Much has happened in the Northeast and across the globe in 2025—some expected, some predicted and some unimagined.
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Monalisa Changkija
2025 is looking at just a few days before becoming history and, with the passage of time, a distant memory. We will bid adieu to this year with a mixture of nostalgia and relief. Much depends on the cards life dealt us and how best we played them. Also, much of what happened was beyond our control, but we also misspent time and many opportunities that came our way. So, as always, we will see an old year passing with regrets and relief—perhaps more with relief—because we tend to believe that a new year will usher in change and bring good fortune. This belief is called hope—one of the most striking traits of human beings—which has seen us traverse and transit thus far since the dawn of time.
This traverse and transit have not always been smooth—often filled with hate, bloodshed, loss and agony. Along the way, we have learnt much but also failed to learn so much more. Yet, we hope, we aspire, and we strive. The outcome is not always successful, but it is also not a narrative of failures. Our traverse and transit of successes and failures are a reflection of our humanness and humanity—our strengths and weaknesses. So, as much as we anticipate the New Year knocking at our door, it will also juxtapose our humanness and humanity with our strengths and weaknesses, and we will experience the same emotions at this time every year.
Much has happened in the Northeast and across the globe in 2025—some expected, some predicted and some unimagined. Our political, economic, social and cultural lives were upended in numerous ways, and many of us of the older generations now live in an unrecognisable world. Most may attribute this to technological revolutions, but perhaps this unrecognisable world is the result of a different kind of ambition and aspiration of crafty and unscrupulous human beings who envisage new world orders that enable and facilitate the amassing of wealth and power to control the hearts and minds of the vast unaware, uninformed and unsuspecting populace. But the world has always been blighted with such people throughout history, and the human race poorer for that.
Yet, we kowtow to them and look up to them for salvation from human misery, little realising they are the cause of our misery. But at the end of every year, without recognising, acknowledging and accepting our reality, our hope persists; thereby, each year becomes a repetition of the past year(s). Perhaps this is something that has remained constant throughout our traverse and transition since the dawn of time.
Therefore, we live petty lives, ghettoed in our races, religions, cultures and languages, weaponising them against each other, fuelled by manufactured and remote-controlled hate, and creating unrest and upheavals to facilitate ambitions and aspirations that can be met only in such adverse, marginalising and fearsome atmospheres and environments. A case in point is the deliberate disruption of Christmas celebrations in some States, not least in Assam’s Nalbari district. The population of Christians in India is very small and poses no political, economic, social or cultural threat to anyone, yet they are perceived as adversarial. Such perception is an unmistakable symptom of an extreme inferiority complex concealed as majoritarian entitlement.
When any community is targeted as inimical to the nation, it is extreme fear of one’s own imagined inadequacies that devious minds convert into political gains. Especially in Assam, there was a time when all communities subscribing to all religions lived in harmony. Though the Nalbari culprits were arrested, the fact that they had the temerity to attack Christmas celebrations—and the increasing attacks in recent years against Christian and other minorities on grounds that clearly indicate ignorance manipulated for political goals—makes the message unambiguous: Assam is no longer safe for minorities. This is definitely a time for Assam to do soul-searching at the abandonment of its age-old culture and tradition of peaceful and harmonious life that the State was famed for. The end of an old year and the beginning of a new one is an appropriate time to reclaim its former harmonious culture.
In Christian-majority States of the Northeast such as Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, the holy season of Christmas is over, with the major festivities concluded, but the festive mood and atmosphere still pervade our hills and valleys and will continue well past the New Year celebrations. But a pall of gloom over these celebrations and festivities is palpable because of assaults and attacks on Christian brethren elsewhere. Though still inchoate, an increasing concern over excessive celebrations at festivals across the country, in an atmosphere of mounting poverty, unemployment, divisiveness, pollution and environmental degradation, is also discernible. Hope persists that these two totally disparate issues will draw attention because the new should not be a repetition.
India’s ancient tradition of meditation has proven beneficial for the body, heart, head, soul and spirit, for individuals as well as communities. I see this time of the year as a kind of time-out to contemplate the past, assess the present and re-vision the future. Time has not divided itself into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years; but since we did that to Time, it is this time of the year that seems perfect for soul-searching and meditation, and for reconnecting with ourselves, with each other, with Mother Nature and, most of all, with our Maker. Anything new and any change must be envisaged and created, and this must begin with translating hope into transformation.
(The Columnist is a Dimapur-based veteran journalist, poet and former Editor of Nagaland Page. Published in the December 28, 2025 issue of North East Now)