooked random food on empty cans of tinned fish and enjoyed half-cooked vegetables out in the sun.

When there was electricity, we listened to and bloody memorized few audio tapes – Preeti Sagar’s Nursery Rhymes, and choice Mizo audio dramas: Hamlet, Genevieve (which was pronounced Jen-eh-veev by the team; who cared about French names?!), Teantisnery and about four comedy skits by the Mizo comic Thangkura drama party. If by good fortune we had broken video or audio cassette tapes in the house, we unwound and threaded the ribbons all over trees just to get that ghostly melody as the strung magnetic tapes hummed in the wind.

It was on New Year’s Day that the little town bustled and came alive. The air still bristled with Christmas cheer and the festivities really began in full swing, Christmas being largely a Christian affair that non-Christians didn’t fully engage in. (Plus there’s a lot of church during Christmas; not a lot of fun time.) Large, colourful shamianas get set up on the parade ground. A host of carnival activities begin taking shape – cotton candy parlours, tombola tables for grown-ups, a range of games and activities for kids, cheap toys to be won and given away.

The evening prior, we would have all met and waved Old Man Of The Old Year away, hoping he takes with him all our old year issues so we can make a fresh start tomorrow, hence the good feeling on New Year’s Day. [Side note: I say Old Man Of The Old Year in the hopes of making it sound cute but really we just called him Kumhlui i.e. Old Year, and he was a man dressed in dirty rags and we all heaved abuses at him and cheered for him to go away already. No one wanted to play him in later years, saying it was a cursed role. I wonder why.] Father Christmas, however, had apparently hung around for this fete and he came with a sack of little toys wrapped up in shining paper which he distributed to people; sometimes, he threw candy up in the air and we all scrambled for them. In the evening, we feasted communally in traditional Mizo style on large banana leaves.

My family moved around a lot, following dad as he got transferred. But childhood for me will always be cocooned in that little faraway, forgotten era in a tiny campus with airs of either a large village or a small town. Luangmual, Lunglei is no longer like this. I am told it is modern and technological and stuff now. A lot of the places I knew then have been altered. I don’t want to go back. But three years. Three years we were in that place. Considering I never really grew up even with all the years I have accumulated since, it is amazing how three years stretched out and defined a whole childhood for me!

All of this, by the way, being my very roundabout way of saying I am feeling rather nostalgic today.

The Infinite Terror that is Folktales

I often find myself thinking the concept terrifying that a Creature-You-Think-Is-Your-Aunt is sucking up your sister’s brains at night and you’re asking her what the noise of slurping was and your sister is crying with pain but the Creature says it was just a mouse scuttling across the floor. Yes, that’s the exact same sound as knocking back someone’s brain.

Folktales are often unapologetically horrifying.

Sociology says that folktales are mediums of orally enforcing societal laws. Customs. Traditions. If you don’t want to be either one of the sisters in that dreadful tale, you should listen to your mother tell you which path to go. Also possibly look for family resemblances.

But I don’t know. The sisters in the above tale did follow their mother’s instructions. But the Creature just decided to waylay them anyway. Well, what else is a cannibal to do, right? I say ‘cannibal’ and it is disturbing that a cannibal should unassumingly enter the world of children’s stories but the real messed up part is that the creature does not even seem to be human. So… maybe not “technically” a cannibal if she’s not the same manner of being as the sisters. But the bigger question arises here: how do you figure that two human girls un-problematically accept a strange Creature as their aunt when clearly they are human and she – this brain-sucking creature – is not? Are non-human relatives that common?

But that is the craziness that is the world of folktales. You very un-problematically accept things that go far beyond the rules of nature: the uncomplicated manner in which a human child would think a Forest Creature and she are family relations, the easy way you welcome travel between the moon and earth via a ladder or a tall tree/bamboo, the simple manner you assume proper conversations happen between entirely different species, the forthright manner you accept that a man could be friends with a tiger…

And bear in mind: in tribal folktales, these are not anthropomorphized beings. No. They’re out and out undiluted versions of their own realities in our world. The moon is still the moon; still as far, still as distant. A shrimp is still a shrimp as a tiger is still a tiger as a goblin is still a goblin as a human is still a human. And these different species apparently coexist in this strange world that is so fluid that a human could be slave to a cat, goblins (or nymphs?) and humans regularly intermarry, the thumb of a deceased could become a bird and speak in words understandable to a human, skeletons in a grave could move at the sound of melodies…

In addition, apart from not being anthropomorphized, these beings do not even seem to conform to human moralities or sensibilities. The goblins would still operate as they do in their – I imagine – spectral world. Your little witness-to-murder thumb bird is still a thumb as it is a bird. (How does that even work?)

