Latest news with #Khasis
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2 days ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
What freedom are we celebrating?
One of the greatest freedoms that a human can have is to be able to speak truth to power. In a democracy, the voter, no matter their economic status, should be able to lambast non-performing ministers, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats who deprive them of their share of rations, healthcare, nutrition amongst others. India is in its 78th year of independence, but look at the human development indices and one sees a large chunk of the population below the poverty line. This is especially true of the tribal states of India's North East where when we started off we all had a piece of land to call our own. There were community and clan lands that were distributed to individuals who started a family. The community helped in building a hut, timber was cut from community forests and there were no labour charges so expenses were manageable. The British, with their superior intelligence, found it rather tedious to have to bargain for land with the Khasi tribal communities and institutions. They preferred to negotiate with individuals and that's how the Khasi chieftains (Syiems), who were the head of the clan, were given some sort of a royalty status. There was no such concept of royalty among the Khasis of Meghalaya. Gradually, land was commodified and the British negotiated with the Syiems instead of the community. That was the beginning of the commodification and privatisation of land in Meghalaya and other tribal states. When something is turned into a commodity, it can be bought and sold at random. In the last socio-economic caste census of 2011, Meghalaya had 76% rural inhabitants who were landless. Today there may be more. It is not as if these lands have been alienated to non-tribals, who, in any case, cannot buy land in Meghalaya as per the Meghalaya Land Transfer Act 1971, other than in the 100 sq km radius of what is called the European Ward of Shillong. Land can be alienated for building educational, health institutions and other institutions 'if they are in tribal interest.' But a look at the ground realities today shows that land has been rapidly gobbled up by a tribal elite, especially those in politics and business. Attempts had been made in the past by one of Meghalaya's visionary chief ministers to bring in a cadastral survey that would take stock of who owned how much land. There was stiff resistance to this proposal and the reasons are not far to seek. Even then a tribal elite had emerged that had an insatiable greed for land. They didn't want that to become public knowledge. Today, Meghalaya is among the worst states in terms of human development indices, educational outcomes and has poor nutritional levels. The latest Performance Grading Index, released by the Centre in June, shows Meghalaya at the bottom of the heap. Discussions on this continue but with no political will to change the status quo. It is not as if the status of education in other states is any better. It is just that Meghalaya has 14,582 schools while Tripura, with a larger population, has only 4,929. Many of these schools in Meghalaya are non-performing: 206 schools have no students and 2,269 schools have less than 10 students. In what are called deficit schools, where teachers' salaries are paid by the government, 18 schools have zero enrolment and 1,141 have single-digit enrolment. It is a pitiable status of education in the 21st century. Rationalising these institutions by closing down the non-performing ones would have political repercussions hence no one wants to touch this problem with a barge pole. It takes strong political will to take far-reaching decisions, but that's a tall order. Education, which is the ladder to enlightenment and empowers citizens to question the powers that be, is simply not available to large sections of the population. School drop-out rates are on an upswing and teenage girls, whose parents cannot afford to keep them in school, become stay-at-home workers devoid of ambition and then get sexually involved with another teenaged boy or man. The result is pregnancy and a teenaged mother unable to care for herself but having to mother a child. The preponderance of teenage mothers in Meghalaya and their being abandoned to become single mothers is the prime reason for the state's high poverty level. And this is a matrilineal society, which is romanticised as a haven for women. But the hidden nuances of patriarchy are alive and kicking here. In such a situation, how can we expect people to question and seek accountability from the elected representatives? Poverty makes people listless and believe they are powerless as they can only think about where their next meal will come from. Elections are a windfall as politicians bribe them with money for votes. Even something as little as Rs 500 is good enough to buy at least 20 kg of rice. Democracy requires enlightened voters who make informed choices, not choices influenced by freebies. Hence, even those who find their names excluded from the electoral rolls