Does the Rajdhani Express go to Assam?” I thought I had heard something wrong. When the question was repeated, I knew I heard it right. My blood boiled. But my conscience got the better of me as I realised that the person may genuinely not know much about Assam.

I said instead, “No, the Rajdhani goes only till New Jalpaiguri. On the Assam-Bengal border, we get off and take a bullock cart!” So pleased was I with my own joke that I almost rolled on the floor laughing.

In October last year, Nido Tania, a student from Arunachal Pradesh was killed at a busy market place in Delhi. A candelight march protest was held at Azad Maidan in Mumbai by students of Arunachal Students Union. File Pic

I am from the Northeast, from Assam, from Guwahati, but I am not Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli who was raised by wolves.
Now a migrant in Delhi, I came in 2008 after landing a job in a reputed media organisation. I come from a respected and well-known family in Guwahati. My grandfather was a lawyer. My father was a gold medal-winning professor at a Guwahati college. My mother is from a family of businessmen who once traded with Bhutan’s king and small Hindu princely areas of Bangladesh.

I was born and brought up in Guwahati, studied in a missionary school with origins in Italy, and finally in a reputed 60-year-old local college. I completed my Masters from a fledgeling, but promising central university in Tezpur, a town linked to Lord Krishna.