The menace of loud cars and bikes
Takum Mokholee: It is with the experience of living near the main road I pen down this dismay over those persons who ride those modified cars and bikes with the overly irritating loud exhaust pipes. You might think it is cool or you might feel you are being macho and in your mind you might feel like you are living the life of "Fast and the furious" but it’s not cool. Civilised people never like it. It’s cool if you drive it for sports events but most of them drive going round the locality 10-15 times/night every night. People need sleep, students need to study, etc etc. Ride to your destination and come back that's ok. We will bear it. But just for the sake of your ride going up and down the whole night is not right.
It is very surprising that in this era this sort of common sense and manners should be pointed out. They should have the sense of understanding if they are old enough to own a bike and ride it Here in this regard I wonder why don't the traffic police/colony in charge book these sorts of person for noise pollution? In one particular place some bikers were made to stop by police and made to listen to their own bikes near their ear and asked if it’s pleasurable.
Peter Rutsa: 1. The over speeding cars with racing motifs are those that never raced or won a race! 2. The loudest cars and bikes revving in the streets are the ones who have no guts to risk their lives and machines at the tracks! 3. The loudest bullets (Royal Enfield) are those who hardly leave the district or state!
Naga Christianity: The slow fade to redundancy
Kaina Zhimomi: Nagaland boasts of more than 90% of its population as professing and practicing the Christian faith, but how many of us can really vouch for its relevance and its positive impact on our society today? Blame it on the complacency or the apathy of the religious leaders who are capitulating on the idea that we have somehow lost the war to liberal progressive ideology and want to desperately hold their profiles by invoking high sounding terminologies- when their authority is challenged- just so they sound relevant. Or maybe, the followers have a collective role in the churches losing its relevance by playing along to their 'complacency' and 'hypocrisy' - two deadliest enemies of faith and the ones who want to remind me of SIN! Hold your horses! We are all sinners, no? Allow me to frame my argument on why Naga Christianity is slow fading into redundancy from complacency and hypocrisy.
1. Everything minus apologetics:
Naga Christianity has everything going on from events, services, crusades, meetings, concerts, et al. But in instances when the legitimacy of our faith is challenged, we bring twigs to a gunfight. And we cry foul when the atheists commit intellectual snobbery by branding us with the phrase ‘not the sharpest tool in the shed’. 1st Peter 3:15 [Google this Bible passage, this experience might come handy when you’re pitching for a seat in heaven] The word “answer” in Greek is apologia, the etymology from which we draw the word “apologetics”, meaning the careful, logical defense of the Christian faith against the attack of its adversaries. Socratic method has been the most popular and logical form of a debate but our complacency and non-desire for Excellency has made most of the Naga Christians settle for self-referencing form of arguments like – why do you think The Bible is the word of god? Because God said so, why do you believe there’s a God? Because The Bible says so- which immediately cancels out the legitimacy of our arguments when we are asked to defend our faith among people who bring thousands of fossil remains dating millions of years to explain how life began from a primordial slime. Maybe it’s time we stop representing Christianity with emotional arguments and clichéd quotes in shirts and start learning about quantum cosmology, the evolutionary theory and learn some of its flawed premises and assumptions which the atheists invoke to ‘veraciously refute the notion of God’ and refute some of their fallacious claims and prejudices against faith. Meanwhile, we also have to accept the empirical facts like, the earth is spherical in shape and revolves around the sun and if any of our Christian brethren refuse to accept these empirical truths, we must be the first ones to fire flaks at them. We are living in the 21st century, cave party is over.
2. Misplaced priorities:
The Range Rover! or in Nagaland, the great Mahindra bolero- by the way, Mahindra has rolled out its new Mahindra bolero power plus variant with 1.5 litre mHawk d70 turbo diesel engine. The churches can go to the dealers and get one soon, so you can boast about it - don't understand the craze for this particular car - ohh!!! Practicality! Most of the churches seem to have lost their grip on prioritizing affairs. I still hear stories of missionaries working in remote regions of mainland India who go without two decent meals in a day. I know of many pastors and church leaders in the remote areas of Nagaland who are frighteningly underpaid- trust me, many people in our own Nagaland wear denims and accessories that cost more than the salary of those leaders [just to give you all some perspective, nothing wrong with expensive clothes or accessories, or buildings or cars, who don’t want to own a Lamborghini or a Nissan GT-R?]. I know a lot of deserving brilliant theologians who deserve to be sponsored and sent to Princeton, Harvard, oxford etc to gain more knowledge and experience and lead our churches in this fast changing ‘era of the internet’. I also know a lot of churches who are financially stable enough to provide our missionaries two decent meals in a day, and pay the pastors and church leaders serving in the remote areas decent amount for their easy survival, and I also know a lot of churches who can sponsor deserving theologians to get quality education from top universities so they can come back to Nagaland and serve our churches and believers better but they would rather invest in buildings and cars and properties over people. I was taught in my theology class that the ‘believers’ were the CHURCH and what we commonly refer to as ‘Church’ was just a building structure. Guess I was taught by a heretic professor.
There are churches thriving around many places in Nagaland and my intent is not to undermine the service and relevance of its leaders and believers. This is a foreboding drawn from my observations as an outsider-as someone who is presently not employed by the church -and the general perception on the image of the Naga churches from discussions on the state of Naga Christianity. Condescension not to be inferred from this mildly satirical piece.
NOTE: The Range Rover reference was a read bait. ~wink~
