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Rakesh Khanna grew up in Berkeley and moved to Chennai in 1998, where he co-founded the trend-bending Blaft Publications that -specialises in graphic novels, irrealist writing and translations of pop fiction. Among the interesting books brought out by Blaft, perhaps the Tamil Pulp Fiction series caught the most attention. Rakesh's interests include topological graph theory, paleozoic marine invertebrates, and banging on things to see what they sound like. He recently travelled to Mizoram with friends who are working on the project u-ra-mi-li--a collection of films, audio, images from their travels.
A series of surprises in Aizawl
Wandering through the busy streets of the capital of Mizoram--its colourful neighbourhoods leaning jauntily on the steep hillsides, with hardly a piece of litter in sight--you will realise that there's a lot going on in the city
Crossing into Mizoram by road from Assam, we feel as though we've gone through a portal to another dimension. Everything changes drastically: from a broad, flat road cutting through paddy fields and open plantations, the road abruptly tilts upwards. All at once, the vegetation changes and the temperature drops five degrees. We stop in a queue at a checkpoint to show our inner-line permits, obtained earlier that day in Silchar; as we wait, I notice a few stocky middle-aged local women sitting by the side of the road, smoking cigarettes. They're dressed in shorts and tank tops, and some are wearing bandanas on their heads, gangster style.
They look like they could beat us up. A burly Mizo policeman looks over our permits and IDs and gives us a gruff but friendly welcome to the state. We're here chasing stories. Though about eighty-seven percent of Mizoram's people are Christian, the old tribal folklore is still very much alive. Tales of the lasi, the elf-like forest spirits who might bless a lucky hunter with their favour, and the keimi, the shape-shifting weretigers of the mountains; these tales are still told by...