are not likely to speak up. They will just stay home on election day and not even mourn their fates. The hullabaloo created by the Congress over the special intensive revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission has received scant attention in Meghalaya. Voting decides our citizenship status but means little for people living in abject poverty. The Bharatiya Janata Party and its plethora of schemes may have reached the states of the North East but their implementation leaves much to be desired. In fact, the claims by Jyotiraditya Scindia, minister of the Development of North Eastern Region Ministry, that Rs 5 lakh crore was invested from 2014-2024 to transform the North East, is largely all talk. Where that money was invested and what visible changes that investment has wrought are questions that are not asked. One question that begs an answer is why the Centre does not monitor schemes and why road projects in the North East are never completed within deadlines thereby leading to time and cost overruns and revision of rates. The quality of such roads and highways also leaves much to be desired. At the end of the day, what freedom do we really enjoy when half-baked schemes are dumped on a region that requires a different and more nuanced approach to development? The Development of North Eastern Region ministry is hardly visible through its outreach and there is no common development vision for the region. Each state is a law unto itself. The very fact that Manipur, which went into a vicious cycle of violence since May 2023, has not seen the face of the prime minister who instead travels abroad to lesser known destinations to ostensibly preach peace is the basest of ironies. Manipur remains in a state of uncertainty with several thousands living in relief camps but the country and its prime minister have all but forgotten them. What would freedom mean for people struggling to live life in a relief camp for over two years? Does anyone care? Do even fellow Indians care? Yet, the 'har ghar tiranga', echo is mindlessly drummed into the heads of unquestioning citizens. Truly, freedom has become a meaningless echo. On that note, happy Independence Day, and may we rise from the ashes to question those entrusted with public funds on how much is actually going towards human development.
India.com
09-08-2025
- India.com
India's Most Surreal Places Where Nature Breaks Its Own Rules — From Reverse Waterfalls To Ghost Lights
1 / 8 The living root bridges are one of Meghalaya's most beautiful tangible heritage sites. They are made of intertwined roots. "These bridges have been built for centuries by the indigenous people of the land(Khasis and the Jaintias). They have also been used by these people to cross the overflowing rivers during the monsoon season," the Meghalaya Tourism site mentioned. A root bridge could be able to live on for hundreds of years. These bridges frequently rise 50 to 100 feet in the air. Meghalaya's longest living root bridge is said to be a whopping 175 feet in length.
Scroll.in
20-07-2025
- General
- Scroll.in
How I died, briefly, and felt more alive than ever
How I died, briefly, and felt more alive than ever The day I died, briefly The day someone else told me I had died My brief death Death by a thousand texts Kyrham died, but I was mourned This is the story of my death. It occurred when one of my cousins, AK Nongkynrih, known to everybody as Kyrham, passed away. Kyrham was a fine figure of a man, tall for a Khasi, about five foot ten, and quite handsome. We from the Nongkynrih clan were very proud of him. He was a well-known sociologist. People spoke admiringly of him, critics commended his scholarly books very highly, and the government and sundry organisations frequently sought his expertise. He went to deliver lectures everywhere, and everywhere he went, he mesmerised his audience. We were so proud that he belonged to the clan – one of the leading personalities of the state, and he was ours, a son of the clan. He was our achiever, our treasure. When I heard about his sudden passing, I went into deep gloom. He was only in his early 50s – too young to die. 'What a loss!' I said to myself. 'Imagine the things he could still have contributed to the state and the country! Imagine the books he still could have written!' I was personally affected because, although we both taught at the North-Eastern Hill University, we hardly met. Why didn't I fraternise with him more frequently? I remember how he regaled us, whenever we met him, with many of his humorous anecdotes. Why couldn't I have interacted with him more often and learnt more of his stories? One of the stories he told us was about Mudong from Jowai who nearly killed a man because he could not stay away from his drinks. The incident happened during the staging of the famous drama of Kiang Nangbah in Jowai. All Khasis know, I think, the story of Kiang Nangbah, the freedom fighter, and how, in the end, he was captured and publicly hanged to death by the British. Because of that, the organisers placed a noose on stage where Kiang Nangbah, the actor, was supposed to be hanged. The plan was to let old Mudong pull the