"One of the earliest memory I can recall from my childhood is watching my mother drying her laundry in the high sun one afternoon, when a gunshot fired by the armed insurgents blazed up the hill, the bullet crossing our front yard. This was the year 1997-1998, during the Kuki-Paite ethnic clash between two indigenous twin tribes in the hills of Southern Manipur.
I consider it cruel how my memory chooses to remember something else rather vividly - the white cotton flying in the wind, my mother’s hair blowing in the breeze and her scent filling up the air around her. It is almost cruel, after everything, how the world still insists on being beautiful.
There are many stories being told about the North-East of India, a region which is culturally quite distant from the rest of the country. Every story told is equally important but the stories often lean towards how impoverished and conflicted the region is, or how indifferently exoticised the land and the people are. There is very little documentation of the in-betweenness of things, the banality of life, the nonchalance, the innocence, the beauty and its mystery.
This ongoing project “I Don’t Want The News, I Want The Music” is a love song, a mourning of nostalgia and its celebration. It is a story of the women who raised me between blue mountains and under big skies. The rose-tinted nostalgia of Zo-Highlands, the loss of a brother, a pair of paper kites hurrying, and the trees in my hometown who still remember me as just a boy who dreams without sleeping."
