One of the many statements by American President George Bush in the height of the country's "Operation Enduring Justice" in Afghanistan to "smoke the Talibans out of their caves," continues to ring on. Obviously thrilled at the asymmetric nature of the weapons equation between America and rest of the world, he had proposed to further modernize the country's military machine - a daunting task that he described would be something in the nature of overhauling the engine of a car running at 80 miles per hour, (in scales familiar to us, that would be something like 130 kmph). A near impossible task, but one which Bush suggested America must perform if it was to eliminate all shadows of a challenge to its military superiority for at least all of the foreseeable future. A task he must have thought in his moments of optimism is not entirely out of America's hope range, considering the country's tremendous human and material resources, as well as its enduring power, as exhibited in the fight-back after the devastating attacks on September 11.

The truth is, in a less dramatic fashion, and for a totally different, (and we suppose a lesser ambition as well), Manipur too is faced with a similar challenge - to get rid of its economic ills. The tendency has been to revert to references of a self-sufficient pre-modern economy of the past, where agriculture was the mainstay, strongly supported by a pre-modern secondary sector, constituting basically of tradition professions like blacksmith, loom weaving, cane work, etc.. It is true that this economy was self sufficient, but we contend, only in that environment. What is more often than not forgotten, or else ignored, is another factor that determines self sufficiency - the level of expectations of the people at a given time. For self sufficiency must necessarily mean an equilibrium between achievement and expectation. If a square meal is all that the people ask for, and they are not averse to a hermit's existence, then self sufficiency cannot be much of a challenge. It is when the people start wanting television sets, motor cars, foreign travels, credit cards, and such other trappings of the modern economy, and their State begins wanting Sukhoi aircrafts and ballistic missiles, that things get complicated. Our failure has been, to our mind, in the effort to successfully transform or transport the indigenous professions and technologies, to the modern era. The question that we should address ourselves honestly is also, even if there had been a will as well as political vision to do it, would it have been possible. Perhaps, but only if we were existing in a vacuum, with no competition from any other quarters, able to develop naturally at our own pace, waiting for Thomas Alva Edition, and the Wright Brothers and Gottleib Daimler and Neil Bohr and Albert Einstein to emerge from amongst us. But no such Utopia happened. What then are the choices before us? Do we jump on to the aeroplane the Wright Brothers invented, ride the motor vehicles Daimler fashioned... or else attempt overhauling on the run, the engine of a vehicle of a past era, while also trying to keep pace with the breakneck, cutthroat competition everywhere? A satisfactory answer perhaps is somewhere in between. Accept the modern without discarding the past. We should first stop wailing though.