Dear Manjit

12:30 pm, August 11, 2013

The Icfai Guest House,

Chaltlang, Aizawl

Dear Manjit,

It’s a mix emotion of sadness, nostalgia and excitement I’m going through in the proportion of 50:30:20 respectively, as I am going to pen down my heart and mind in these eco-friendly, elemental chlorine free papers produced by ITC.

I sometime wonder why I can’t exactly remember the first time we met. This is unusual as I can vividly recall about the occasions when I met others for the first time at Aizawl. I met Pranjal in the late May of 2010 at our old Icfai campus in Chaltlang; I met Gyanashri in January, 2012 picnic at Sairang; I met Koyel on a November afternoon in 2012 at your very own place… However, I do remember the kind of unease that we used to feel during our initial encounters and you too have acknowledged this during our Champhai trip this year. I believe that sense of unease was due to our own reflective individual personalities, which I find quite natural when two people of similar intellectual abilities sits opposite to each other. It’s like the silent counter magnetism – the repulsive phenomenon between two identically polarized magnets. It took some amount of time before we became really close friends, and that is the beauty of bonding; the same magnets can have the strongest bind between them when any of the poles subjectively gets reversed.

I don’t want to sound too exaggerating but I must acknowledge that you are intellectually superior to many of your peers.  I also firmly believe that you still deserve more than what you have achieved till now. You have the kind of leadership qualities that generally change makers possesses. I know that you are aware of your own qualities as much as I do and that is why I need not act like a mentor who speaks in the common mechanical motivating lines derived out of his own snobbery.

I do believe that people like us have larger roles and greater responsibilities to offer. I know that no matter how much you will achieve in the world is not going to sufficiently satisfy you until you pay back your debt to your own family, your own people, and your own place. That is why I would like to see you coming back to India and to the northeast once you complete your formal education from abroad. What bothers me these days is that there are a lot of divisive forces that are playing insensitive games with the short-term emotions of ordinary people. Technically speaking, I am not opposed to boundaries that separates region on the basis of geo-political or socio-cultural identity but I am strongly opposed to the boundaries that divides people. It’s a high time for us to stand against these divisive forces.

Finally, I would like to confess one thing that I am not very good at keeping contacts. But this does not mean that I think any less of my old relationships. I would like to assure you that our friendship will be preserved like a half-read novel. After any unconditional hiatus of any duration, we will certainly begin from the point where we left.

Wishing you all the best for everything…

Shamim