The man on the hill. It is painful for him to bend down from the hill and see what is happening down there at the foot of the hill. It is even more breaking painful for him to straighten a bend in a curved bone not to look.
“We can go there anytime we want,” she once told the man on the hill about what she and a fruit man, her fruit man, usually do.
They can go there anytime she wants. Or anytime he wants. Or anytime they want. Any of these three times. Or all of these. Anytime.
There they have got berries and cherries at the farm, and her supple hands and lips must be even more beautiful when they are smeared with their crimson sap so much that she must be taking a bath in that every time they go there.
Sometimes she sinks her teeth into the flesh of these sappy fruits at other places, where they can find them. She had said it is difficult to find these forbidden fruits here mainly in the city like they are in the woods and hills far away, but it is just that they are not that much abundant here as she likes them to be. Every day when they don’t go there or anywhere else together, the fruit man would stop by her gate on his way back home and she would see bunches of these fruits, the torn flesh of many of them dripping, all over his body hanging from his shoulders, his shirt wet and stained with the thick, sticky sap. He would be there for a while, long enough to blow a new life into a beloved dead from starvation, before he resumes his journey, she says, back into the mist on the outskirts of the city.
The man on the hill. He talks to himself. He says nothing. He packs his sack, slings it over his shoulder and sets to walking on the ridge of the hills, casting his eyes far away beyond the haze over the hills.
Ngasi amuk segaire ikui kuidringeida ikhiba seireng khara. Machet machet tana. Masisu seirengni—segaiba asisu. Seireng segaiba asisu. Eidi seirengni, iba amasung idaba seirenggi pukhri macha ama, chingnungda leiba. Mei tharaga manghanningdaba pot manghanbagi apenba ama lei—masisu seirengni. Seireng asi eina angang oiringeida tamlakpani Eikhoigi patki khangpok chakpada imungdagi chenthorakpada meirakta— Eigi thabombida asaba nungsitna chakthektuna amuba seireng isinbikhi. Mit uisinduna chenthorakpadadi phaoki Eigi hakchang manungda marei thinjinduna lamlakliboi meirina.
Photo kapte ei. Photo kaptaba asi eigi photographyni. Eigi thamoida yenglabadi khanggani. Karigumbada nang phaoningdabra eigi thamoise nangonda pansillaga?
Eigi khangpokki sumangda sannarare nungsit. Khongul liba chatkadra ei nungsitki Natraga asum phamduna leihougadra mamsillakpasida Seireng makha amuk iduna?
Introducing Culture Circle Wari Watai. Thoithoi O’Cottage in conversation with Bihari Yengkhom on Poetry and Life on November 17, 2022. The introduction was recorded on 26 February 2023.
Most of us are selfish. Some of us are not. All of us have needs because life is programmed to survive until it ends, and survival requires intakes, which translate as needs. Friends, as Kahlil Gibran’s prophet says, are needs (not all needs) answered. We humans procure our needs differently from other animals. While true friendship is not a conscious give-and-take relationship, the need is naturally mutual because nobody is complete so as not to need another person whose friendship they accept. The needs between two friends are necessarily different, breeding a symbiosis. If there is friendship, there is this symbiosis; if there is no friendship, no matter how closely two entities of nature are closely together, there is no exchange of substance between them, though, by quantum physics, it is impossible for there to be no interaction between any two entities, no matter how apart they are from each other. But this is of another order–matter, not life, though we have to note that life and matter are inseparable in spite of the fact that we should not mix perspectives up when we should not.
This is the law of life. The law of nature. You cannot defy nature, though you can bend strands of it here and there by making it interact with the same strands or its other strands. At a cost. For example, while water flows down towards its lowest energy level, you can force water up and make it climb skyscrapers, by using other strands of the law of nature to increase the pressure at a point and making the water run for another point of the least energy level or equilibrium. At a cost. You don’t always have this energy so you cannot always pay for this push. We can bend strands of the law of nature using the same or other strands of the law of nature only temporarily.
