Kangleimaichou

If circumstances can play with lives then Nonglei is no exception. At an early age he accidentally joins one of the many insurgent groups in Kangleipak( Manipur), and during his days with them he becomes mentally sick and thus finds a way out. The only way is to migrate to one of the mainland cities like most people from Kangleipak. After he has arrived he tirelessly looks for ways to leave behind his tainted world. As a person still trying to reconcile with his past he pursues conventional higher studies with little enthusiasm, and later, like most people, he is compelled to look for a job. He ends up working for a major daily in the city, but it doesn't take him long to be disgusted despite what others would call his a 'successful journalistic career.' Understanding that his career as a journalist is frivolous he attempts to write for himself as a means to subdue the guilt in him. The more he tries, his world becomes more serious. But that seriousness is another sinc...

What place is this where the educated and the rich can't make walls stand straight for few years, where its advanced people can't keep a new highway free of potholes for a year? They say they are an old civilisation. Every one hollers they are proud of their language yet nothing wise and beautiful has been said in the last many decade. They claim they are the only people in the region to have their own script, but they write foreign words which the natives like to gabber. You mention colonialism to them, you will find millions of them screaming 'Go back India' or 'Go back Indians.' But they are the very people who are happy to marry off their sisters and daughters to Indians, while few men, branded as RK Singh, John Clinton, etc., married to Indian ladies, walk with their chins thrust upward and their chest puffed up. When you find them in hordes belittled in dusty cities like Delhi, you will hear them say," Oh, we are an oppressed people, but in our societ...

It wasn't long ago, it was only a few years back which still looks like only yesterday. You must have seen me there lugging that duplicate Moreh Nike bag, eyes starry, body still hard and sinewy from days in the fields. There were special meals for me for twenty consecutive days in the entire district. Each one of the relatives and family friends fed me with the look on their faces saying: Oh boy, we will never see you again. I was going away with the mask of the master in one hand while the another lugging the duplicate bag. I was too shy to put on that though; I wasn't so sure where I should start wearing that master's thing. My old man was full of emotions, my mother was devastated, so it was those people, who had once trodden the unknown patches, who kept telling me why I should wear that mask or from where I could start wearing. Someone said,"From Awang BOC." There were conflicting voices," No, no. People may say things. Don't listen to him, you c...