"World music day",,,,yet music is one of the farthest things on my mind as I hear my mum, on the phone, describe a town burning.. Yes, my sleepy little home-town has managed to grab a 1 minute slot on National Television this Sunday morning, wedged between more important stories like the BJP leaders mudslinging, an HIV+ve woman being actually "labelled" as such, the Titans facing off in the oh so important T2o Finals,,,and so on........
I struggle hard to try and remember Haflong as I once saw it, quiet, serene and idyllic, during our so called rebellious college years we would crib of how things never seemed to happen where we lived, real life just seemed to give us a wide berth, little did we know then of what was to come. On the news spot, I saw the intrepid journalist who had the sense to travel to a refugee camp in my town where he was shown with children on his lap, around him, wide-eyed, staring at the TV crew, unaware of what was going on, just knowing that they had left behind all things familiar, and were forced to walk for miles with cloth bundles on their heads, to come to a place crowded with similarly scared, bemused children. Thus is the state of my land. The newly formed NIA has its first assignment in trying to solve the intricate weave of terrorism, self-rule and corruption that has found a safe haven in this woody paradise, for the past decade. The local Governing body has been dissolved, yet again, the power to run it given to an 89 year old man, who was hospitalised the very next day that he took over,,,we cringe at the memory of something similar in the not-so-distant past, when another old man had opened his greedy mouth wide and it had to be stuffed with crores of the towns-peoples' money before things went back to their original bad state. There is a curfew that has been imposed, which takes effect from 8pm every single night for the past few months, my parents and countless others like them have moulded their lives, both social and essential, around it. The state Government and the Central machinery seem like stuff out of fairy tales, what is justice and law for the rest of the country does not seem to percolate down to our level. Houses burn, people are ruthlessly massacred, children too, scores of people are displaced from the lives and homes they knew, thrust into a future rife with uncertainties, but how many people know what is going on there ?, under the leafy forest cover, that was once our pride and now seems so sinister.....when will the media, so engrossed in more "news-worthy" bytes realise that while they run after elevated TRPs, a small world burns, and if something is not done soon, if someone does not see it fit to remove the layer of apathy from the eyes of the rest of my countrymen and my leaders,,,I shall lose my world, my small little hill-town, a place I grew up in, a place where people still walk for miles to catch an overfilled bus, once a week, to come to a town, far away, buy an entire weeks commodities, and go back home, tired, an entire day behind them, only to repeat the whole process in another 7 days, a place where there is so much money and so much lucre, that there are guns all around, grabbing hands, killing hands and all hidden from the rest of the country, partly due to apathy, and partly due to ignorance.