Not to mention that you may converse all you like with your tiger best friend but he is still a tiger and it does not matter how close you are, your tiger friend would still kill and eat your family. Or you, actually, if it comes to a fight. To be fair, you would also still eat the shrimp or the bird that you talk to. Because of course you do.

So I have to wonder what the purpose to these stories is. Metaphors are very well and fine. I enjoy good metaphors and immensely appreciate clever puns. Even Jesus taught in parables. But folktales fascinate me in ways other stories often do not. The parameters that weave fiction around reality in the construction of folktales are riveting because of how extremely fluid they are in parts and suddenly how conforming too!

I consider myself a structural-functionalist. I always think things and ideas have their places in society – good or bad – otherwise they’d be obsolete and replaced.

Folktales… big time head-scratchers!! Perhaps art? Art is as you do. Art is as special as you think. Art is an abstraction of society through an artist’s lens. As a form of art, what are folktales? A representation of society, only exaggerated for drama by the storyteller? Very possible. Or maybe more? Maybe I should rethink this again. It sounds promising.

Mizoram

The third best thing about Mizoram is how intensely beautiful the scenery is. It is not ideal for a great number of things – the road, for example. Travelling is a pain because sometimes you see your destination straight ahead but it will take you an hour to reach it because you have to go round the fat portions of a hill, or two – or three! – to get there. Anyone who has ever travelled to Siaha from Lawngtlai will testify – three hours to travel 10kms as the crow flies; not a funny joke.

Building on this, it is not ideal for development. Anywhere that roads aren’t ideal cannot presume to have it easy with development projects. It is not ideal for fun escapades either, especially when monsoon lasts and lasts until the earth is pregnant with rainwater and always threatening to leak water and heavy chunks of clay all over the roads for close to a majority of the year. It is definitely not ideal for agriculture and for nearly half the year, the hills look like they’ve been through hellfire; probably not that far off, to be honest. Huge scars left behind bald hills and black soot raining down every March? Magnificent blemish on the beauty of the hills.

But on the whole, beautiful scenery. It soothes the soul to see green hills rolling over each other. Even cliffs are gorgeous, except you do not overmuch want to be close to them or god forbid, hanging off of them. It is lovely to see the hills change colour as they grow more distant from you – different shades of green that taper off to blue until they merge with the blue of the horizon or stopped by fluffy white clouds in impossibly blue skies. Any walk in the woods is blessed by the sounds of the forest and the melodies of the birds, the insects, the animals, the water and the wind. Just be careful not to walk into a snake or leeches and you’re golden.

Full moon nights are magical. I’ve watched the moon burn bright orange one October night in 2010 driving back from Lunglei to Aizawl. You should not experiment with this probably, but we could travel by moonlight, which is to say even with our headlights switched off, we could see the earth illuminated in the golden glow of the October full moon. I’ve sat outside in cold December nights in Champhai counting stars and admiring the only three heavenly objects I can identify – Orion’s Belt, Sirius and Betelgeuse.

Sunsets are majestic; I’ve stopped my engines on my evening drives multiple times just to watch the explosion of colour on the sky behind black hills. It is a spiritual experience, like you are observing the face of the Creator in front of you.

Of course, in the age of the curated happiness of social media – your Instagrams, Facebooks and WhatsApps – people would often care more about Digital Likes than basking in the glory of the Now. Phones are whipped out at every glorious moment, in the hopes of capturing happiness which inspirational quotes have already taught us was like trying to capture a butterfly in flight; rest and let the butterfly come to you, right? But I’ve noticed sceneries are notoriously hard to capture in all their magnificence. Ultimately, you are subjected to tons of pictures on your Wall of unfocused and confused angles of the sky, flowers, hills, what-have-you. Nature photography is a precise, artsy skill; not possessed by many.

In fact, I’d even suggest this is akin to amazing singers singing songs and making it look so easy that everybody starts thinking they could also do it and then suddenly, cacophony all around! I knew this for a fact when back in November 2022, Michael Learns To Rock came to play in Aizawl and thankfully, my DC and SDO(S) smiled indulgently and said I could go see them and gave me a bunch of official Aizawl errands to run while I was home. I was in the crowd that night, “belting” out their songs along with them, which is to say I was screaming the lyrics out instead of matching the tune because obviously, I am not the best singer in Aizawl. Not even in my family, if I’m honest. But Jascha Richter on stage could make the notes seem so effortless. Incredible. In any case, it was alright because although my throat was hoarse from the singing and the sore throat that I was deliberately ignoring, and although I skinned my knees because I fell down and had a shiny bruise as a souvenir for the night, I sang with MLTR and Jascha Richter liked my IG post the following day. Any chance to tell this story. Carefully curated happiness indeed!

