You know you’re a Naga journalist if…
• Your salary is thinner than your Press card.
• Your job profile includes everything from reporting to going out to buy your boss' Talab.
• You receive an urgent, top priority call at
• You receive a dreadfully urgent top-priority phone call from the police at
• You do a story on Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio. And your heading is always that eternal liner: "
• You read of the same heading, word-for-word in the other local newspapers as well.
• You forget that you have come across that same heading in earlier older editions as well.
• You have done at least one big, exclusive story but next morning the other papers have the same story – from a press release.
• You have been threatened by an underground functionary at least once for not carrying their press release on page-1.
• No matter the extent of suffering you have endured – and continues to – you still cannot muster up courage to use words other than "national worker."
• You have been threatened at least once by a functionary from all the Naga underground organizations.
• You have been threatened even for reasons that you used "underground" or "rebel" or "militant" or even "activist." – Terminology that any neutral, objective and academic newspaper would have used if it were not in Nagaland.
• You use "national worker" and next day, an opposing faction’s worker rings up and accuse you of "legitimizing" the other faction. And then, threaten you with dire consequences.
• You have encountered at least one citizen whose press release he’d demanded must be published on the front page, "by tomorrow" because it is "very critical issue."
• In fact, almost all the citizens with press releases have asked you to publish it on the front page, "by tomorrow" because all of their materials seem to be ‘very critical issues.’
• You shove it into page-5’s ass. And they accuse you of being "biased" and "uncooperative."
• You have been threatened with a lawsuit at least once by people of all sorts.
• You newspaper or editor has at least one current lawsuit in process for the shittiest of reasons from a shitty Media-uneducated citizen.
• You have wished at least once that a seminar would be organized by the editors to educate our mostly Press-uneducated Naga public (and organizations).
• The only "important" occasions you are not called to give coverage are birthday parties.
• You can tell that a guy is being totally sweet and polite because he wants his nonsensical stuff on page-1.
• You call mass cleaning drives "social work." So do 12 lakhs other Nagas.
• You call robbers ‘money-snatchers’ (I hope Naga newspapers won’t start calling rapists ‘virginity-takers’ or ‘sex-thieves’…or something equally weird and Bosti)
• You still cannot get over the terrible habit of asking everyone at a particular event to line up for a picture. The event in question is as shitty as so-and-so-colony-undertakes-cleaning-drive. And you insist the picture must be taken with a large banner declaring the "social work."
• Your most efficient newspaper hawker/distributor is rarely a Naga.
• Eminent, foreign personalities fly 183, 000 Miles from around the world into the state and the only question you have in mind: "Do you like Nagaland…?"
• Paul Gilbert is in front of you and the only thing you ask him is: "Do you like Dimapur?"
• You are convinced that you have the right to take decisions for every other journalist in Nagaland – because you happened to be based in Kohima.
• For some curious reasons, you expect foreigners to have heard of the Naga political issue. To your embarrassment, you find they haven’t even heard of a Godknowswhere place called Nagaland in their entire lives.
• Your press club or that club hears you’d lost your bicycle. They scream and tear their hair out, shout and write to the CM, Guv and Obama Barak and all – but they don’t sound even a whimper when undergrounds threaten (which is almost every day) or when thugs rough up some photojournalist.
Email: alngullie@yahoo.com