Re-describing the ‘elephant’

Witoubou Newmai


 
A society engaging with a movement fits in the parable of the blind men describing an elephant once the proliferated divisions of the society failed to look beyond their respective limited experiences, while snubbing the experiences of other divisions and the 'collective aspiration'.


As each division of the society has its own description of the ‘elephant,’ it goes without saying that the overarching principle of the movement is ignored. As such, the blind men’s manner of inspecting and describing the elephant only gives rise to thrust-and-parry expressions among the various divisions of the society.



As the single ‘elephant’ has acquired numerous shapes and sizes for the blind men who inspected the animal, relational hiatus among the engaging people has also become prominent, with each blind man sticking to the part of the animal he had inspected. In this way, the blind men have also disfigured the 'elephant' through their narratives.



The message now before the Naga society is to make the 'collective people’s journey' reinvent itself. In this way, the society can rediscover the abiding relevance of the overarching aspiration of the Naga people, which seems to have lost with the divisional descriptions of the ‘elephant’.


Reinventing the Naga ‘elephant’ would also mean that, each one has to compromise the argument about the sizes and shapes of the 'elephant.' The head, the trunk, the legs, the neck, the tail, the ears, the torso and so on, each of the blind men has claimed the respective  parts they have inspected as the shapes and sizes of the whole ‘elephant,’ which can never be the walking animal. To make it a walking animal, one has to stitch one’s description of the ‘elephant’ together, with alacrity, with the descriptions of fellow men. This is what we may call it as building a ‘consensus’ sans ‘uniformity’.



Extrapolating this area to another situation, and contextually speaking with regard to the Naga case, our society often uses the term ‘unity’ vaguely to mean also ‘uniformity.’ We need to dissect those very terms for diligent exercise.


Someone had once said that the Nagas often attempt to bring ‘consensus’ only after achieving ‘uniformity,’  “which is humanly difficult.” That is why our discourse often drowns in fatuity.


‘Consensus,’ not necessarily the dictionary definition, also connotes that we continue to take care and promote our common interest inspite of some differences here and there. In other words, ‘consensus’ can be achieved without ‘uniformity,’ as in the case of stitching together different descriptions of the blind men about the ‘elephant’.


 The whole argument is, how difficult or sophisticated the societies are, from time to time they consolidate or collapse utterly when they recognize or fail to recognize the signs of time or fail to compromise divisional interests.