For Representational Purpose- Image Courtesy: stock.adobe
Subongtsungba Longkumer
Mokokchung
Our forefathers hunted heads with spears and machetes, trophies of their bravery and the wars they fought. The sight alone chills us—the gruesome relics of an ancient way of life, proof of victories won through bloodshed. We tell ourselves we have moved beyond such savagery, that civilization has refined us, that we are better than the warriors of old.
But are we truly past it?
Today, we Nagas still hunt heads. The battlefield has shifted from the forests to courtrooms, village councils, church committees, and social media. Our weapons are no longer sharpened blades but sharpened words—pens, papers, whispers in dark corners, the click of a keyboard. We no longer sever flesh, but we slice through dignity. We do not raise machetes, yet we wield our influence, our connections, and our collective silence to execute reputations, careers, and souls.
We demand apologies not as gestures of reconciliation but as trophies of conquest. We do not seek truth; we seek submission. We force men and women to kneel—not before justice, but before egos, before the faceless mob, before the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of righteousness. A head is claimed with every forced signature, every reluctant confession, every tear-filled plea for forgiveness. Alive, yet lifeless.
Dare to ask a question—just one question—to an organization, a group, a community, and suddenly, your very existence is put on trial. "Who are you?" they ask, as if truth requires a title. "What authority do you have?" as if conscience needs permission. And before you can breathe, the verdict is passed: You are not above any organization, community, or tribe. You have overstepped. You must be humbled. The price? A letter—an apology, carved not from regret but from coercion, a ritual humiliation to appease the gods of human pride.
The courtroom, where justice should be served, has become a theater where verdicts are predetermined, and power dictates truth. The village council, meant to uphold fairness, now bends to those with deeper pockets and louder voices. Even the church, once a refuge for the broken, now demands written apologies as the price of redemption—proof of a soul's surrender rather than its renewal.
And when all else fails, we take to social media, where assassinations require no weapons—only a well-crafted post, a vague status laced with accusations, a flurry of comments from those eager to draw blood without consequence. Screens become the new battlegrounds where lives are destroyed in real time, where one post can bury a person deeper than any grave.
And so, we must ask: Have we evolved, or have we simply perfected cruelty? Our forefathers, brutal as they were, at least granted their enemies the mercy of an ending. But we? We leave them breathing, yet broken—souls cut down without bleeding, living testaments to a conquest that never ends.
