“Assam is in Darjeeling right” my well educated neighbour asked me introducing himself, sweating in Delhi’s summer.

Incase you didn’t get the humour, save your laughter. Because it’s none of your fault if you aren’t certain if Nagaland is in India or for that matter if Manipur is part of China or India or ‘none of the above’. I on the other hand will stop judging you based on your ‘knowledge about the north-east’.

A few thinkers did write great books about the very real and palpable divide that exists on the psyche of the everyday Indian when it comes to thoughts and ideas about the north eastern part of their own country. The palpability of this divide is never more evident than the exercise of looking for a rented accommodation in Delhi’s suburbs like Munirka and Humayunpur.

“Do you smoke? Do you eat fish?” the landlord’s son asked.

“Nahi,” the student replied in negative for the first and nodded his head in confused directions for the second one.

The landlord’s son went inside and came back to where the student stood,

“Actually mummy doesn’t give out rooms to people from the ‘Narth East’ (North East)”

It’s tragic that the sense of national alienation strikes one, when he is standing at the very heart and capital of his own secular country. While literacy rate in India comes out poor when it comes to HDI (Human Development Index), it is also time to look at the other side of the population – the literate population. What sort of education are we talking of, if a man doesn’t know the basic geography of his country and still manages to top his geography papers? It’s the education system that deserves a fresh look more than anything else.

I met three different teachers from three different primary schools across Delhi and none fared better than my house neighbor when I put forward the infamous two questions:

1)      Is Assam in Darjeeling?

2)      Is Manipur in India or is it in China?

The all pervading and all invasive psychic divide have shown tremendous resilience in letting the North east exist as ‘Paradise Unexplored’ forever. The school maps have shown tremendous resilience in keeping the North East as a lump of earth and not a detail more, or a level deeper. The worthwhile question here is why such resilience for such unrewarding a cause? In the age of flat world it must be taking a huge amount of energy or prejudice to keep the psychic mountain from toppling down. On the other hand, it demands no turbo chargers to bring the divide down only if we learn to let it go, the prejudices and the stories. If we are using guns to keep the nation together – it’s time to invest on some good adhesives instead. If the nation dreams to scale to the league of ‘beautiful nations’ it will first need to scale the walls that divide itself internally from being one.

(the photo was captured with a Sony point and shoot. Location: Karbi Anglong, Assam, India)

Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.  ~Ansel Adams

An hour’s drive at the max from the small town of Diphu is a natural river park called Siloni in Assam, India. As the regular swarm of visitors busy themselves bathing in the river or cooking around it, a few women draped in their rugged Karbi dress hunch over the clean water, looking for fresh water snails and collecting them on a jar or a basket. Siloni in itself isn’t a star attraction and it’s best to travel to Diphu in the month of February when the annual Karbi Youth Festival takes place at Taralangso – a 10 minute drive from Karbi Anglong.
The nearest airport is Gopinath Bordoloi Airport in Guwahati. Trains leave early morning for Diphu from Guwahati and it takes a couple of hours to reach Diphu and offers splendid views through the journey.

And as they wait, looking towards the river, waiting for the last ferry, I could hear a distant music floating on the wind and a shivering reflection of a lone lantern on the tumultuous water.

Location: Dhubri, Assam, India

I had clicked this picture in Dhubri, Assam, India. The last town in India where the Brahmaputra flows before entering Bangladesh. A little too far from the national capital, this town has witnessed reverse progress, esp. after partition when East Bengal became a part of Pakistan and then Bangladesh. Dhubri used to be a major port before partition with inland water services to many major cities, via erstwhile East Bengal. This photo was clicked on the river bank and the person here carries a bamboo wall, which will be used for fencing or to support a clay house’s wall.

I had taken this picture with a 2mp phone camera during an unplanned trip to a village in Assam. Unfortunately I do not have the original photograph anymore. The village predominantly belongs to the Bodo community and on the upper left corner you can see a woman in her traditional clothes, called ‘Dokhna’.