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.

Autumn Goodbye girlies to August's salt air (and the rust on their door)

I never connected them until May 1, 2025 when Spotify shuffle played Britney Spears’ Autumn Goodbye about three songs after Taylor Swift’s August but oh dear lawd, the feels.

Autumn Goodbye was a 17 yo girl, cocky and vibrant, full of life, eager to experience. She never promised a happy ending and was never told they wouldn’t make her cry. Her youth, counting on days to come that she probably felt she had, simply accepted that the summer love that bloomed from April through September will keep them warm long after their seemingly inevitable autumn goodbye.

In contrast, August was a 31 yo woman, longing for love and companionship, who never needed anything more than salt air and the rust on their door, only to realise that they were destined to be lost in memories as August was sipped away like a bottle of wine. Why? Because that time was never hers to lose.

As she processed her break-up, Autumn Goodbye realises that she wants to hold on to a faint hope because ‘my heart has a place for that smile on your face’. Through red leaves and blue tomorrows, she hopes that time will give back the love that they shared on the time that they borrowed.

They say you never forget your first.

August no longer really hopes for a reconciliation. Wiser and older, she chooses to linger in memories from back when they were still changing for the better and wanting was enough. Because for her it had been enough to live for the hope of it all. I imagine her reminiscing of an August that slipped from her like a moment in time, saying: ‘So much for summer love and saying us’, actions of a younger woman, because she now knows he hadn’t been hers to lose.

They also say you can’t lose what you never had.

Summer loves. That’s what was similar about these two songs. Summer loves as told by a 17 yo girl and a 31 yo woman. Who hasn’t been through that?

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.

AI and Art and the Human Soul

Some time ago I saw a very thought provoking internet poster that spoke on art. A very tiny discussion but extremely intriguing to me.

Someone very snidely posited that every time you have wealthy kids that don’t need to work, they become useless and they play at and waste good money on some form of the arts. And precisely because not everybody can be very good at the arts, we get subpar artists. Besides which, they don’t move society along because they’re not productive members of the society as their illustrious sires.

To which someone countered, and I concur, that instead of being disparaging, why don’t we examine how curious it is that when humans don’t need to work for survival, we naturally gravitate towards the arts?

Doesn’t that speak at something primal within the framework of our very being? That over the course of history, perhaps moved along by the industrial revolution, we have somehow got to a point of evaluating all our lives' worth by how productive we are. Is this what we were made for? Is work all that there is to us? Are our lives to be measured solely by the economy and science of it all? Cogs in a wheel. Until the day we retire. And then die. Which, bleakly, is the best case scenario. Some people don’t even make it to retirement, after all.

In Sommarøy in Norway, as a publicity stunt for tourism, the locals have decided to do away with conventional time zones. The 24-hour clock is discarded. People do what they do. I’m sure there are some rules in place to stop society descending into chaos, but for the greater part of it, they apparently don’t operate in the strict 24-H rhythm. I mention this because of one very important outcome: they survive. Things still work.

So why are we so obsessed with being productive that it seemingly becomes all that there is to us? People should have some time to themselves. People need to de-stress, de-toxify, de-clutter. There are always more important things than things – people, family, friends, us.

And art.

It’s funny I was chatting with Atu the other day and Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli came up in the conversation. Miyazaki has proclaimed his disdain for AI art. He calls it an “insult to life itself”. This goes out for ChatGPT and all those other AI products that imitate life but without soul. Very sci-fi territory.

I think it is curious that we somehow thought with the rise of AI, we were imagining robots and the computers doing our calculations and our manual works for us. Sci-fi imagined lifelike robots of various designs that have rendered human labour unnecessary. Sci-fi dreamed of androids that could do the menial works of humans at better speed and strength than flesh and blood ever could. And what do the humans do? They turn to arts. Sci-fi is filled with beauty as far as the human society goes. Human society becomes artsy and fancy again because the machines are doing everything for us. Of course at some point, we enter dystopia but that’s the other end of the spectrum. Inevitable, one might even say.

In real life, however, the rise of AI has come to mean rise of AI art! What is human art that is time consuming and imperfect and expensive going to be valued at when AI can mass-produce art? How is a human artist going to compete with an AI that can combine the works of oh I don’t know Vincent Van Gogh and Sandro Boticelli and Leonardo da Vinci maybe in a matter of seconds and come up with its own Master Painter, with its own USP no less? Depressing to think about.

Art is how humans become immortal. Art is how we still remember William Shakespeare and Whitney Houston and Maggie Smith and Michaelangelo. It is not an indication of a person gone soft. Art is the soul of humans. Whenever humans don’t need to hustle and fight for survival, we have always naturally turned to the arts. Science and arts are not even all that different. It’s only when we quantify science that we divorce them. 

It is interesting to think about what that soul will evolve to when it is AI that produces our art for us.

Foreign Words

There are some foreign words that just capture shit. I have a list here of three words from three different languages that I constantly use and love. 

Schadenfreude: This is a German word. I learned it from the seriously cute and sharp-witted comedian Trevor Noah. It describes that feeling you have when you delight in someone else’s misery. As of 25th March 2025, after the drug bust of a local entrepreneur, a very apt word to describe the mood of Mizo netizens, feels like. Which, by the way, was the random muse that inspired this blog.

Mendokusai: This is a Japanese word. I learned it from Atu who is my Go To for all things Japanese. My favourite rendition of it is by Nyanko Sensei in his Madara form, from Natsume Yujinchou. It is the same as the Mizo “AVBT”. For those who don’t speak Mizo, the very tame English word for it is “troublesome”, the exclamation of it probably being, “what a bother!” or more colourfully: for fuck’s sake. Captures the essence, doesn’t it?

Maya: This is Sanskrit for illusion. It recalls the great sages of India who refer to this world as such. An illusion. Of the cosmic variety. The most famous representation of Maya in popular culture is possibly The Matrix, where people are unaware of their true selves and their true reality and are wrapped up instead in a grand illusion. Delusion, perhaps. For those who can see past this veil of reality that obscures the true face of the self and the universe, greatness and a sense of peace possibly, is possible. Maya relates to Brahma, the Creator. In that all things are One. To think of yourself as anything different from the Universe is a lie. Because anything that takes you away from this Union with God is Maya. Illusion. Beautiful.

If you want to start adding them into your lexicon, be my guest. Just memorise the spellings and Google for the pronunciations.

Tivolian Cowardice

Sci-fi writers really observe people so closely and can lift out behaviour traits so well and isolate them just to make them sound/look ridiculous until one day you’re like: OMG I know a Tivolian!!

Now, Tivolians are a humanoid race of people from the planet Tivoli whose main defining trait is cowardice. But this cowardice was not subjective or passive. In fact, this cowardice was very calculated. The Eleventh Doctor would describe it as “aggressive cowardice”.

At first glance, the Tivolians were a society of cowards who had grown so used to being conquered and occupied by other races it had become a way of life just to accept it. They never defended themselves and did everything they could to make their conquerors as comfortable as possible. In fact their anthem was basically “Glory to [Insert Name Here]” so as to make it easier for invaders. 

All this seemed amusing, if but slightly exhausting, and you even feel sad for them and maybe would defend them, until you start to realise that this cowardice was decidedly a plan of hostile action. That at the core of it was a combative disloyalty. You realise that a Tivolian would switch sides on you the moment the wind shifted.

Now do you understand my first para better? You do know a Tivolian in real life too, don’t you?