In the wee hours of a Monday morning, I was standing in the lounge of the international airport, making small talks with a distant auntie. Her son was attending medical school in Nanchang (Sanghai, China) and it happened to be his first trip abroad. We were looking around for other Indians attending the same med school.

Suddenly a chirpy voice in heavily accented Manipuri addressed us from behind. A heavy set woman in her mid fifties introduced herself telling us that her son is attending the same school. I felt relieved, but auntie put on a wary smile and thanked her. I smelt something wrong with the attitude of my auntie.

Only when the lady left did I found out the reasons for her cocky attitude. She called her son aside and with a stern look told him never to mix with 'chingmis'.

She turned to me, "see he can get easily spoilt, if he gets along with them", to emphasize her opinion. Well, auntie is running a big organization, but she still has not been even to shake off the shackles of our pre-conceived and totally concocted notions, we Meiteis have of our brothers from the hills.

It made me thinking. And then out of the blue I realized that in more ways than one, Meiteis in a big way are responsible for the current fracas and melee in Manipur.

For one, we carry ourselves as a holy race, while others (read chingmis) are looked down with contempt. We seem to unnecessary affix a perennial tag or stamp of 'unholiness' on them. If we walk down the corridors of the not so distant past, we would come across an umpteen number of incidents, that would open our eyes to the way our forefathers rolled out the red carpet to them.

Leave alone sharing table to break bread with them, even their footfall on the holy ground of our premises seem to defile the entire household. We meted out such inane and humiliating hospitability to our visitors from the hills, though we always received a king's welcome in our sojourn to the hills. It definitely sowed the early seeds of hatred.

And for some silly reasons we stereotype the chingmi ningols as an undignified and loose breed. A few years back one might have noticed the endless streams of meitei youths flocking to Chandel, Churachandpur, Ukhrul and other hill districts during Christmas, kut, Gan-ngai, Lungaini and for that matter any and every festival. (You name it.)

Their single-minded purpose is the once in a lifetime chance for a roll in the hay. Simply put, they feel that these girls are easy prey because of their open-minded and devil may care attitude. My dear meitei brethrens let us try to drag off the logs in front of very eyes before we point we out the splinters and specs in other's eyes.

In fact it is true that we have lost their respect. This does not come as a surprise to me looking at the ways we have treated the chingmi ningols for ages. If you take a headcount of the number of cases, where our boys lure them in the name of love and ditch them the moment they jump out of the sack, the sheer number will alarm you. Such untoward behavior puts us in a bad light and their disrespect for us will only manifold with every passing day.

Visit a kindergarten, a higher institute of study; chances are that you will find the chingmis at the receiving end of our endless mockeries and snide remarks. We treat them below par in any walk of life and they are made the butt of every tomba and chaoba's joke.

And however brilliant or talented a chingmi is, we always brand them as a bunch of quota seekers. This does no justice to many intellectuals in their fold. Let's just put ourselves in their shoes and see for ourselves how long can we bear such humiliations and injustices. (Would you try your patience?). We would indeed run out of steam fast and I am dead sure about it.

For one fleeting moment, let us put aside all our cries and shouts at their call for a Nagalim, Zomiland, Kukiland etc.etc. Behind these bigger political pictures, there is an undercurrent of hatred and resentment of the meiteis running deep in their veins. I feel that many of our small ways have resulted in catastrophes in big ways.

They have more than enough reasons to hate us and resent our imposing authority. Why don't we try to inflate our larger than life ego, before it burst at the seam? And yes, my dear visitors of e-pao, I am not a political activist, so excuse me if I am not politically correct. I am just trying to be a realist and learning to shoot straight from the hip.