Session 34 summary
Dreams and Chaos
From an early age Sentilong enjoyed telling and listening stories and went to church services for the stories. He has observed that the art of oral narration is slowly diminishing day by day. Remembering his school days Sentilong talks about how there were no libraries, books and magazines available. There was only access to school textbooks. He read his first novel in the second year of college because he was exposed to literature then. He read books just to tell stories about cultural situations, he also invested his time in writing films on social issues, context for YouTube channels, media houses and air contents created for indigenous languages and teach students.
He set up Bookipedia Foundation in 2019, where he collected 800 books and invested in 500 books more from Amazon. Now the foundation has more than 2000 books for free. The college students are given free library cards to visit and borrow books. In 2020 he realized that there is need for publishing houses to tell folk stories. There is a small publishing house to publish books from Mokokchung and other parts of Nagaland. There was only small funds available, taken from the 10% of their salaries to look out for students from the weaker section of the economy.
In his work Sentilong addresses some issues which bothered him. Some of the issues were; the issue of uselessness/redundant class. The unemployment rate is the second highest in India and it is difficult to get jobs and the livelihood of the entire family depends on the parents. The exam for recruitment is for the clever, if you don’t study hard you will end up becoming a farmer. But the farmer is living a sustainable life in the village than the youth in urban city. Working hard is equivalent to being educated, this is an idea that got imprinted when people were introduced to education. When the Nagaland government was founded, everyone received education and got jobs due to massive recruitment drives. In the present time Nagaland has the highest employment in terms of government jobs but it has become a land of unemployment for the Nagasand a land of employment for the Non-Nagas as the Nagas have degrees but no skills. They are the useless class but redundant to demands of the world, who are not skilled or not of use to the world. There is the presence of legitimate corruption which is turning the dreams of the youngNagas into disaster and there have been various models to justify corruption. Another issue Sentilong focuses on is History and politics. There is a postcolonial state of the State in political conflict. The Nagas are fully alienated- they are facing the problem of being considered as outsiders and not Indians. It is the duty of the government to look after them but the people abuse government infrastructures and so the government has become an outsider to them too. There is also the issue of inevitable extinction. Majority of Nagas will become extinct from the land at the end of the century but if this topic is brought forward the person would be ostracized. The population has been dwindling in the last 20 years. Most Nagas are unable to speak their native language and mother tongue. With decreasing population and unawareness to their native language the extinction is inevitable and most tribes have lost their lineage, history, culture and heritage. Sentilong’s works are centered on these issues.
About the Speaker
Sentilong Ozukum
Founder, Bookipedia Foundation
Sub-Divisional Officer (Civil)
Mokokchung
Nagaland
Sentilong is a civil servant, motivational speaker, screenwriter and an emerging literary voice from North East India. His works include Campus Blues (2010), Sincerely Yours (2017), Dreams & Chaos (2020) and The Case of Longti Village (2021). Three of his books have been adapted into award winning web series and movies. He also works as a content creator and screenwriter for various YouTube channels and for All India Radio, Mokokchung. He is also the co-founder of Bookipedia Foundation in Mokokchung which manages a free library a publishing house for indigenous writers and undertakes various initiatives to promote and preserve the indigenous Ao language.
