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| Photo by Sergio Souza. |
We speak about how the Naga people and their generations have changed, which is essentially a premise we employ to make comparative assumptions about things positive or negative. Personally, I feel times do not change; Nagas did not change — they merely changed their options.
The personality of any society is decided primarily by the choices of the individual. His choices are then reflected on his immediate family, for instance. The family then projects the learned behavior on people outside their immediate circle of kinship — friends, lovers, neighbors, colleagues et al. This phenomenon is called introjection — the unconscious adoption of the thoughts or personality traits of others in speech, behavior or value systems.
We are lax about the failure of the state system; we normalised corruption; normalised soppy clichés that pass for academic discourse; normalised the loss of modesty among Naga women; normalised weak, whiny men who cannot distinguish moral courage from self-absorbed righteousness.
If one can assess whether or not a person reads good literature just by the way he talks, or determine his familial upbringing by how he treats others, then how effortless to point to the downfall of the Naga cultural capital merely by looking to their families.
Meaning, each of us is responsible for this sad, steaming pile of chaos that Nagaland and her people have become.
We created a monster out of good intentions applied wrong.
