Witoubou Newmai
We need to rethink our understanding of various discourses prevalent in our society. Perhaps, our discourses are guided by non sequiturs. We need to reason together why things are getting veered the way they are today.
Quid pro quos for favours seem to be the sole inhibitor for the discourses from producing the desired effects. In other words, organizations so formed with specific objectives often get veered as elements steering the outfits are overwhelmed by quid pro quos for favours. Also thanks to cronyism, majority of our ‘right organisations’ are filled by ‘wrong people’.
That is why most of the ‘right organizations’ often choose not to speak or act at the right time even when any crisis reaches the level of survival, while their rhetoric continues to be impressive. This is a painful reality today.
In our Naga society, which is also characterized by both ideals of Naga nationalism and the grim realities of willful ignorance on so many ‘happenings’ around us, the practice of quid pro quos for favours has entrenched at a great dept that the farce has gone almost beyond awareness now. This could be the reason why Niketu Iralu, with a nerve of urgency, says, “A struggle not examined is absolutely hellish and impossible to tackle”.
Indeed, a ‘struggle’ must be ‘examined’ while, in the same time, keeping in mind that the long overdue of such an ‘examination’ has fueled the sense of despair in the society that has even energized the veering agents. It is time for every concerned man and woman to think of the most appropriate measure to counter such energies.
In a situation such as this, it also finds values and meanings to recall what Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say. According to the civil rights activist, “Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured”.
When it comes to our situation, do we really have enough resources and energies to “open the boil?” Or, are we ready for the “pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light”? Injustices and lies must be exposed somehow if we are to see cure.
