The last month has seen a Manipur totally overwhelmed by the survival of the thriftiest. If it wasn't for the fact that this particular thrift is concerned less with habit, and more with necessity, you could be excused for thinking that nothing else mattered in the world at all - even perhaps that there was no world outside Manipur.

But more than the bare essentials of life, the one area of local affairs where an enormous expenditure is being focused on recently is the search for new routes to the outside world. If necessity is the mother of invention, then obstruction is the father of exploration.

Some good may come out of the present misery after all. Perhaps Manipur will open new roads for multi-directional traffic to flow unhindered. Perhaps it will start looking within for a better understanding of itself, for the journey that is realized in the best and the worst of human experience. Journeys whose questions and answers are more within than without.

To have an understanding of this journey is to possess an overview of self, a perspective that allows us to understand how the human experience that is Manipur fits together in all its diverse modes, and to see how each experience relates with every other experience. This understanding is therefore a state of mind that redefines experience, and as such, lays the foundation of growth.

If this is the case, and I sincerely hope it is, then we should expect this understanding to be fostered and grown in improving and expanding all possible systems of communication.

An honest examination of our present systems of communication will reveal to what extent we have wasted our energies. It will show how far we have been left behind. It will also show how a willful neglect of development only serves to sow the seeds of extinction.

The pathetic state of our roads should serve as a warning and a wake up call. Especially for those who have consistently looted the funds meant for their upkeep. It should be clear to all that roads and other development works are invaluable to a landlocked state like Manipur.

Their repair and maintenance deserves the highest possible priority. There was much talk recently about the much-hyped 'Eastern Door', and how it would open up all kinds of possibilities. I don't know where that door is, but I'm sure the keys to that door are to be found in the opposite direction. West is where the answer lies. West is where we should look.

Communication is all about nurturing growth. It is about the process of transformation through the exchange and sharing of everything of value - all this through respect for human potential.

In this sense, communication is the manner in which the individual comes to see the self as an end in itself and all others as ends in themselves. And we have failed quite miserably in this department. To understand this point, you only need to talk for a short while to the blockading hothead at my immediate north.

Of course, no person can be completely coherent in the sense in which I am using the term, for in Manipur, there is always a lower level to achieve. Whether you agree with me or not on the importance of communication, depends upon how well you integrate all the items of the miserable Manipur experience, and how clearly you understand all its tragic irony.

Manipur's predicament is that it is a creation born out of the cut and thrust of political uncertainty. This has created a world of the insecure, the excluded, the excommunicated, and of the marginalized.

It is within this very world that it must first seek its future, for there can be no quick fix solution to its problems. The problem is how to overcome the subject/object divide in a manner that will allow it to move and look forward at the same time. Manipur's health lies in an honest understanding of its condition.

The tension between Manipur the beautiful and Manipur the beast is the history of the species, for history is nothing more than the recorded story of man's struggle to break free from himself. Manipur cannot grow unless it stops trying to figure out this struggle.

More than the struggle, the dynamics and energy of that struggle are the keys to its growth. Growth cannot, however, occur in a vacuum. It also cannot occur inside closed doors. Manipur has to find a way out. A way that can never be held to ransom, and which liberates it to freely explore the possibilities of life in a creative and imaginative fashion.

A moment's reflection will flag up the absurdity of the present impasse on our highways, for it too easily supposes that some are less equal in terms of economic, intellectual, moral, emotional, imaginative and physical attributes.

It would be a shallow world if the notion of "homeland" should be confined to the ethnic cost-efficiency sphere alone. The standoff itself points to a lack of communication, for it exemplifies the partial, and therefore irresponsible, understanding of how things really are.

In our present system, the idea of communication lies suffocated beneath an increasingly spreading pall of crude values: values expressed in terms of mere ethnicities and short-term gain.

At an increasingly rapid rate, the notion of communication is being severely marginalized by introverted ideas of social exclusion - ideas that are little more than a programme of balkanization.

The danger in such a programme is that the mind locks gradually and inevitably into the world of the mundane, where it wallows in the shallow state of unfulfilled potential. It becomes in essence, a philistine - valued by none, excommunicated by all.