noose at a signal from the director, and for that reason, they made him sit alone behind the scenes, where the end of the rope was. They gave him careful instructions and asked him to pull the rope only a little just to take the slack away and make the hanging scene more realistic. But the trouble was that the hanging scene was the very last one, and the drama was very long, interspersed with songs and dances to allow the organisers to prepare the layout of the scenes to come. Sitting there alone, behind the scenes, with nothing to do, old Mudong got bored. Fortunately, he had come prepared with a bottle of yiad pynshoh, the local rice spirit. Consequently, as the play progressed from scene to scene, old Mudong progressed from the top to the bottom of the bottle. That top-down progress made him feel quite sleepy, and almost against his will, he leaned against the wall and went to sleep. Meanwhile, Kiang Nangbah was about to be hanged. The British soldiers put the noose around his neck. Kiang Nangbah made his famous speech about freedom if his head should turn to the east. Then, the commanding officer gave the signal for the hanging. The director, too, gave the signal to old Mudong to pull the rope and stiffen the noose. But old Mudong was fast asleep. When no response came, the director shouted, 'Mudong, the rope, the rope!' Old Mudong suddenly woke up, heard something about the rope, stood up and pulled it as hard as he could, and then held on to it for quite some time, partly because he was still not sure what was going on and partly because he was supporting himself on it, for there was a slight dizziness in his head which threatened to toss him to the floor. Back on stage, Kiang Nangbah was lifted about three feet from the ground and was dangling at the end of the noose, emitting all sorts of desperate sounds. Luckily, his hands were only loosely tied, and he was able to claw at the rope and relieve the pressure a bit. The spectators watching the scene thought it was a splendid show. So lifelike! So realistic! They started clapping and shouting. 'Shabash, shabash! Bravo, bravo!' they roared. But the director saw what was happening and shouted at old Mudong to let go. The old man also suddenly realised what he was doing and quickly let go of the rope as if it were burning his hand. Kiang Nangbah fell three feet to the ground with a loud thud. The organisers rushed to get him out of the noose and rubbed his throat to help him breathe. The moment Kiang Nangbah was able to speak, he cursed Mudong and cried, 'Chai won itu i dahbei?' Where's that motherfucker? Realising what was happening, the crowd roared with laughter and Kiang Nangbah rushed towards the motherfucker with terrible oaths of vengeance. But Mudong had left from the back door and was running for his life. I was not the only one shocked and gloomy about Kyrham's passing. At the time, he had just been voted as the most popular teacher in the university. My colleagues talked of nothing else but his untimely death. One of my writer friends with whom I used to discuss all things literary was so disturbed by the news of his early death that she said to me, 'Please don't die, okay? What would I do without you?' Was I that beloved to some of my friends? It warmed my heart, and I wrote a poem, Death on a Birthday, in which I discussed the terrors of living too long and the anguish of dying too early. Is there a right time for dying? All we can do is be ready for death even as we toil for life. Then my phone started pinging. It was my sister, Thei. She was sharing a WhatsApp message from one of her childhood friends. The message read: 'Dear Thei, I'm shocked to hear about Kynpham's death! Compared to us, he's so young. What happened? How was he ill? Was it a long illness? Why didn't you tell me that he was ill? I would have come to see him. He was such a dear boy. I remember when you and I were school kids…May God grant him eternal rest.' My phone pinged again. It was one of my nieces on WhatsApp. She was asking, 'Maduh, are you all right?'' 'Yes, I'm all right,' I answered. 'Why wouldn't I be?' After that, she called me. When I said, 'Hello,' she said, 'Hello, Maduh! My God! It gave me such a fright' and started laughing loudly, nervously. 'What happened?' I asked. 'So many people called me... They asked me if you were dead. One even said, 'May he eat betel nut in the house of God!' It was crazy!' We had a good, long laugh at that. I was to hear this expression about the betel nut often in the next few hours. When a Khasi refers to a dead person in a conversation, he also says, 'Bam kwai ha ïing U Blei' (May he eat betel nut in the house of God). The invocation points to the Khasi belief that the original home of man is heaven. So, when he dies, if he has earned virtue in life, his soul and his essence go to heaven to be united forever with all the cognate and agnate members of his clan who died before him. The practice properly belongs to the Khasi religion, which accords a great symbolic significance to the betel nut. Nevertheless, every Khasi, without exception, uses this invocation to wish the dead well and as a charm to avert evil or ill luck whenever they mention the dead. In the next few minutes, more people enquired about my death. Some were very nice about it. After that, my phone began to ping without stopping. It was a WhatsApp group created by a local society of authors. I was a member, though I didn't know many of the people active in the group. 