Nature aside, what is wonderful about Mizoram is the sense of society and belongingness, however real or pretend it may be. It is enough that the society is big in Mizoram. There is a lot to be said about it but as one of my JNU seniors put it, there is no other society I’d rather die in than the Mizo one. I suppose that makes Community the second best thing about Mizoram.

I cannot say for any other group outside of my own, but for the people inside this group, Mizoram and the Mizo community is amazing. Socialism is alive in Mizoram even when as a political theory it is rejected by many in favour of the more shiny ones like Capitalism. Not all facets of Socialism, obviously, but the idea of equality and egalitarianism, very definitely, even when it is denied its name. It is true that unfettered equality/egalitarianism is impossible to maintain, or truly, not to be actively desired, but an element of it is certainly to be applauded.

It is often said that the real measure of bonds are found in trying times – it is not the people who make it to your celebratory days; it is the people who are there when your world is crumbling down. Mizoram and Mizo society have their flaws and their extreme shortcomings, but in our deepest moments of grief, there is nothing like people putting aside their own chores and coming to grief with you, the community making arrangements for you that are difficult for you when you’re shrouded in loss and feeling disoriented; and friends, family and neighbours acting as solid anchors when you’re floundering in the sea of sorrow. All this, despite who you are as a person. Because the society was always bigger than the sum of its parts.

Society being what it is and we being who we are, a valid question that often arise is how much is too much? How much of society do we want or need in our lives? How far should society dictate our lives? Death is very final and hence cannot be the only measure of a society. It is indeed true that hard times test you and your relationships, but it is also equally true that many people will find it easier to commiserate with you than to celebrate with you wholeheartedly. Every time there is an accident, a mob arises that is often uncontrollable, in a matter of seemingly seconds, like something out of a Stephen King story. People with a morbid fascination for the gruesome, indulging in tragedy porn. That aside, even when no gore is involved, how often have we felt like people have been waiting for us to make even a single mistake? Not that alien a feeling, is it? So in the grand scheme of things, how much society is too much society?

In the winter of 2022, a man unfortunately drowned in Keilungliah dam in Champhai at around 1:30 in the afternoon. By 3PM, the place was filled with spectators. It wouldn’t be farfetched to assume that 99% of those gathered could not swim. Yet there they were, even as the evening wore on into the night, curiously hanging around the 40-50 feet deep body of water, excitedly chattering away, from gossip and the cold. Shit, if anyone of them fell in, there’d be multiple casualties and possibly even more loss of life. When I asked the spectators to go home for the night and not cause more troubles for police, rescue ops, divers and the society leaders, one man snapped at me intoning that that was inadvisable because those gathered there were volunteers and if we refused them their place here, we would kill the spirit of altruism in the soul of the Mizo – the sacred tlawmngaihna – and we’d not find any more volunteers later on in other incidents. I cannot say I was right and he was wrong, but as a magistrate and a sociologist, but more importantly, the hoper of far flung hopes and dreamer of impossibly optimistic dreams, I replied that Mizo tlawmngaihna was not so fragile that it would die if a government-cum-non-government-organisation’s Search & Rescue op that required specialization (in this case, swimming and in particular, diving) would request they gave them space. Indeed, this graceful stepping back is a lesson in tlawmngaihna we need to learn in the society; sometimes, our good hearts and our curious heads really do hamper certain jobs – controlling fire outbreaks, for example, is sometimes made difficult by spectators jamming up traffic or using up water; it’s weird.

People often make the mistake of looking at society through myopic lenses. You cannot pick and choose one ideal standard to measure anything in its entirety, leave alone an entity as great as a society. You have to try to look at the Big Picture or succumb to inevitable toxic environments myopic, narrow thinking leads to. Mizoram is wonderful in many ways, it is sorely lacking in others; so are the Mizo. So is everybody else, too. Besides, Mizoram is very young. Someone born in the 80s went through a very dramatic time when a phone was a solid green box in the living room to Now where your watch can look for your phone! And why would it do that? Because the world is in your phone, just a click away. Doctors today can implant plastic in your eyes to help cure your myopia; we can allow for some leeway in the way we look at Mizoram and the Mizo and try to be less myopic. If Mizoram has a lot to learn, let her learn. In about a century, she has undergone such changes as to witness head-hunting rituals to technology at her fingertips!

Which brings me to the best thing about Mizoram which obviously is that it attained statehood in 1987 which is the same year I was born which makes Mizoram as old as I am which is cool.