The takeaway is we have to live by the law of life. You can be selfish, but you cannot be selfish all the time–you will be tired of being selfish. You will see yourself be eventually bent back by nature and you will be straight again, unless you are too unfortunate and die before it happens. If you are blessed with a long life, you will ultimately be good.
It is beneficial to be wise enough at least to see this truth. Even if you don’t want one of your friends, you have still to be friends, if there is a need, if there should be a symbiosis, and ultimately there would be no purpose or reason for you to dislike that friend. Circumstances matter. A friend or a stranger may wrong me, but what’s great in me if I scold him or retaliate because I have the chance? What’s so great in me if I love only those who love me and hate those who hate me? Even a dog knows biting when teased.
We may not be a Christ and we will be tired sooner than a Christ, but it is worth exercising virtues in us, even when we can do harm or things less than kind. It takes wisdom and wisdom takes good nature, which is there in nature, which mysteriously seem to reveal more in some people. It is beneficial to know that those who are selfish are selfish not because they are wise but because they are impatient because they don’t see the truth of life because they are not wise. They cannot be selfish all the time and their happiness slumps to the extent they are selfish because when one is selfish one loses self-respect (which is the soul’s poor view of itself) and other people stop giving them joy. Selfish people are ugly and they are sad to be ugly and they want to be beautiful. Ultimately, you have to stop being selfish.
My photography and my cinema demand a lot of me and my creative crew. Most of the time, we cannot afford them. Finance, technology, material facts of lived life around us, and limitations of life itself. Still, being a perfectionist (which is a cause of sadness and disappointment, unless you generously accept failure or take it as forming an early phase of an evolution whose completion you won’t see), I hate poor execution and I know I cannot execute most of my creative imagination.
I have an epic poem in me. The gods, goddesses, demigods, sorceresses, humans, poor humans, the houses, the natural topography, the built structures, the interiors of the houses in these worlds. They intimidate me. I have to find some means to visualize them on the page or the screen. I would hate to die without having done this. I have invested a huge chunk of my life in it. I have sacrificed relationships. I have shut myself off a good part of the world in meditating on and pursuing this dream. Born in a small town in a small state with just a few people, you have to be multiple talents in one if you want to do something that pleases yourself fairly well. This is how I came to this. And these are a few of my first attempts:
Gloomy city The city I lost you in Old men walking among piles of old dead and dying men and women A lonely child
To name a few. Trial work with AI. It helps visualizing your creative imagination. The limit is really your imagination, if you have some basic sense and knowledge of art and terminology of at least art.
When your creativity in the art form you love is amputated by practical factors, AI may come to help. For example, I have a cityscape in mind. A city in a foggy, smoky night against an ominous night sky, with the glaring bright windows staring out into the black night out of the black buildings. A city big as a complex world. A city so wide and complex you cannot see all things in it. You have your love in it. You don’t know where she is. You have lost her. This is important to me. But it is a physical scene that I don’t see here where I live. A scene not exactly like any I have actually scene in real cities. I don’t have the budget to develop a city like this for a photograph or a film scene. I don’t have the budget to get it created by special effect artists. I want to do it myself, with AI.
The City That I Lost You In, created by Thoithoi O’Cottage (December 2022) using AI
The creation of the above and the following three images goes through a process similar to making a film which involves several talents. Photography of the kind closest to my heart and the cinema, as Tarkovsky wrote, are unfortunate art forms because they involve a lot of money in their making. Still more unfortunately, there are things that photography and the cinema can do even if you have all the world’s money. There are realistically and practically impossible things to do in the traditional sense. In photography and the cinema, you have to clip much of your creative wings. Yes, having to work within limitations breed creativity, but the world would be undoubtedly richer if our creative wings are give a sky to fly in. It is here where AI steps in unlike anything else we can think of.
