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.