Feeding the Non-Resident Fetish!

Of late, one is rather familiar with calls to bring in change to current situations in light of perceived deteriorations in one’s immediate surroundings. A friend from Aizawl, in a recent e-rant, vented out his frustrations over the current government’s ineptitude and corruption. His rant did not spare the church which, at such perceived dire times, could only muster vague statistics on its missionary reach. Underlining his impassioned email was a desire to see a change for the better specified in terms of electoral politics—a new government that would bring healing.

At the risk of over-simplifying a list of ideas that need more definition, modernity engages all of us irrespectively whenever we consider where we are at present in light of where we were and where we want to be. This is because modernity implies a break from something earlier and that this break could be in terms of structure, institution, and culture. Structurally a once communitarian people defined by tlawmngaihna and the zawlbuk (I reify the most obvious for convenience) have urbanized and been differentiated in the process. Institutionally, our sense of being an indefinite ‘people of the hills’ has now been closed in with imagined but very real boundaries that are controlled by elected representatives and the bureaucracy which are still limited within a larger nation—India. With these breaks come very real cultural shifts so that individuality seemingly trumps over communality and relations are gradually determined by their economic value. The church, in spite of its spiritualized vision, often functions to maintain what was lost in the modernizing. That thorny MLTP act with its polyvalent political and social angles is a constant reminder of the mobilization of religion to achieve ends that are more secular than ‘spiritual.’ Let me not smudge the point that all these breaks from a traditional way of being and knowing came with the promise and potential for development and efficiency albeit with evident contradictions.

These observations, one must be cautioned, are generalizations. Yet, when further broadened to frame my friend’s rant, some questions (the list could go on) need to be answered: Will a change in government, hence political moves, be enough? Is World Bank a viable answer with its baggage of compliance expected? Can an overblown and pampered bureaucracy deliver the goods when it fails its subject people, even those concentrated around one city-Aizawl? Why is perceived development so concentrated around Aizawl alone and what does it say about us becoming modern? An interlocutor on my previous post points a perceptive finger at human want for ‘more’—is this what modernity feeds on? How does the role of religion change with changing times and hopefully for the better?

Although instant prescriptive answers are what buy you space in a microwave world, there just seems to be more questions than answers. And yet, the process of asking itself engages one beyond just attractive but empty rhetoric and to think of modernity beyond just its façade of technological and commercial promises. Hopefully, such an engaged reflection can also widen our resources for answers—in the traditional that we are losing and the modern that we are taking on—and also constructively channel my friend’s rant.