'Ei, I just heard Kynpham is dead!' 'Kynpham!? Kynpham Nongkynrih?' 'God! When?' 'How did he die? How was he ill?' 'My God! Just the other day, I met him! What happened?' 'How old was he?' 'Not very old, I think. Maybe early fifties: 51 or 52.' 'That's too young to die.' 'Maybe it was a long illness or what?' 'Or maybe a sudden illness?' 'It could be cancer, you know? Sometimes, cancer strikes out of the blue, haa! You are normal; you feel normal, except for minor complaints here and there, and then bam! It hits you, and within days, you are dead.' 'God, dead, haa? What a loss!' 'Yeah, still a lot of contributions from him!' 'Hey! Was he eating too well or what?' This was a euphemism for hard drinking. 'Yeah, yeah! Maybe that was it, otherwise 52 was too young, you know?' 'Among us, what do we say when a man between 30 and 45 dies?' 'He was stabbed by broken glass?' 'Yeah, yeah! That could have been it.' 'I don't know. I have never seen him drunk …' 'Maybe he's one of those 'standard' drinkers ... Drinking at night, at home.' 'Death is so unpredictable …' 'Life, you mean?' 'To think Kynpham is gone, just like that!' I was getting irritated with all these exchanges, so I wrote, 'I'm still alive!' That made many of them laugh. But I didn't know what else they were saying because I left the group for good. They were not behaving like writers, I thought, just like common gossips. Next, it was my cousin from Sohra, Just, who called. 'Ei, everybody in Sohra is saying you are dead? Are you dead or alive?'' he asked and laughed aloud. 'Yeah. Many people have texted and called me asking about my death. Tet teri ka! Sngew jem daw pynban!' I was feeling a bit fed up with all the messages about my death, that was why I said, 'Sngew jemdaw pynban.' Among us, jemdaw or jemrngiew means a souring of one's luck, an enfeeblement of one's essence or destruction of one's personality. My cousin said, 'Jemdaw nothing! The old ones used to say if someone dreams about your death, you will live long! Don't worry; people are just confused between you and Kyrham.' 'I know, but it amazes me how people keep mistaking me for him, you know? I'm just the opposite of him, small and frail …' 'It's your name! Kynpham: so very much like Kyrham! Many things, too. You and he were born and raised in Sohra: he, from Pdengshnong, and you, from Khliehshnong. Both of you are NEHU professors, and both of you are quite well-known. But the main thing is ignorance. Those ignorant of you take you for Kyrham, and those ignorant of Kyrham take Kyrham for you.' I knew all that, of course. But it still amazed me that people could have been so confused about us. He was from the Department of Sociology; I'm from the Department of English. He was so outgoing and visible, lecturing everywhere and all that, while I'm almost a recluse, willing to let my books do the talking for me. How could they have made such a mistake? Then, I started receiving messages from some of my students. It seemed many people were mourning my passing on social media. One obituary especially caught my attention. The girl, Meba, quoted the following words from the website of Northeast Beats: '...One of the most talented and prolific poets from the Northeast, Nongkynrih's poetry encompasses a staggering gamut of impulses and thematic concerns, thus lending to his poetry a touch of unparalleled brilliance and splendour. For the uninitiated, please do go ahead and google his name, and you will see a staggering list of publications … ' From the Northeast Reads, she quoted this: 'Immerse yourself in the exquisite verses of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih's The Yearning of Seeds, a poetic odyssey that transcends borders and resonates with readers across the globe. This captivating collection, rooted in the essence of Meghalaya, envelops you in a tapestry of emotions both familiar and profound.' Having quoted the texts, she superscribed her obituary on them in bold, white letters, saying, 'I will remember you! Humbleness and respect are what I have learnt from you. Thank you (thank you for being with us all those days).' Meba interspersed her obituary with red hearts, broken hearts and appropriate emojis everywhere. The student who sent me Meba's obituary was livid with rage. She thought it was a forbidden thing to grieve the death of a living person. It was sacrilege. She asked me to give her a befitting reply. But my heart warmed to Meba. Living, I was witnessing my death mourned with such deep feeling. And that, too, by a total stranger. How glad I was that my death would be missed and lamented this way! How unique to witness heartfelt condolences from far and near (the writers excluded, obviously) expressed on your own death! It was a privilege few, if any, would ever have. Thank you, Kyrham, for the confusion. As you were missed, so was I.
