"Chingna koina panshaba, chingmeena koina panngaakpa…Manipur sana leibaakni" (Surrounded by hills, defended by hill men…is our great land, Manipur). This is how our forefathers used to describe this beautiful land. My grandfather used to tell me on many occasions that different ethnics in our hills were different forms of our brethrens. Amongst them, Kabuis and Tangkhuls were the closest ones.

I heard about the bravery and peculiar hairdo of our Tangkhul brethrens, and the watchfulness of the Tangkhul hui (Tangkhul breed of dog) from him. Needless to mention, the relation between Kabuis and the valley was of royal level. Many of them reliably served the Meitei Kings even more than their Meitei counterparts.

We can’t imagine a Meitei Lai Haraoba (festival of Meitei Deities) without Naga dance. Khamba, the hero of Meitei romantic folk story, Khamba-Thoibi, and role model of many Meitei lovers of olden times, and his sister, Khamnu were brought up in our glorious hills by Khaangaraakpa, a close friend of Khamba’s father and a hill village chief.

If we try to remember, Pamheiba (Garib Niwaz), the conceiver of Vaishnavism in the valley grew up in our lofty hills. The list is inexhaustible if we try to unfold the centuries old brotherly relationship between the hill and valley.

But why do I compel to remind all these things? Don’t we know it? Are we talking about people of far seashore or of African jungles or Sahara desert?

No, we are talking about our own people who have been living nearest to us - but still seem to be always far?

We belong to same Mongoloid group, we eat the same food, we have same taboos and have similar origins; we look similar in the eyes of the world, but we always feel that we are different. We have dyed ourself with borrowed traditions, languages, religions, customs, rituals and beliefs.

So, we see ourself different from our own people. Vaishnavism brought change of lifestyles, cleanliness, and respect to elders, warmth towards any living being for the valley people. Christianity, in the hills, came as an eye-opener, realization of self-respect and good education. But on both the occasions, we undermined the hill-valley relationship.

"Yesterday, you were my brother, today you are of low caste – somebody we must not interact with, as I’m now a Vaishnavite Hindu while you remain the same uncivilized hill tribe." This was contrasted by, "we cannot be of one family anymore, as you have been treating us like an uncivilized tribe for long, and now we have learned to live of our own." Like a ship that shoves away with the changing wind from the shoreline, we began to tear apart from each other with each passing day. And we never ever had realized this.

Today, we are educated and civilized, we are now aware of our rights; we can define what are sovereignty, liberation, homeland and the ‘state’. 1500 years ago, we might be probably used to share a single fruit sitting on the same branch of a tree, looking the gifted beauty of our land.

We never thought that he was a Christian or a Hindu and a hill man or a valley man. But today, we talk on the lines of "our people" and "their people", because we are aware of Woodrow Wilson’s ‘city state’ and Mao’s social progresses and equality.

This Christmas, Santa Claus arrives in our hills with an extraordinary gift, a hope of peace, a gift that has always been longing for by the people of this region – this is really astonishing, and has never been happened before in the past 50 years.

This is the time we tend to forget all our hard days inebriating with the cocktail of icy wind and Christmas jingles. This is the time, on the other hand, we feel the viciousness of the chilly breeze through our ear, and our breath becomes smoky as visible vapour.

Yes, it is also the time when our innocent eyes spend a hard time in distinguishing valley man and hill man, as both of them are clad with the same attire of Naga shawl to defend from the bone-chilling cold.

With each passing day, the fog becomes thicker closing all the eight directions, but souls like me, slowly drift into a probably unrealizable dream with all those folk and real stories of the grandfathers, and wish if time winds back to those wonderful days again!