Chp 841. Anti-Tobacco Songs

Good morning everyone from the beautiful hamlet of Neihbawih.

It's hard to believe that we're already in the month of December! As we were all preoccupied with various CoVid-19 lockdowns and face-mask regulations, time flew really fast. Wooosh.

For a very long time, Mizoram had the unique status of being the only Indian state with no CoVid-19 related deaths, until 28th October, when we got our first fatality due to this pandemic. But even then, as of today, 3rd December 2020, there are a total of 6 fatalities due to CoVid-19 in Mizoram, which is still far better than all the other Indian states where the numbers are in double, triple, quadruple and even quintuple digits!

And this is the part that baffles me.

I mean, yes, for a long time Mizoram enjoyed the status of being the only Indian state with no positive cases. And even after we got our first positive case, we still had the lowest infection and community spread rate in India. All that is because of our impressive ability to obey the lockdown rules and maintain strict social distancing as well as utmost regard for public health safety, all coordinated by the well efficient Village and Local Level Task Forces.

But once a person in Mizoram is infected, doesn't that put him or her in the same playing field as an infected person from Kerala, Punjab or West Bengal? Once infected, everybody's kept under the same (or similar) treatment, so why is there such a disparity in fatality rate?

If you look at today's current data [source: covidindia.org], Mizoram (3847 cases, 3572 recovered) has a recovery rate of 92.8%, and this is quite consistent across all states. Even Maharashtra, the state with the largest infection (18,32,176 cases, 16,95,208 recovered) has a recovery rate of 92.5%. But when it comes to fatality rate, Mizoram stands at 0.1% whereas Maharashtra is at 2.6%, with the national average being 1.4%.

I find this fact quite phenomenal because CoVid-19 is known to affect people with pre-existing conditions the most, and Mizoram has the dubious distinction of leading India when it comes to cancer. We are the largest consumer of tobacco related products in India, in terms of per capita consumption, mostly because smoking and other vices aren't considered taboo by most families in our Mizo society.

Thankfully, that trend has changed now, with more and more youngsters of today abstaining from cigarettes out of their own volition. Back during my teenage days, many of us started smoking due to peer pressure and the fear of not "fitting in", but the Mizo teens of today are so much wiser and way better informed. Kudos to them.

Earlier this year, just before the CoVid-19 outbreak, my uncle Dr. Malsawma had released 4 songs that he himself had composed, with the hope that it will create more awareness about the dangers of tobacco among our Mizo community. Those songs were performed beautifully by the much talented Ramhlun South YMA Choir.

The launch event was held at Synod Conference Centre, Mission Veng, on 19th February. A lot of family members, friends, well-wishers and colleagues in the medical profession turned up for the event.

My uncle immediately opened his speech with the grim news that Mizoram not only led India in cancer but we were also number #1 in terms of tongue cancer (male), lung cancer (male and female), breast cancer (female) stomach cancer (male and female), hypopharynx cancer (male), and gland cancer (male), not to mention we were also second and third in other specific cancer categories as well.

Yeah, that was reassuring. :P

But he stated the hard facts, and the truth may not always be palatable, whether we like it or not. Unlike people who call news that are not in their favour as "FAKE NEWS!", this is something we should all accept and try to rectify.

Dr. R. Thangliana, our Minister of Health & FW too delivered a fine speech on the importance of maintaining a healthy lifestyle free from tobacco and alcohol for the betterment of Mizoram. 

The launch ceremony was then officially initiated.

This was followed by the talented Ramhlun South YMA Choir performing the songs on stage, one at a time. In between each performance, there were other programs held on stage.

Overall, there were 4 songs, all performed by Ramhlun South YMA Choir. Though all the lyrics were written by my uncle, other people composed the tune. The four songs were:

1. "Cancer Thlentu", composed by Pu Lalrokima, Ramhlun South, about Cancer awareness.

2. "Sikserh Ralpui", composed by Pu Lawmzuala, Durtlang, about Malaria awareness.

3. "Sim Rawh Aw (Zu Put Put Suh)", composed by Pu Lalrokima, about Cancer awareness.

4. "TB Doral Lian", composed by Pu Lalrokima, about Tuberculosis awareness.

I listened in awe to each song.

By the way, yes, the above photo looked deserted but that was only because my cousins who were all sitting next to me went outside to take a short smoking break during the ongoing anti-smoking programme. Yeah, that was super ironic! :D

Dr. Samuel, husband of my cousin Lalnui and my uncle's son-in-law delivered the vote of thanks to conclude the launch event.

Ramhlun South YMA Choir once again came on stage to perform the remaining songs. I really like how they took the trouble of changing their uniforms to perform different songs. :)

Below is a short sample of the songs they performed that day, taken from my mobile phone (the official music videos are posted further below). Turn up your volume, do listen to these amazing songs.

