Al Ngullie
The clarity and vehemence with which the right-thinking, mindful young Naga today communicates his choice and reacts to the collapse around him, is to be ignored at the risk of great consequences. His grievance never targeted the machine – his unapologetically open demonstration of reasoning is against a value system his father’s generation created.
What is this value system now found so blameworthy? It is one that was built on feudal narcissism and social insecurity, fuelled by political instability and nourished by new world naïveté which the concept of Global Village, Globalization and the new millennium’s technologies brought to the tribal Nagas. In the dimly lit Naga kitchens, one truthful insight has remained constant – the Naga warriors boarded an airplane when they were still naked and savage. The new world came before we were even far from prepared to absorb the history-changing leap into the modern world. Such a background laid the foundation for a value system in the nature of the one we see, know and experience today in Nagaland.
A Burdensome Inheritance
So what might be the outcome of this value system? The answers are best answered in questions. The instances illustrating the 'fruits' are myriad: What sad school of though planted in the modern Naga youths the notion that only a Maruti Gypsy and a designation as a government officer are the pinnacle of human triumph? What pitiful insecurity squeezed in the belief that a political people can build empires without fuel from a self-sustaining, self-generating local economy? Why feudal peculiarity gave birth to the eccentric conviction that culture is never progressive? What nature of faith has failed to defy corruption and manipulation because of the complacence that cleansing State and Society is the task of only the mechanisms of Law and Justice? When did cowardice become the best answer to the corruption, the lies, the thievery, the deceit, manipulation and the blood and the lies Nagaland is wallowing in today?
Mark these words: The right-thinking young Naga hungers with a vengeance to rise and seize the ills his father’s system created, and see to their destruction. This is the mind of the truthful young Naga today – the next generation belongs to him and the task of reinventing the sad heritage of his father is the son’s, to accomplish. To the condescending senior, such a statement must definitely seem a lofty piece of idealism founded on naïveté and wanton caprice. After all, the young are young and inexperienced, are they not so? There, dear senior, you fail yet again.
What is the value system the preceding two generations created? The system is a sad narration of a society diseased by Political Correctness, fear and hyperbolic pretensions woven around feudal and political insecurity; a society diseased by complacence; an ethnic people manipulating cultural symbols to satisfy selfish ambitions. When the right-thinking Naga citizen is already seeing, living and experiencing the dire straits his people and State are in, what more explanation is required to convince him otherwise?
New Identity, Old Truth
The brand-conscious, internet-driven, individualistic young Naga vagabond is the advertiser’s livelihood. But this Facebook-guzzling youth has little patience for the diffidence his father’s generation nurtured during the past 50 years. The reason is simple: the young Naga cannot even enjoy his branded apparel or his hamburger because his sense of security, connection and belief system has been breached by social insecurity, political apathy and manipulative, adaptive ideologies the older generation bred. What options do the young Nagas have? No, none so far.
Hence, naturally, the Naga youth is an angry Naga – he expects his purpose within the very challenges his father’s generation created (and now refuses to own up to).
Today. the internet is the world. Emergent web technologies have reduced perspectives to a screen. A small glimpse at the revolution on the web will suffice. The free and honest opinions Naga youths express are encouraging enough to challenge any observer. Conversations for them have begun confronting the uneasy comfort of Political Correctness (Nagas are proficient in it). The almost shameful vulnerability of the 1960s generation to take offense is not so much a burden now. In Nagaland, the truth is not in the newspapers but on the internet. In fact, the voice of truth is being spoken there – unapologetic but self-respectful. On the internet are things, issues and opinions, newspapers is Nagaland do not, would not and cannot publish. If you wish to know what truth the intellectual Naga is actually expressing – not what the newspapers show – you only need to log in. The real voice of the real Naga has harnessed a new identify of self-respect to claim what is rightfully his. The youth have now harnessed the new enablement technology has empowered them with.
I feel to offer our youths a small word or two of encouragement. One exceptionally irrefutable fact our senior generation – leading citizens, policy-makers and Naga leaders in general – continues to fail to notice is that the Naga youth today is no more the small-town hopeful. He is the global crusader. And an angry one at that too.
Children of the Gutters
The modern Naga youths fashion opinions that were nurtured by the frustration, blood, and dissatisfaction and censure their history of pain and darkness fed them. The angry Naga youth not only sees; he now perceives and discerns as well. He is no more willing to swallow the claims of his government and society. The Media has no space for him. But the modern Naga youth is today master of an incredible facility not even the convenient tradition of censure among Nagas can suppress and oppress – the virtual world. The virtual world – access to personalized technology, the Internet and growing interaction with peoples and cultures beyond the borders of Nagaland’s kitchen – offer him a free, unbiased, uncensored and a welcoming space for him to communicate; to communicate his impatience that he can no longer tolerate the system his father created. The Naga youth demands change. And change he shall have. Just watch.