Scroll.in
12-07-2025
- Scroll.in
What ‘Timefulness' by Marcia Bjornerud taught writer Janice Pariat about Earth's temporal rhythms
Every Saturday, as often as we can, my husband and I head away from Shillong and take a long walk out in the hills. For next book research, but also because we enjoy such activity. The roads are mostly empty; we pass a small shnong or two on the way, a few locals, young goat or cow herders, sleeping dogs, clusters of chatting women at designated riverside 'jaka sait jaiñ' washing clothes. The views are splendid – vast and open across the hills and canyons, and at this time of year, with the rains, drenched in mist and greenest green. Amidst the green, dark rocks. Jostled around this seismic landscape. Tumbling down the slopes like frozen waterfalls, jutting out sharply from the edges of hills, standing solo-tall, figurative and mysterious. If you walk up close, you'll see they are sometimes blanketed in moss or painted by fungus in Pollock-esque patches of grey, red, and black. In or around rivers, stones lie smooth and softened. Often a trail is dwarfed by towering rock faces, solid and ancient. They are a presence, as much as the trees and rivers. It is on these walks that I've become mesmerised by rocks – beginning to see them not as cold and inanimate but as being very much a part of our storied landscape. There has always been evidence for this here. Close to Mairang, for instance, about two hours' drive northwest from Shillong, stands Lum Kyllang, a gigantic mammoth-shaped granite formation towering 700 feet above ground – the story goes that Kyllang and Symper, two spirit guardian brothers, who bickered endlessly, had a final showdown, with Kyllang throwing mud at Symper, and Symper tossing rocks at Kyllang. Until today, Symper (about 50 kms away to south) is mud-rich and forested, while Kyllang is starkly, slippery stone. And, as local stories go, he's still mischievous in spirit – beguiling climbers, playing tricks on them and leading them astray on their way down. At the edge of Meghalaya, in Sohra, stands Khoh Ramhah, a natural rock formation that resembles a traditional basket, a khoh, or an inverted cone. We grew up hearing stories of how it once belonged to a giant named Ramhah who roamed these hills, and whose basket turned into stone when he lay down to sleep. Ever more importantly, the Khasis are a megalithic culture, raising megaliths to compute their history and clanship, to mark long funeral trails, and the hills even today are dotted with these towering structures, some of which have fallen victim to the weather, many others to modernity, to the construction of buildings and roads. On our walks, especially around Mylliem, an hour southwest of Shillong, we pass clusters of these stones strewn across the hillsides, still marking a clan's memory, hidden in the undergrowth alongside the trails we take. Perhaps this is why I've found such resonance in the work of American geologist Marcia Bjornerud, who urges us to begin thinking about rocks not as nouns but as verbs – with agency and spirit all their own. They are both witness and journal, both participant in and consequence of the earth's intricate geological processes. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud twins the story of her life with the biographies of particular rock types, basalt, granite, sandstone, among many others, gleaning succour, wisdom, knowledge from her supposedly 'mute' subjects. Rocks are far from silent – either vibrantly functioning as vehicles of folklore or weaving narratives of geological history. While I'm able to manage gathering the latter, from family, friends, chats with strangers on our walks, it irks me that I am yet unable to read geological text, that I can't quite understand our planet's ancient language. This drove me to pick up Bjornerud's first book Reading the Rocks: An Autobiography of the Earth – I must admit it wasn't the easiest to follow all the way through, for the language could turn quite technical at times, but I soldiered on – absorbing little by little the deep, continually unfolding history of the earth. It's a tale filled with cataclysm and reincarnation, with flux and constant adjustments over billions of years. Bjornerud is not only a riveting storyteller and an astute historian of her own discipline, but she is also deeply interested in the intersections between geology and philosophy. What questions might be raised given the vastness of deep time? What might rocks teach us about ourselves? What wisdom could they impart? How may they guide us into reframing our lives and the structures of our society? This comes to the fore beautifully in her slim slip of a book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. A book that found me just when we began to encounter the quarries. On our walks, around many corners, and alongside main roads. Hills and hillsides hollowed out for sand and stone. To serve the rampant construction drive across Meghalaya. At first, it was hard to believe that such vast swathes of earth could be reduced to the merest, finest grain, but standing there, a little bit horrified, a little bit in awe, we saw it was all made possible because of colossal machinery. Gnawing into the earth, digging through soil like butter, and to the side, endless trucks waiting hungrily in line. In so many places where we've walked now, the hills are alive with the thudding of stone-crushers. Why must we do this? We've asked, as we walked away. Is there a way to quarry more…ethically? But is this the question to ask? Is it not imperative to wonder whether it's ethical to do so in the first place? And how have we arrived here? At a point when humans (driven by extractive capitalism) are the most major of 'geologic' forces shaping our planet, driving our own selves deeper into ecological devastation? I found increasingly that I turned to Bjornerud's Timefulness for answers. 