It Might Just Be Me,

but when I saw the photograph below,

it so reminded me of one I took many years ago, admittedly in the one above it is the wet season and everything is green, photograph Rasheda Akter/Unsplash,

this is the photograph I took, when we were looking for new fish to export from the state of Meghalaya in India, I have zoomed in a little and of course it is the dry season, but it looks so much like the same place, and it is Cherrapunji, India, so why the interest? other than the fact I was there, and made a second post about the area in 2011, in India’s Meghalaya state, there is a remote village tucked away in the hills, Kongthong, it has a unique, centuries-old tradition where every inhabitant is given both a regular name and a song at birth, both of which become their identity,

the 650-or-so people who call Kongthong home, have a normal name that they use for official purposes, as well as unique tunes composed for them by their parents at birth. These songs are made especially for them, are used as their bearers’ names throughout their life, and die with them when their time comes, “It is an expression of a mother’s unbridled love and joy at the birth of her child. It’s like a mother’s heart song, full of tenderness, almost like a lullaby,” Kongthong native, Shidiap Khongsit, recently told a BBC correspondent,

each newborn in Kongthong is given a unique jingrwai iawbei by their mother. Technically, they are given two, as each song has a short version, which is used as a sort of nickname when its bearer is within earshot, and a long version (between 10 and 20 seconds long) that are sung out in the fields, or when one needs to call out to someone over mountains and valleys, “Nobody can say for sure when it began, yet most agree that it has been around ever since Kongthong came into being,” Shidiap said. “Kongthong itself has been here even before the kingdom of Sohra was established by our people and by those from other villages in the area.” if only all of those years ago we had known of Kongthong, it would have been so nice to have popped in to the village.