Velocity in Shillong

In Shillong's Lady Hydari Park, c1997

I lived in the somnolent hill town of Shillong for 15 years. My teaching career started there at St Joseph’s School. St Joe’s students were, with the exception of a handful, Khasi tribal girls and teaching them maths and physics wasn’t a cakewalk. [I started as a maths teacher because that was the subject I graduated in first.] I invented strategies to make the lessons appealing and relevant so that my girls [it was a convent school – quite many of those ‘girls’ may be grandmothers today] would take interest in them. One strategy was to connect the lessons with the actual life in Shillong. I still remember one of the questions that I used to give in the physics class.

Shillong town bus takes half an hour to travel from Iewduh [the bus stand of Shillong] to Nongthymmai [place of my residence] which is 6km away. Carl Lewis takes 10 sec to run 100 metres. A sloth bear can run 500 metres in a minute. Find out which is the fastest among these and which the slowest?

I was a regular commuter and was quite frustrated by the speed of the town buses. The above question was intentionally meant to assuage that frustration by showing to as many people as I could that the speed of Shillong buses was far less than that of Carl Lewis. Even a sloth bear fared far better than those buses. The girls weren’t quite happy with my oblique mudslinging. They were all proud of their capital town, the beautiful, flighty and coquettish Shillong. 

Charming, but Shillong was a town without velocity. Not only the town bus, but the people also creeped. Inertia governed the hill town.

Someone from Himachal Pradesh told me later that the indigenous people of that state also lacked velocity. They take life easy. Perhaps, this relaxed attitude to life has something to do with the mountains. Mountains slow you down.

In his magnum opus, Funeral Nights, Khasi scholar Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih, tells many stories about the innate languor of the Khasis. One such story is about a government employee in Shillong who attended a meeting of the Association of Government Employees. “Yesterday I went to listen to the speech of our president,” one employee tells another. “What did he say?” the other asks. “He told us that we should always do our duties sincerely, a hundred out of a hundred. He explained what that meant. We should work 12% on Mondays; 23% on Tuesdays; 40% on Wednesdays; 20% on Thursdays; and 5% on Fridays.”

That was the velocity of Shillong when I lived there [1986-2001]. If Kynpham’s book is to believed, Shillong hasn’t changed much.

It really took me more than half an hour to travel the 6km from Iewduh to Nongthymmai by the town bus. I have read quite many novels sitting in those buses. Why did they do that, however? Why did they just keep the bus halted at every stop waiting for passengers whereas the number of passengers would be the same whether you run the bus fast or slow? The answer is: that was the Khasi way of doing things. Slow and steady; there is no race to win, however.

Unlike the relaxed approach of the happiest people in the world [Finland], Shillong’s attitude was far from a virtue. Shillong’s relaxation was lassitude, sheer inertia. This inertia is what prevented the state of Meghalaya from achieving any progress worth mentioning. Perhaps, today the state is doing far better. I can see pictures of Shillong town on various websites and the town looks quite different from the time I saw it last. Twenty-two years is quite a long period nowadays.  

Let me end this post with a quote from Kynpham’s book mentioned above.

“Do you know who is progressing (in the state)? The ministers. And the people? They crawl. Ministers are millionaires; their children study abroad, roam about in flashy cars, party and drink, but the ordinary people? They don’t have even the bare necessities like drinking water, electricity, roads, medicines and so on….”

Kynpham’s book was published just over a year ago. That would imply that Shillong and Meghalaya haven’t progressed much from my days there. 

Note: I used the first name of Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih in the post not because I have any personal association with him but because the Khasis generally call each other by the first name. And I too called him by that name in the ephemeral period of my contact with him – a week or so.

PS. This post is part of #BlogchatterA2Z 2023

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