THINGS YOU SEE, THINGS I DO: July 2006

i feel strange when i get down to writing, it's something which i don't do often. i somehow find more comfort in expressing myself through photographs (which is probably why i hardly manage to get the message across). anyway, this time i thought i'd start. but then again, since i'm so very unsure of my celibate vocabulary (unlike my enfield sprockets, it never gets greased), there's a slight hesitation. so i've come to an agreement with the mark twain (excuse the highhandedness) within me, for beginner's we shall borrow.

i don't how many are gonna read this, fewer would want to know where this is headed and after all that if there is someone still scrolling on down and wants to know what brought it on. it's the photos of umiam lake and the cathedral in shillong. i know the 'large' thumbnails dont do the place justice and i felt it demanded a littlemore respect. the first of the north-eastern states i had the good fortune of visiting, meghalaya. 'shillong', in particular. if you think of shillong as the 'cook's special', umiam lake is the entrée. in this order, you travel into this capital full of pristine low lying hills and a wreath of cirrus strokes overhead. by the time you're through the lake and into shillong-country you're already running short of incontrovertible adjectives to adorn your travel diary with. this is a good clue as any that my travelogue should end right now and i let someone true to the place speak for the place.

robin s. ngangom is a manipuri poet who studied and is presently teaching literature at the north-eastern hill university in shillong. reproduced below is not something that preaches the resplendence of shillong, but something that divulges the reasons why shillong with the rest of the immaculate north-east has been misrepresented by the indian media so far.

BAD PLACES

Sometimes, through no fault of it's own, a neighborhood picks up a bad reputation. If you happen to visit on a singularly uneventful day,you will find it roofed with a blue sky, and dark green pines and bamboo stooping to kiss it's dusty road. And although it is true that love was made inall wintry houses and it's dead have been buried in it's unruffled graveyard, you would never guess how it earned such a vague hatred from outsiders. Perhaps one night, acting on a tip-off, a party of nervous paramilitary men shot a couple of teenage militants to rags at the gate of one of it's unfortunate houses. What is truly ironic is the factthat the revolutionaries do not hail from this neighborhood, they merely happened to be there during an illtimed party. It is also entirely possible that a few men and women desperate to find witches and warlocks in an increasingly faithless age, forged themselves into medieval instruments and burnt down a house which looked a little eerie in moonlight and killed a strange old man and his wife.It has been called names - a hideout, for instance - they say the scars on its walls are bullet marks really. You would be advised not to court its women because the area grows dangerousafter sunset. But such neighborhoods continue to grow as if nurtured by misgiving.

- Robing S. Ngangom, from his collection titled 'The Desire of Roots'.