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.

Four years ago, my wife and I moved to Guwahati, the gateway to Northeast.  We had dreamt of a church like we had seen come out of our living room in Kathmandu.  We were young, naïve, and strangers in Kathmandu in those days.  But the handful of members that gathered for fellowship in our living room soon became the integral part of our lives, and in no time we had grown into a vibrant church.  Three of those precious souls that met in our living room for the first time are now among the main leaders of Hope Church in Kathmandu. 

After the church in Kathmandu was fully established, we moved to Korea where we ministered in an expatriate church.  People came from different parts of the world, of different colors, ethnicity and spoke different languages.  But when we gathered for fellowship, it was a community united in love and truth.  For six long years, we had the privilege of sharing God’s word and seeing it bear fruit in the midst of this colorful congregation. 

With that kind of experience behind us, we came to Guwahati with a great expectation of birthing a church like the one in Kathmandu or in Daejeon.  However, these four years in Guwahati have begun to challenge us in ways we had not expected.  Our home Church in Kathmandu is comprised of all kind of people and languages that are found in Nepal.  But the church in Guwahati, a cosmopolitan city in the region, seems to be fragmented into various pieces divided by invisible walls.  Those who occasionally join the multi-ethnic churches seem to do so only as an auxiliary exercise while their committed membership lies in their own ethnic churches.  In a personal level, these Christian friends are very warm hearted and hospitable.  But when it comes to church, they seem to be bound with some kind of invisible cords from which they cannot break free.  There appears to be a huge gap in the level of spiritual fellowship with believers from other than one’s own ethnicity.  Such a scenario is now forcing me to question my earlier fascination with the Northeast.    

Why was I so fascinated by friends from the Northeast in those early years of my Christian pilgrimage? What did I see in them that was more attractive than what I saw in my own kind of people?  Was it their sense of fashion?  Was it their non-discriminatory relationship between male-female friendships?  Was it their sense of liberation from Indian taboos and traditions?  Was it their musical ability and English language?  What was it?

As I reflect upon these questions, a vague idea is arising in my mind.  But I cannot make a judgment right now.  I will have to dig deeper to get the real answers.  However, this vague wind that blows over my head is the possibility of westernization that I saw in their fashion, male-female friendships, freedom from taboos, and in their music and language.  With that hint at the back of my head, I will have to rethink about my fascination about Northeast and see if my perceived ‘westernization’ is a reality or only a fantasy.  Can the church from the Northeast generate such level of fascination for the outsiders as my friends from the Northeast did in my formative years?