Though all the songs above were really good, my favourite wes "Sim Rawh Aw" as they sang "zu put put suh" which is a very Mizo way of describing smoking in a very criticizing way. I'm not gonna lie, I do smoke, but the song definitely gave me new encouragement to quit smoking, and I plan to quit smoking soon. 

When I posted about this event on my WhatsApp story that day, my classmates from school who are all doctors now like Dr. Thalavai Sundaram, Dr. Ranjith Kumar, Dr. Saravanan Rajamanickam etc., all responded immediately, telling me how wonderful the initiative was, and how it was much needed for us Mizos, as they told me that apparently in CMC Vellore, in the Cancer ward, there's an entire wing dedicated for just Mizo patients alone! I was like, whoah!

Once the event was over, everybody headed home, except us, because, you know, we are always special, lolz. Our dear driver back then switched on the dimmer lights by accident, and by the time the function was over, our car battery was completely drained!

Yeah it was not a funny experience at all, especially while pushing the car to "running start" the vehicle in front of all the Ramhlun South YMA Choir members. :D

My mom, sisters and nieces went home in our relatives' cars while I stayed back at the Synod Conference Centre with our driver, waiting for the Ford mechanics to come and charge the battery. Our neighbour Mawizuala was sweet enough to stay behind and give me company.

And that was the launch function that day.

A few days later, my uncle invited all the choir members of Ramhlun South YMA again for dinner at his place to show his appreciation for their music, and since we live right next door, I too was invited as the official photographer. :D :P

We arranged the chairs neatly to seat everyone.

Soon the choir members arrived one by one, and once everybody reached, the short function started, where my uncle talked about the songs he wrote and history behind each of them. My aunt Nu Zovi (who herself was an extremely talented singer back during her heydays) ended the short function with a prayer.

Nu Zovi is the eldest among my mom's siblings (my uncle being the youngest) and since she couldn't come for the launch event that day because of her age, the choir performed the songs once again specially for her. This was so sweet of them!

And then it was dinner time.

The dinner was served buffet style on their terrace upstairs.

Hungry choir members standing in line. :)

Some of you might think I was focussing on just the female choir members above, so here's a photo of the male choir members as well. :P

Chow time. I really enjoyed watching the choir members eat, because while the rest of us chewed our food with that munch munch sound, these choir members were making a Do Re Mi Fa So La... sound every time they chewed their food. :)

The man of the hour, my uncle Dr. Malsawma, eating his dinner.

Nu Zovi eating dinner on the dinning table with my cousin Lalnui.

One final group photo before they dispersed.

And that was a fulfilling end to a wonderful evening. Our souls enriched by the beauty of their songs, our stomachs satiated by the delightful dinner.

To conclude this post, here are the four Music Videos performed by Ramhlun South YMA Choir, I hope you enjoy listening to them all as much as I did, and please give the videos some love by "liking" them on YouTube.

Cancer Thlentu.

Sikserh Ralpui.

Sim Rawh Aw (Zu Put Put Suh).

TB Doral Lian.

Ps. On a totally unrelated topic, I just wanted to mention that I was finally able to display the YouTube videos above in 100% width on your desktops and laptops because I used a special CSS trick to do so, you'll find the CSS source code at h3xed site. Just giving credit where it is due. However it is still not displaying in 100% width on mobile browsers so I'll look into this matter once I go home from Neihbawih. Cheers.

Chp 840. 16 years a Blogger

As we come to the last day of November, I realized I've been blogging since November 2004, so this means I've just completed 16 years of being a consistent blogger.

I've seen a LOT of changes on this platform during these 16 years, ranging from the way we used to publish our blog posts initially, to the dynamic template options introduced, as well as other enriching features added, like CSS support system, advertisement revenue integration, comment moderation etc etc., but I'll write about those experiences if I am still alive and well by the year 2024 to mark my 20 years of blogging milestone. :D

As of now, there are just a few things I want to mention in this update.

First of all, no, blogging is not dead. :)

Sure, a lot of old time bloggers (especially among our Mizo community) have stopped blogging, some of them due to new found responsibilities like marriage, kids, jobs etc., but most people stopped blogging because of the rise of social media.

In a virtual world where people can now easily pen down their thoughts and opinions on a Facebook status update or even in a WhatsApp group discussion, people no longer have the time and energy to write lengthy content for their blogs. Not to mention people prefer viewing memes or quirky video updates rather than reading long texts, which makes blogging even more unpopular today.

Though the demise of blogging is true, there are still more than 600 million blogs as of this year 2020, out of which around 152 million blogs are said to be active with daily to weekly updates, which is still a very large number (though a vast majority of that number are from micro-blogging platforms).

So, yes, blogging is not dead. Yet.

