Saturday 30 December 2017

The pain does not go away

Sundays are unbearable... I used to call Ma every Sunday... we would chat for long about this and that ... she would bring me up to date about news at the Guwahati end, I would tell her about what we had done in the past week, I would ask her how she was, what she was busy with... sometimes she would tell me, sometimes she would say she had no time... whatever it was this weekly phone call had become a fixed ritual... and I had not realised that to perform that ritual every Sunday was so important for me till now when I don't have to call her anymore...never knew that the fact that there was no one in India waiting for me to call on Sunday would be so hard to bear...


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Monday 18 September 2017

The house died too that night

My tribute to Ma, a month after she left us...

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Tuesday 16 May 2017

Dancing to the State: Ethnic Compulsions of the Tangsa in Assam

For those of you who have no idea who I am, where northeast India is and what my book (named in the title, OUP 2017)  is about here is the story behind the book.


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Friday 24 February 2017

Strange encounters in the Jaintia hills


My friend Hema and I had undertaken a 2-week long road trip in January 2017 through some hilly parts of NE India. At one village in the heart of the Jaintia hills, we ran into a French anthropologist friend of mine, who was staying and working in the village at that time. The additional tensions created between the ethnographer and her field consultants on our arrival in the village as tourists are described in this description of our brief stay in the village.

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