The three images above which have old men walking among piles of old dead and dying men and women would be extremely expensive if we were to take photographs or make films of the same scenes, if not impossible. It would be impossible in Manipur yet, for various reasons. I think these images evoke an emotion in you. Some emotion, which is not totally unfamiliar, even if you may not be able to name it. That was my purpose.
When your creativity in the form of art you love is limited by practical factors, AI may come to help. For example, I have a cityscape in mind. A city in a foggy, smoky night against an ominous night sky, with the glaring bright windows staring out into the black night out of the black buildings. A city big as a complex world. A city so wide and complex you cannot see all things in it. You have your love in it. You don’t know where she is. You have lost her. This is important to me. But it is a physical scene that I don’t see here where I live. A scene not exactly like any I have actually scene in real cities. I don’t have the budget to develop a city like this for a photograph or a film scene. I don’t have the budget to get it created by special effect artists. I want to do it myself, with AI.
The world, powered at least by technology enabled by population, is running at a breakneck speed and in all directions, creating and leaving behind jetsam of realities that last for too short durations for thought to condense and settle identifiably on as fine water particles gathering into dewdrops on leaves and slivers on cold winter nights. Thought needs time to get formed, to take shape, and to evolve. It needs at least fine traces of recognizable consistency in the continuity of reality that it is supposed to be anchored to. Rhizome. Sad and beautiful.
At the same time, we know there are no right or wrong speed and no right or wrong direction. We look at and value things relatively and there is no absolute point of reference. If you feel driven (ultimately this is the reason and we have no reasons that we ourselves make) to go east and if a beautiful and tempting train goes west (the world is beautiful and tempting, which is not bad), maybe it is not your train. Simply that. Why should we take all the buses and all the trains running out there? If something is too fast for you, beyond your exertion capacity and if the effort will break you, maybe you better not hang on to that. Maybe you better release your hold on that, no matter how heartbreaking it may be. If something is very slow for you and if being kind and its companionship enriches your life, maybe you better be a little bit kinder, slow a bit down and walk with it, making your life at least a little bit more beautiful. There is no rule that you should or should not walk with it. If you feel like it, maybe you should walk with it and if you do it, that’s your life, or at least part of it. We don’t have all the time.
And if we have done something good or made something beautiful, we should take time to love that, to enjoy the feeling, and to feel good about it. We should not let ourselves be shoved into the restless next or the fast trains and cars passing by rustling our clothes and hair. Life is in living, not in unfelt or unfeelably restless chasing that tires us.
Old Man in the Middle of the Road I (December 8, 2022) created by Thoithoi O’Cottage with AI
Old Man in the Middle of the Road II (December 8, 2022) created by Thoithoi O’Cottage with AI
Now no person can embrace the entire world in their thought like they did in olden times. Neither can we all humans together embrace the entire world with our thought. In any case why should our thoughts necessarily embrace everything about us like the womb embraces an embryo? How smart and knowledgeable are we humans? We can’t even manage our pollution. Simple. There are much more things about us humans than we know or can think of, and it is better that the human in us lives beyond the capacity of the all-controlling ego in us. The world was uniform almost unbearably boringly to the humans of now and a thinker’s wildly generalizing thought could do service to more or less all societies and all lives. The internet and the technologies driving it and it is propelling are being catalysts everywhere and this is the similarity in the process but the products are blindingly numerous and mind-blowingly diverse and different beyond the deceptive homogeneity of dancing Instagram girls. The most of the living thinkers and philosophers we have long honored are old, immovable, and dying. The living philosophers familiar to us are all getting old without the embrace of legendary thinkers and philosophers of yesteryears, fully knowing the fact that the world has outpaced them.
The world is a small universe too vast and voluminous for individuals to drink up. A fish in an ocean cannot drink up the ocean dry. We are sweet small individuals, too small and insignificant for our most important days like our births and deaths to make any readily visible difference to the world and the cosmos despite our love for and high opinions of ourselves. We should see this fact. We should be humble. The stars, the galaxies, and the cosmos are there irrespective of us, our thoughts not affecting them or their realities. Knowing a little is not a shame. This clearly shows what we care for all in the infinite world. Just a few familiar faces, our small worlds and small cares that still worry us. Managing to put a hand on the wounds of the near and dear ones, while the other hand is on our own wounds. Knowing how really small we are and for how small a period of time we live and have each other so closely makes our small insignificant lives so profoundly significant because it is the first and the last and it is not going to happen again. So beautiful. So sad. So sweet. Very little time to love each other. But this is all that there is and that can be.
