Skip to main content

Shillong and a little more

 

Hasina Kharbhih, image from the website of her NGO

As I was reading Ashish Kundra’s book, A Resurgent Northeast: Narratives of Change, the name of Hasina Kharbhih caught my attention. It didn’t take me much time to verify that it was the same Hasina whom I taught in high school back in the late 1980s. This is what Kundra says about her:

Sexual exploitation of urban migrants pushed seventeen-year-old Hasina Kharbhih to start the Impulse NGO Network in Meghalaya. She offers a contrarian view of the skilling programme run by the government. ‘Skill India turned our rural youth into labourers,’ she fumes. She pledged to stem the tide of migration of rural women by leveraging an exclusive source of strength of the region: handlooms. Over the years, she has created a network of 30,000 artisans…. A Fulbright scholar, Hasina’s work has won her many accolades and awards.

I had read about Hasina a few years back in the magazine, Down To Earth. Kundra’s book gave me more information about her services in less words. Though I played absolutely no role in her evolution as a social activist, I found myself feeling proud as her teacher.

A friend of mine visited Shillong a couple of weeks back. “It’s a veritable hell,” he said. Development has destroyed the hill station. Monstrous buildings tower on either side of the highway. Vehicles start crawling on the highway much before reaching the city. Too many vehicles, too little space on the road.

That friend and I both lived in Shillong for a fairly long period. I worked 15 years there as a teacher, first at a school and then at a college. He was there as a student mostly and then as a journalist for a brief period. The Shillong we knew is not the Shillong that my friend saw on his visit. “The change is catastrophic,” he said.

Kundra’s book also ends on a note of lament. Development has pitted many parts of Northeast against the risk of losing everything that makes them (the people of Northeast) special, he says.

All these YouTube channels that glorify Shillong are just bluffing people, my friend says. Where’s the charm in a hill station that is smothered by a grotesque concrete jungle and creeping traffic? You can make a reel in some tourist place and project a place as Paradise.

As I read Kundra, I imagined Hasina Karbhih sitting in her car on the last stretch of the Guwahati-Shillong highway. I wondered what she would be thinking of the development that ate Shillong like a cancer.

Kundra mentions, though rather too inconspicuously, that corruption is a serious problem in the Northeast. The union government gives a lot of money and other benefits such as tax exemptions to the region. But the money doesn’t reach the ordinary people of the villages. The so-called leaders eat up all the money. When I was in Shillong, I was astounded by the way the rich grew richer while the poor became poorer in Meghalaya. All the talk about tribal culture of sharing and caring was just blah-blah even in 1980s. The situation must be far worse now.

I see a lot of people from the Northeast working in the fish stalls and other such places here in my hometown in Kerala now. It is very ironical. Earlier we from the South went to Northeast in search of jobs. Now they come over here in search of jobs. Destiny is pretty much of a joke. There’s a difference, however. We were treated as third-class citizens there in the Northeast in those days. But we treat the people from the Northeast here now as any other citizen. We call them bhais, brothers. They used to call us dkhars, outsiders.

They had reasons to feel threatened by our presence among them. We took up good jobs there. We don’t have any reason to feel threatened by their presence here now. They do the jobs which we don’t like to do. Our youth are going to Canada and Australia and so on pursuing big dreams. The youth from the Northeast are here to fill a vacuum in a nightmarish reality. They have become part and parcel of Kerala’s day-to-day life. I wonder what Hasina Karbhih would have to say about it. 

A rural family in Meghalaya, pic from my album of 1980s

PS. This is not a book review, obviously. Just some thoughts that flashed through my mind as I read Kundra’s book which is a fairly good and comprehensive overview of the present condition of the Northeast.

 

 

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    The only absolute guarantee in life is change... very often, not for the better... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Corruption is ruining everything? You don't say... Too many people in power have no concern for the little people. Sigh.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sad that meaningless development is destroying pristine lands.

    ReplyDelete
  4. "development' is a much maligned and abused word.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I too have observed Northeast girls working in hotels of Trivandrum when I was there. Development costs sometimes what we like most.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's it, Murthy ji. Development is a double-edged sword.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...