Tomichan Matheikal's blog

  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 abo

courtesy The Hindu “Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are,” said a nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon .  Elaborating on that view, Samuel P. Huntington said in his book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order , “For people seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential.” I lived in Meghalaya for a decade and a half.  As an enemy in the sense Huntington means.  Dkhar was one of the first Khasi words I learnt.  It is a pejorative term for the ‘outsider’.  I was a dkhar in Shillong just like thousands of others there who hailed from ethnically different backgrounds.  In the latter half of 1980s I witnessed people of Nepali origin being hunted and driven out of Shillong.  I lived in a part of Shillong where people of Nepali origin abounded.  I witnessed people being beaten up brutally.  I saw people being loaded into trucks and driven away.  My landlord, a Khasi gentleman who smelled of wh