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...

AI-generated image Heavendrea was my landlady for many, many years. We got along very well because there wasn’t any occasion when we had to get along together. Fritz Perls would have loved us because we lived out his ideal of ‘I do my thing and you do your thing.’ I was not in Shillong to live up to Heavendrea’s expectations and Heavendrea wasn’t there to live up to mine, and, more importantly, we both acknowledged that. She wanted me to pay the rent in the first week of every month which I did without fail. Life was simple because the matriarch had few demands. I was one among many of the tenants in Heavendrea’s little kingdom. Her house was a proper building with a solid foundation and brick walls. The houses given on rent looked like makeshift structures with floors and walls made of wood and roofs of tin. I liked my little house anyway because Shillong hardly offered anything better to ‘outsiders’. My house had two little rooms and a littler kitchen. When I approached Heavend...

The name Geronimo is fiction just as most names in this A2Z series are. But Geronimo was real. He was my landlord, the only landlord I ever had in Shillong. All other house owners were women, landladies. Khasi men hardly owned anything except the bottle of drink they carried home at the end of the day. I’m sure the situation is different today. The change had already started even before I quit Shillong. Khasis are a hill tribe that follows matriliny. The mother is the boss at home. The children get the mother’s surname. The father is almost a nobody at home. In the olden tradition, men had certain status as they presided over religious and social functions. With the arrival of Christianity, the priestly and sacerdotal duties were usurped by the clergy. Now the Khasi men had little role to play at home. American journalist Thomas Laird described the Khasi land as a place “where women rule and men are used as breeding bulls.” Whenever I went in search of an accommodation, it was a ...

Florentina is not one individual but a representative of the many females I lived with at St Joseph’s School, Shillong. St Jo was introduced in the last post . It is worth taking a closer look at St Jo.   St Jo was an exclusively girl’s school when I joined it as a math teacher in the high school section in 1986. It belonged to a Catholic congregation of nuns and was quite an old structure with classic wooden planks for floors. I can see from the Internet that the entire campus has undergone a sea change although Shillong is at an elevation of 1500 metres from sea-level. Much more than the infrastructure must have undergone change. A friend of mine visited St Jo recently [does anyone call it by that endearing abbreviation anymore, I wonder] and told me that he was treated very rudely by the principal though he is a Catholic priest. It was that same priest who had got me my first teaching job there at St Jo back in 1986 when the world was a much simpler ambience. He was a stud...

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 an...