Humility. Compassion. Celebration of life and being alive.
Adu ei ingle. Kada changle. Tumningba kanna phaoi. Mit pangduna leinaba hotnabasi achouba, awaba thabak amani haibasi yamna tumninglaba, hakchang kanna ngamdraba matamda khangngi. Mit uisinkhibadagi amuk pangthoraklaroi, aroiba oina uisinkhragadabani haiba khangba misingna amuk henna khanglamgani mit pangduna leiba phangjabasi kayagi matik laibak phabage haibasi.
Tumningba phaorabani kanna. Adutumthokpasi pammuba. Tumbasi phajadi phajaba, aduga tumthokpasi pammuba. Tumdabasi yam nungngaiba. Sum kari karino phaoduna leibasi. Tumninglaga tumthoktana mamun pharaba uheina kenge kenge touraga sum nungsitta yanduna leibagum choukrida uiraga sum kontharaga leibasi phana yamna toirabani. Wislawa Szymborskana lai yekpa, murti saba, yot suba asinachingbasi photo kappada maong tai, photogenic oi hai. Aibadi oide hai. Seirenggi pareng mari manga iraga chap leppaga karisu toudaba manna pung amagumba karigumba ama tuminna lei hai. Adudei comma ama hapchingani hai. Adei pung anigumba amuk tuminna yungduna leiraga hapchinkhiba commadu amuk louthoki hai. Hairibasi manungda kari karino thoklabasu photo kappa yaba thabak ama oina thokpadi natte, aduna photo kappada tade hai. Yum saba, sambal khaba, murti saba, lai yekpadi photo kappada thabakka loinana taidana.
Old Man Sleeping in a Chair created by Thoithoi O’Cottage using AI
Adu eidi photo kappa phajadou malli. Uiraga tumdi tumthoktana khuiraga kontharaga, lektharaga anam kanna tumdana thrang thrang yallaga nungsitta hairum hairum touraga leibado. Photoda phajadou malli.
Cha lollaga thakle. Tamo Megha Ksh na lou pari ani yeibagi miyamna chagadaba bora apakpa khaojao ama leiraga puraklambaduga chare. Tumningbasi ngaihakki oinadi phare. Adu kuiroi khangngi.
Tumbasi phajei. The Old Man and the Sea da Santiagona tumbadu nungsi. Ruskin Bondgi The Kitemaker amasung atei wari kayada yaoba ahalsingna mapham chadana tumduna leibadu yam nungsi. Eigi Walking Home da Khongdoina tumbadu nungsi, kisu ki, sirabra changlibra khangde. Eigi Coffin Makerda ahalduna tumbadusu yam nungsi. Masu laplap yengbada changngi changde haiba khangde. Magi punsisu aduni. Ngaihak leiragadi eisu changngi changdre khanglaroi. Eisu phajarani. Phajadringei ngaihaksidi cha thakkhige, bora chakhige, aduga masi loiraga tuminna thabal yengkhige.
Photographing at the Kakching Runners’ World War II Memorial Run on Sunday morning. I covered finishers, organizers, sponsors, volunteers, medical teams, and so on. My primary interest was those (old and youngh) who had the indomitable spirit to finish the run beyond the limits set by their bodies–those whose spirits dragged their fragile bodies to the end of the run. Many of them passed out. Many had serious cramps. A couple of them required assistance in their breathing.
This photograph was taken by my friend Robert Leishangthem while I was choosing my subjects. He took the shot in color. I produced this version after a quick retouching.
Phajou yadre. 
Lake Bard 
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