I guess it's about time that I write something, anything on this blog.I am been too shameless to secure this domain for almost a year now yet not post anything. I had my reasons, one reason was I didn't really know where to begin with, though I really had the idea of starting a blog like this for years now.
What really made me want to start a blog like this was this big thing called the INTERNET. The internet is like this source to everything you need to know of just about anything,just anything. All you have to do is type your interest on the search engine and then TADA !! a long list of results appears on your screen as if screaming 'read me. read me.i am here', and all you have to do is pick the ones that interest you the most.I must confess I never had an email address nor knew much of anything about the internet before 2007 when a fellow classmate asked me my email address and kindly offered to get me one when I told him I had none.
So when I was finally getting used to the internet,it was one of those days when i typed 'Chakma' on the search engine just to see what is written about the tribe I belong to, the results were unsatisfying and infact disappointing at some points. Lots of writers, anthropologists , journalists wrote many articles and books on the tribe but none of them had accurate details, many things were missing and some just made up which I am sure was done by interviewing people who just knew little of the tribe, and then written and published. When I came across some of these works, I was pretty pissed. I was like '"OMG !! What the hell is this ? What are these people writing ? Only part of these are true and the rest am damn sure is just made up.I need to do something about it"
That's how it hit me. If I really wanted to do something about it, starting a blog is the best way as I can't go and shout out at all those people and say they were mistaken, and that some things they wrote about us aren't true at all. One reason being, some of them may not be even alive by now, and the rest , there may be more than hundreds, I can't go to each of them, that will only mean I am crazy or something. So I am just hoping that perhaps when they read this blog someday (when I post more articles which I will ), they might understand where they went wrong and if they are interested in learning more about the Chakma people, they can continue visiting the blog or may be contact me, though it should be noted that I don't mean that I mean the only one who knows everything about the tribe. I just hope that my blog serves as a medium to know more about us.
Another thing that really bugged me as a kid and it still bugs me at times is that the Chakmas living in other states of the country not given voting rights (belonging to some indigenous tribe might suck some times when you are called this.. haha). There are Chakmas in states of Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura of India, Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh,the Rakhine State of Burma and some parts of Thailand. That made me question the real origin of the tribe, though oral history trace back to the time of the Buddha even claiming that the tribe are descendants of the Sakya clan (the clan of the Buddha). But I just seem to not be able to stomach the fact that the culture,traditions,cuisine of the tribe are so similar with that of Thailand and Burma, than that of India. So it has to be either of these two countries, but then again, its just MY theory. The last thing I would want would be a historian bashing up my blog before I even started it when I still have a long way to go on my search.
So, when I shared my views with my father, he was more than interested to help me out. He liked my idea of sharing folk tales, myths, legends, tradition and culture.He already has some immense collection of these stuffs which he had been collecting over the years, its kind of his hobby. He would share some of these stories with me when I was a kid. It's been almost three years that I have been away from home, one of the main reasons why I could not post any articles as of yet. So now that I will be going home this June, I will be able to bring those collections with me and then post them.
Till then I hope my hair and that of that of the possible readers or followers of this blog don't go gray waiting..haha . I will be back with more articles soon. :)
