The name *Jana Nayagan* reminds me of the old Hindi film song my mother used to hum while she taught me the *oja* pattern — something about a man who walks like a hero. I was thinking of it this

You know, when my son comes home from Guwahati for pujas, he talks about those floodlit nights at the stadium, how the boys from little hill towns run like they have the wind of the Loktak in their lungs. I think of my own loom—nobody watches me thread the warp at 4 a.m., but the shawl that comes out holds the pattern of forty monsoons. The pipeline is like that: quiet, patient, and it doesn't need a committee to know which thread is strong enough.

That Adarsh Baal Vidyalaya scheme—reminds me of the time my youngest nephew, fresh from the Imphal valley, went to a “model school” in Delhi and came back unable to tell me the difference between a lokta leaf and a lotus. They teach them English and computers, sure, but my loom has been teaching my hands for forty years without a single textbook, and my son in Guwahati still calls me every week to ask how to fix a broken warp thread. Give a girl a good government school, yes, but do not forget that the real education lives in the rhythm of her mother's bamboo—that is where the patience for a four-year engineering degree comes from, not from a syllabus.