Consonant Aspirations - Archive

For this special 200th post, I thought I'd cover something that I had the joy and honour of organising and running in Zunheboto last week. It was the very first Sumi Mother Tongue Literacy Development Workshop. The workshop ran from 23 Oct 2012 till 26 Oct 2012, and was conducted by the North East Literacy Network, represented by Palash Nath and Luke Horo, with the support of SIL International and also our wonderful benefactors in Melbourne, Inotoli Zhimomi and Nick Lenaghan. Our very humble hand-written notice on the white board It was hosted by the Sumi Literature Board and held at the S ü tsah Academy in Zunheboto. This workshop was meant to be a first step towards teaching Sumi as a subject in the private schools in Zunheboto (which mostly use English as the medium of instruction), with the further possibility of teaching content subjects in Sumi, along with a gradual transition to English. The philosophy here is that children learn better throu...

Back in Dimapur now after another trip to Zunheboto, this time to help run a workshop on Sumi Mother Tongue Literacy, which I'll be blogging about as soon as I recover from the journey. It's really sad that the roads to Zunheboto are all so terrible (see my previous post here ), especially the Kohima-Chozuba-Zunheboto Road which has been abandoned now because they started expanding it, stopped work, then the rains came and you know... Then once you get to Zunheboto town, the roads don't get any better. The roads aren't always resurfaced every year, and even when they are, they aren't done properly. So during the monsoon, the main road through Project Colony becomes a mini-river whenever it rains. Then when winter comes round and it stops raining, all you get is dust. My friends came up to Zunheboto for the first time last week, and they were impressed by the natural beauty of the area, especially the neighbouring Tizu valley. I believe the phrase ...

The past two week I've been receiving messages from an Assamese guy who used to work at the guest house I was staying in in Guwahati. (I've found out that he's since been fired.) It started with half a dozen missed calls on my phone after I'd just gotten back from a trip to Nagaland. He then left a message asking if I could give him a minute of my time. When I rang him back, he asked me if I 'knew about a million dollars'. It took a while before he told me that his brother had in his possession a 'US one million dollar note'. He wanted me to see if it was real or a 'duplicate'. Although novelty million dollar notes are allowed and have been printed out (according to Wikipedia ), but none are legal tender. I told him there was no such thing as a 'US million dollar bill', and that you can't have a duplicate of something that isn't real. A few days ago, I got this second message: Brow right now i m having 1 million doler.....

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the start of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, which saw fighting between India and China over two disputed border territories in the Western and Eastern parts of the Himalayans. There was probably more to the war than the border dispute (Tibet had been annexed, the Dalai Lama had also recently been granted asylum by India) - the Wikipedia page has a list of references about the war. The conflict was never actually resolved, and Arunachal Pradesh / South Tibet just to the north of Assam is still claimed by both India and China. Even today, while other NE Indian states have removed the need for foreigners to obtain Restricted Area Permits (RAPs) or Protected Area Permits (PAPs), visitors to Arunachal still need a permit. Here're some articles about the 50th anniversary: 50 Years Since Sino-Indian Battle: War Never Begets Peace ( International Business Times ) Half a Century ago - October 20, 1962 ( Times of Assam ) Lessons of the Si...

I was telling the story that I blogged about in my previous post to someone in Guwahati. When I got to the part where I was saying 'I don't understand Hindi', I told her I'd said: मुझ को हिन्दि नहिँ आती है। mujh ko hindi nahiin aatii hai. (lit. 'To me Hindi does not come'). She burst into laughter and exclaimed, "But you're not a woman!" This raised a rather interesting linguistic question for me. The issue here was that I had used the feminine participle of the verb 'to come': आती  aatii where she had expected the masculine singular form आता aataa . Now, what I'd learnt in my few weeks of Hindi lessons from a tutor from Lucknow was that in Hindi, all nouns have grammatical gender (like other Indo-European languages such as French and Russian) and that verbs agree with their subject in gender and number. In French, for instance, some verbs agree with their subject for number and gender in the passé composé 'compound past ...

As you can guess from the title, this post is about responsibility, racism and trying to recharge a prepaid SIM card (with a phone company whose name starts with 'R' incidentally). It happened about 2 weeks ago at a little shop in Paltan Bazar. The credit on the SIM card that I use for my 3G mobile internet had expired after just one month and I needed to buy more credit. Now, this wasn't the first time I've had to recharge a SIM card - it's something I have to do constantly when I'm here, especially since I'm only ever here for a few months at a time and don't have a fixed address in India. The shop I had gone to previously wasn't opened, since it was still 9am, so when I walked past an open shop, I asked the guy there (in Assamese and English) if he could recharge my SIM. He said he could, so I thought, why not. As is common practice here, I gave him the number to recharge, he paid the phone company using the credit on his phone as a dealer, a...