It's all about balls and brains!

By Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei *

In a bicycle-rickshaw, in one of the Indian cities, one was driven into a crumbling place where the streets are below flattened and hardened mud with trapped plastic waste. The sky was occupied by noisy rooks as though soon they would form a sheet which could blanket the entire sky.

As the man furthered in thick wafts of stench struck one's face, but the man showed no willingness to hurry me out from the place, instead he maintained the same speed. I said to myself while my nose was covered with a handkerchief: perhaps he is tired and I shouldn't ask him to hurry me out from this place wrapped in stench. I said nothing.

The man slowed down to fumble in his shirt pocket for his Chinese mobile phone. The speed returned and the man issued out happy-sounding words.

The thick stench hanging all over the place; the noisy rooks above; the landscape which looked would collapse anytime, all these didn't matter to the man.

He was one of those who are forced to leave his village to make money in a city. To huddle to bath with many of his kind about a broken tape which issues water once a day, then to jump on the saddle after a plate of rice mixed with potato curry.

He will remain the entire day on the saddle and many a times in the day many say nasty things and he gets less, and when possible he asks for more. When completely exhausted he will look for a place where his kind usually huddle for some cheap liquor with ten-rupee contribution. Then with feet on the saddle and back on passenger seat he sleeps.

Observing this man and the setting one was instantly taken back to my home. One couldn't be wrong with this analogy of the wretched rickshawallah as the people and the stench-wrapped, dilapidated setting with noisy rooks above.

Imagine one of the remotest places in the world where cost of living is as high as any big city in the world; a place where a jobless individual pays more than a hundred rupee for a litre of petrol, while people in other major cities come out to protest when it costs them seventy rupee.

If you have been making money on speculations, Kangleipak( Manipur) is the place where your returns will exceed your highly inflated speculation; if you are selling a 15 kilogram LPG cylinder in Mumbai below a thousand rupee and yet making some margins, then invest some in Kangleipak where you can sell one cylinder at three thousand rupees.

If risk is what is concerned about there are easy ways to arrange security with willing lots at few hundred a month.

When you run into a few hordes questioning the nature of your business, you just tell them the goods arrived in planes, since the highways have long been blocked. If this doesn't convince them, which is quite usual, tell them black-books clutchers whispering "Jesus" have been doing that because they have been told that they have to be "The Nagas." You could giggle when you say that since it's a Sanskrit word, nothing indigenous, though.

When you begin telling those hordes you could smile at the questions you put to "The Nagas": What language does a Tangkhul man use when he speaks to an Angami man? Can a Meitei man not understand Maring or Khoiboo language? Don't the Meiteis and other tribes have the same origin? Where did "The Nagas" come from?

You know that: It's communal politics and perverts playing New Delhi game, while the line is drawn by religion. You also know: what does the black book say; it doesn't say that one should go to church to make political decisions to block highways so that ordinary people can die of starvation and lack of medical supplies.

Ask a crowd where Obama was born, the first person to put up his/her hand is certainly from Kangleipak, then ask the same individual why " does it have to Jana Neta Irabot instead of Lanyaba( pioneer)" he/she will be first pick up a stone to throw at you.

Now you can go and ask a renown academic with this PHD and that PHD from this and that university about the existing maladies he/she will blurt out all in few minutes because they are in his/her theses, then ask him what should be done and whether he/she has tried extra steps you will get a bitter look from that individual, who a while ago was efficiently capable of verbosity.

No doubt, the place is good for business.

Not only your rice, potatoes, LPG, petrol, etc. can be sold at multiplied prices but your arms and ammunition do have a ever-growing market. You just have to be a bit like Viktor Bout, though. Those jungle-trained old fogies who are not over with Karl Marx and Mao can afford the supplies, for they cut and bleed a wretched people to keep their utopias alive.

With them you only do business, but don't share your opinion with them, since they could go berserk and turn those barrels against their taxed-people, something they could never dare when a platoon of Indian army pick up their sisters and mothers to draw pleasures.

They turn on their barrels where they can and where there is money. And they think a Kalashnikov can change the world and bring them what they dream of possessing; perhaps the dream of driving one of those noisy mini-cars meant for senseless middle class Indians with music blaring out the rolled down windows and one hand holding a smoldering Chinese 'fag.'

People have forgotten that they are humiliated and their world is entirely in the grip of others. Instead they fake a world in which there are hopes, freedom, enough to eat and jobs. Perhaps they see them on the surface of the moon.

This indifference must have been a state from which they would emerge to do "stuff", but the prolonged-state in which they are only manifests their tomfoolery and incompetence, which we often find in a defeated people who have been booted from one side to another and then to be trampled for they have not risen.

Should you have "balls and brains", you should be questioning your conscience, your conducts and the conducts of others as well. How could you still fake that "all is cool" when there is no food to eat, no fuels for your vehicles, schools and colleges are shut for teachers haven't been paid in months?

It isn't cool at all. How could you go about screaming it's right to strangle others' throats and snatch their food just because you happen to be capable of jungle justification and yours is accepted by "sheep?" Have people actually forgotten to see others as loveable humans in whom you can find the same senses you possess?

Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei

* Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei contributes to e-pao.net regularly.
The writer can be contacted at bobomeitei(at)hotmail(dot)com
This article was webcasted on September 27 2011.