Nagaland’s Mon district was flooded with the blood of 13 civilians as Indian security forces opened fire at them, “mistaking them for insurgents “- 4th December 2021.
Since my childhood, I noticed that all the countries of this dear blue planet are in possession of weapons and fear, and we, civilians, are in possession of only one thing- uncertainty. The country possesses pride and wealth, we possess an almost collapsed spine and a restless life to make our days end meet.
Sometimes we take birth as farmers and then our land is flooded, sometimes we are born as school teachers and the pension doesn’t come through after retirement, the same ‘we’ sign an 8 hours service contract to a corporate office yet we are forced to spend 12 hours and return home like a robot.
We are born and a constant running for survival starts till the day we die while the power-hungry nation sits comfortably, watching and howling in laughter as we struggle. We die and the nation is directly or indirectly is responsible for it, we die and we become just a nameless corpse with a number to them.

“Politicians hide away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that role to the poor, yeah”

– ‘War Pigs’, Black Sabbath.

Even after this, there are some people who set sail to find the meaning of this life, sometimes like Miyazaki they mutter-I’m not going to make movies that tell children, “You should despair and run away”, or sometimes they just want to jog their life in reverse after turning forty just like Sukumar Ray, or those same people, to stand with their claim, can march towards nation’s capital and continue to protest for a year, empowering everyone on how to fight the power.

This issue contains Siva’s photo story on the missing people of Kashmir. Siva, using family photo album, has tried to speak about those who went missing when they tried to speak against the power. I once asked Ahanger what ‘justice’ would mean for her and the families of the victims. “Give our children back to us, can India do this?” she asked (excerpt from Siva’s photo story).

Sandip Dhara’s ‘Gonokoborer Deshe’ is a collection of fictional letters that is deeply rooted in harsh reality. There he repeatedly tried to highlight how innocent people who had taken up arms are crushed when two megalomaniac nations collide.