'Timefulness', as a word or a notion, hasn't yet entered common parlance or common knowledge. If you Google it or its variant 'timeful', you're greeted with results for a technology company in Mountain View, California and a to-do list app acquired by Google in 2015. But Bjornerud's word refers to none of these. 'Timefulness', for her, is to become acutely aware of how the world is made by – indeed, made of – time. What does this mean? Especially for a species as chronophobic as we are. Willing ourselves to cast time as the enemy and to do everything to deny its passage – Botox, fillers, plastic surgery, anti-ageing, everything. But even this type of time denial, rooted in a very human combination of vanity and existential dread, is more forgivable, Bjornerud says, than other more toxic varieties that work with this mostly benign kind to create a pervasive, stubborn, and dangerous 'temporal illiteracy'. And by this, she means the obliviousness with which most of us live our lives on our planet without knowing anything more than the most superficial highlights of its long, long history. We've heard of dinosaurs, perhaps Pangaea or tectonic plates but learn little of the durations and happenings of the great chapters in Earth's history. As a species, we largely share a childlike disinterest and partial disbelief in the time before our appearance on the planet and have a small appetite for stories which don't feature us humans in a starring role. Most of us simply can't be bothered with natural history – tragically so at a time when the geosciences are thriving! To disacknowledge time, to ignore how it is intrinsic to the shaping of our earth, untethers us from deep geological history. We are at this point in our human history because we have forgotten, willfully, that we are, above all else, earthlings, shaped by the earth's rocky logic. We are disassociated –detached from our surroundings, speaking of our 'relationship with nature' without realising that that's what we are. In fact, most of us live on our planet behaving like 'bad tourists', Bjornerud says, enjoying its amenities, ransacking its bounty, without ever having noticed that it has its own ancient language and customs. To be in 'timefulness' is the very opposite of this – it is to build an awareness of the rich natural history that envelops us, and a sense that we too live in geologic time and are part of a continuum from the planet's past into its future. There are terrible ramifications to 'temporal illiteracy'. All is short-term. As a geologist, Bjornerud contends with Young Earthers, creationists and apocalypticists but as frustrating as they might be, she points out, more pervasive and corrosive is time denial that is invisibly woven into the infrastructure of our society. From economic credo that insists on constant growth to populist short-term thinking politics, from biennial budget cycles to last-minute stop-gap spending measures. And at a moment when the need for long-range vision grows ever more imperative, our attention spans are shrinking as we tend to reels, texts, and tweets within an endless, insistent Now. Bjornerud doesn't spare academia too, pointing out that physics and chemistry, 'pure sciences', are considered the highest of scientific pursuits for their quantitative exactitude, possible only under highly controlled, wholly unnatural conditions, divorced from any particular history or moment. It is telling that 'lowly' Geology, with all it has to offer – not least the geologic timescale! – has no Nobel Prize. It largely continues to be seen as a musty, dull, discipline, and this has serious consequences for us at a time when politicians, CEOs, and ordinary citizens urgently need to have a grasp of our planet's history, anatomy, and physiology. Having an inflated, aggrandised sense of ourselves as a species is harmful – but so is the very opposite. How often we've been told, in movies, books, on the internet, that if the 4.5-billion-year story of the earth is scaled to a 24-hour day, all of human history would transpire in the last fraction of a second before midnight. I'd always thought of this only as a moment to step away from ourselves and contemplate how small we are, a moment to reevaluate. But Bjornerud calls this temporal downscaling also a wrongheaded and irresponsible way to understand our place in time. It suggests, she says, a degree of insignificance and disempowerment that not only is psychologically alienating but also