“IMAGINE MOKOKCHUNG”

By Limalenden Longkumer |

Music, honestly speaking, is not in our blood. Well, technically. The cells in our blood don’t actually play music just like the employees of our government don’t really work. You see, to earn a decent living through music in Mokokchung at the moment would be like Lijaba scratching his elbows to fill some poor girls’ vessel with rice. Unfortunately, Lijaba no more roams about. I reckon it would be easier to find a needle in the haystack than to find a person making a living solely out of music in Mokokchung.

We say we have a lot of talented musicians but let us take a moment to ponder on what ‘talent’ actually means. No, you take the trouble to define ‘talent’ but the least I can say is that it does not mean mediocrity. Or are you trying to say that ‘talent’ means mimicking someone else’s tunes? In that case, it would mean that you are talented in imitating others and that does not mean you are talented in music. In other words, it means you are an idiot fooling yourself with your misplaced fantasies.

You may still argue but the fact remains that even a 10-year old illegal Bangladeshi immigrant in Mokokchung is earning more than a 30-year old “musician” here simply because he’s got better work to do than imitate some western or Korean chimps.

Music, like any other industry, depends on a lot of other auxiliary enterprises for its growth. If you are doing music for the sake of it, then so be it. But if you mean serious music (like for income generation), then you’d better go hang yourself on the nearest tree.

There are other issues that are far more meaningful and worthy of applause than pursuing music as a career in Mokokchung, right now, like:

# A Nagaland Police officer whose sense of discipline is as pale as his khaki uniform.

# School girls with skirts so short like they are trying to show off their brains.

# Our boys, so girlish you call them gay and they hit you with their vanity purse.

# A holier-than-thou church worker walking the streets of Mokokchung just like he’s walking down the boulevard of New Jerusalem!

# Or, a whole Public Works Department who can’t differentiate between a road and a pothole.

It is nobody’s business to chip away the interest of the diligent individuals who love to pursue music as a career or whatever; yet, a faint sketch of the pathetic economic situation we subsist on ought to be an alarm loud enough for any good citizen to give heed to. We need a strong economy for any industry to thrive, including music, and in order to develop our economy we need to formulate a realistic economic policy. It’s like you can’t swim if there is no water.

I won’t mind living without listening to music but I will definitely not enjoy music in an empty stomach (forget about dancing!).