When I Called The Professor As My "Brother"!

I spent the childhood in detesting my biological family.  As a newborn infant, I was abandoned by parents at birth on the basis of their religious and astrological convictions.  Spent the first ten years of my life in maternal grandparents’ home where I endured a kind of child abuse by an uncle that nearly cost my sanity.  At eleven, I was brought back to my father’s home where physical and emotional abuses nearly cost my life.  The terms “father”, “brother”,  “uncle” found no place in my oral or mental vocabulary.  The only endearing terms were, and still are, “grandfather” and “grandmother”.  Sadly, I was not aware of my grandpa’s death (apparently he died while I was being taken care of by another family).  I still have a memory of my childhood days of waiting for his return for a long time; no one told me he had died.   When I was brought back to my father’s home, I lost the love of my grandma too.  Thus, back in my father’s home, the goal of my life was to get away from the family as far as I could get.

In my quest of running away, I ran into the Lord Jesus Christ.  In an amazing manner, he transformed my life, my quest and my destiny.  I got into a small Christian community.  Everyone in that community called each other as “brother so and so” and “sister so and so.”  There appeared to be a deeply rooted brotherly kindness even among the strangers.  Such friendship and intimacy began to affect my otherwise solitary existence.  As I grew closer to Christ and to Christians, I began to feel at home in the church. 

Why Was I So Fascinated With The Northeast? - Part 2

I was born and brought in an ultra-conservative Hindu society in the far western part of Nepal. At the age of 17, I happened to read a booklet that brought me to the feet of Jesus Christ.  When I eventually met some Christians, the thing that fascinated my young imagination was the egalitarian spirit of that small community where the higher caste and the lower caste would sit together, eat together, and live with no single care of being defiled by the other!  Men and women sat together and talked with each other so freely and so comfortably as if there was no wall between them.  In my childhood experience as a Hindu, I was not allowed to eat or even touch a lower caste.  Even as little school children, when we came home from the school, someone would have to sprinkle clean water over us before we could enter the house.  If no one was at home to do so, in that case, there would be a water jar kept outside for that particular purpose, and because there was no one to do the sprinkling, one would have to find a green leaf in the yard, dip the leaf in the water without touching the jar and then sprinkle the drops over one’s head. 

Why Was I So Fascinated With The Northeast?

The year was 1988.  I had just gotten in an English medium Bible College in Bangalore; though I could not make one proper sentence in English.  The first person who took a genuine interest in helping me to improve my English was a friend from Nagaland, a Christian majority state from the Northeast part of India.  His name was Nzalo Kath (not sure of the spelling).  Our friendship was short lived as he developed a serious stomach problem and went home.  He never returned back to college; had no address to write to him. I still wonder if he even survived the sickness.  But he left a lasting imprint in my young Christian mind of what a Christian friendship would look like.

By the second year in college, my English improved a little, and the circle of my friendship was expanding.  Many of those inner circle friends were from the Northeast.  If things had to go by my appearance and ethnicity, I should be at home with the mainland Indian friends.  But for some mysterious reasons, I was drawn to friends from the Northeast.  So much so, by the end of my fourth year in college, I had fallen in love with a beautiful lady from Manipur, another state in the Northeast where Christians make the majority of the population.  Falling in love with a warm hearted lady brought all together a different level of excitement and attraction to the Northeast.  After 28 years of marriage with a person from this part, this excitement about the Northeast has not yet waned.