allows us to ignore the magnitude of our effects on the planet in that quarter second. And it denies our deep roots and permanent entanglement with Earth's history; our specific clan may not have shown up until just before the clock struck 12.00, she goes on to point out, but our extended family of living organisms has been around since at least 6 am. Finally, the analogy implies, apocalyptically, that there is no future – what happens after midnight? I'm not quite sure who has the answer, but I'm thinking it has something to do with us collectively experiencing a shift, a realignment with, and a consciousness of, deep time, of transforming ourselves into polytemporal beings, aware of our own present, contextualised within a deep past, envisioning a distant future. Difficult as this might sound, there are writers and academics like Bjornerud to guide us. And also, I've recently discovered, artists across the globe working on time-transcending projects. Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilised insects, dust from meteorites, and 'future libraries' in Oslo to help us expand our time horizons. Photographer Rachel Sussman travelled around the world to take portraits of living organisms older than 2000 years for her series called 'The Oldest Living Things in the World.' Which included 'Spruce Gran Picea, Sweden' (9,550 years), 'Antartic Moss' (5,500 years), 'Lomatia Tasmanica', Tasmania (43,000 years), among many others. Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, in Alaska, engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on 'river time' to unstandardise our atomic time. Somewhere in Western Texas, inventor Daniel Hillis is building a '10,000 Year Clock'. This is in collaboration with The Long Now Foundation, a nonprofit organisation 'established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.' Their work, talks, workshops, artist collaborations, encourage imagination at the timescale of civilisation – the next and last 10,000 years —a timespan they call 'the long now'. Bjornerud closes Timefulness with the evocation of the Iroquois' 300-year-old Seventh Generation idea, which remains radical and visionary as ever: that leaders should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects on 'the unborn of the future Nation…whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground.' In a current world that severely lack both the appetite and political-economic infrastructure for intergenerational action, the Seventh Generation idea is more important than ever. And it begins with timefulness, with walking the hills, with earth, with stone.
Time of India
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Acquire land for common burial: HC to Meghalaya
Guwahati: The High Court of Meghalaya has directed the state govt to take immediate steps to acquire the required land for common burial purposes, either by acquisition or private treaty. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The court of chief justice IP Mukerji and justice W Diengdoh was hearing a petition filed by 'Re-Seng Khasi Hima Crematorium,' raising the issue of a dearth of crematoria and the lack of willingness of the Khasis and the Jaintias to share a particular crematorium. Initially, the scope of the PIL was confined to facilitating the cremation of persons belonging to Khasi and Jaintia communities on one hand and those embracing the Hindu religion on the other throughout the state. The court, in its order on Monday, stated it carefully examined the detailed report filed by Additional Advocate General K Khan and the report filed by Amicus Curiae N Syngkon. The court also noted that the result of the meetings between the Amicus Curiae and the public authorities appears to be that some Christian denominations, through churches and other religious orders, own private cemeteries. "Those denominations having private cemeteries are reluctant to share their cemeteries with other denominations. They have no objection to sharing cemeteries which are acquired by the govt or public authority and designated for common burial for all communities irrespective of faith," the court said. Stating that the common burial grounds are very few in number compared to the number of dead and the demand for space for their interment, the court said the villages have community land belonging to the village people in common, and a part of it may be gifted for common burial purposes. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now "However, substantial land is required across the districts for the above common burial purpose, if any progress is to be made towards solving this problem. These lands need to be acquired by the govt through the land acquisition machinery or through private sale or treaty," the court stated. The court further directed the Amicus Curiae to move the chief secretary of the state to form a committee led by the chief secretary as the chairperson to hold meetings between all stakeholders, including representatives of the district councils, representatives of churches or religious orders, administrative officers, state legal counsel and local functionaries for the purpose of acquisition of land for common burial.