Having said that though, for the past 16 years, I have hated this blogging platform because of the name. Why is this platform called "Blogger", of all the names? Blogger is a person who blogs, and it is a common noun. Blogger is also the name of this blogging platform, and hence a proper noun, like WordPress, Tublr, Medium etc., which are also other blogging platforms.

Very confusing, naw?

You might think the difference may not matter much, but it is a big deal, especially when you're searching online for new blog templates, tips and tricks, technical queries, statistics etc., which are specific to just this platform alone. You will keep getting other blogging platforms in the search result because of the generic name "blogger". Bad SEO indeed.

And it is even more ironic that this is one of the top products of Google, the company that redefined online search as well as SEO and SEM. :D

To make matters worse, Google's "blogger" platform uses Google's "blogpost" domain as default, hence confusing people even more on what to call this blogging platform. Should it be referred to as "blogger" or "blogspot"?

Then there was also a time when blogspot changed the domain name from blogspot.com to blogpost.in for those of us in India, hence making all our old links invalid, and then somewhere along the way, they happily changed it back to blogspot.com without telling anybody, again making all the links of the posts we had published with blogspot.in invalid once more. Aaarrghh.

Of course all that could have been avoided had we hosted our own domain name even while using this platform.

For instance, I own the domain name kima.in (as well as mawng.com too, lolz) for many many years now, but haven't really migrated my blogspot domain name to that yet, as I don't want to lose 16 years of blog links leading back to my old posts that had been hardcoded on so many different referral sources.

Bottom-line is, I'm coping and managing with all the setbacks. Overall, this is still a pretty decent blogging platform, and I like how Google generously spares maybe one or two of their precious engineers to improve the platform. :D :P

Jokes aside though, yes, we're still seeing an improvement made to this platform like once in 2-3 years, so at least it is not a shelved product. The last update was made just a few months ago.

The new changes were announced on May earlier this year and were supposed to be implemented by June, but the deadline kept getting postponed, probably due to the CoVid-19 outbreak, and finally this new change was implemented on October, which was last month. 

And I had been suffering since then. :D

Now I really appreciate the dedicated Blogger team for this much due update. As you can read from their blog, the new changes have really enhanced our blogging experience, from refreshingly new UI layout in the editor section to new stats, comments, lists, search operators improvement and so on.

But the ONE big difference is that the new post editor is no longer a WYSIWYG editor. At least not like the previous version. For my non-techie friends, a WYSIWYG editor means a "What You See Is What You Get" editor. Basically, the rich-text formatting that you type in the editor is exactly how it will appear on your website/blog.

I always write my blog first on an MS Word document, along with all the required HTML tags like inserting a link and embedding an image. And when I copy-paste the content to the previous editor, that was it. My blog post was ready. That was how I used to update my blog for the past 16 years.

In this current new editor, if I copy paste from MS Word to the "HTML view" section, then all line breaks are gone! Everything becomes one single huge paragraph, lolz. So I have to manually press enter to arrange them in the required paragraphs. And if I copy paste it to the "Compose view" section instead, the line breaks are there, thankfully, but all HTML tags are now converted into text, so I have to manually insert all links and images again! Arrgh.

The quickest solution I can think of is to add two break commands <br /> after every paragraph, as you can see from the screenshot of this blog update below.

Ahhhhh. Quite a pain right?

To be frank, I really don't mind writing all my new blog updates this way, it is not that much of a hassle. The problem arises if I try to edit my old blog posts. Remember I wrote about how Photobucket screwed me up? For 13 years, I had been using their servers to host images for my blog posts, becoming a premium customer and paying $9.99 per month because of my high bandwidth usage. And then suddenly one day, with no warning, they jacked up the monthly charge to $39.99, disabling images for those who were unable to pay that highly exorbitant fee!

Suddenly, all the images across more than 650 of my old blog posts were disabled! That was such a dick move by Photobucket. Corporate greed at its worst.

And so I moved to different hosting services like AWS and imgur, and I planned to edit all my old blog posts slowly, one by one, changing the image host and re-linking them for each of those posts.

Yeah it's gonna be a huge headache to do that while at the same time putting those two line break commands for every paragraph as well. Aaaah, such is life. Nothing comes easy.

I did write to the Blogger team about this issue, but sadly I didn't get any replies.

Ahhh, anyways, that is my rant for this blog update.

Hoping to keep seeing you visit my blog, and if you're thinking of starting your own blog, please do so, nothing is too late.

Also, if you decide to start blogging, please don't copy my style of writing on a Word doc first and copy pasting it in the editor, as that is not only a big pain (as you can see from my description above) but it is also not the proper way in which you're actually supposed to be blogging. You are expected to type directly in the online editor, and if you do that, you won't face any of the issues I am currently facing.

Why do I still do it this way then? Well, what can I say, I'm just an eccentric old fart. :)

Cheers everyone.