Atongla Rothrong
If I just think of how we live here in Nagaland, I usually come to the conclusion that it is paradise compared with the other countries and states suffering from natural calamities like hurricanes, earthquakes, famine and bloodshed.
But anyone who claims that the older ones have had a more difficult time, certainly doesn’t realize to what extend our problems weigh down on us, problems for which we are probably much too young, but which thrust themselves upon us continually, until after a long time, we think we’ve found the solution, but the solution doesn’t seem able to resist the facts which reduce it to nothing again. That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered.
It’s really a wonder; we haven’t dropped all our ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, we should keep them, because in spite of everything, we still believe that people are really good at heart. We simply can’t build up our hopes consisting of confusion, misery and death. We are seeing the world gradually being turned into a wilderness; we hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. We may not feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if we are to look up into the heavens, I think that it will come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.
In the meantime, we must uphold our ideals, for perhaps the time will come when we shall be able to carry them out.
Do you gather a bit of what I mean, or have I been skipping too much from one subject to another? I can’t help it, the prospect that we may be sitting over a bomb about to erupt, facing a gun barrel ready to be triggered, or swimming in a pool with red water colour, unables me to be too hopeful. Forgive me, but you and I seem to be living in a generation called “Bundle of Contradiction”, contradiction from without and contradiction from within.
I twist my heart round, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I would so like to be, and what I could be, if……..there weren’t any other people living in the world.
