Proverbs: ‘Praman Panthei’ Expanded in Minimal Pictures

It all started with the essays on cows and postmen.

It was not necessarily on the Hindutva craps about cow, neither about postmen from the ubiquitous government’s India Posts but the topics per se.

The fact is that we started studying English as a second language from primary school and the methods were flexible, from learning the parts of speech to essay- and précis-writing.

I studied in St Joseph’s School in Imphal from Nursery to 10th grade.

What’s prominent, as we reached higher grades, was those elaborations on proverbs and idioms—we call them praman panthei in our mother tongue, Meitelon/Manipuri—and even more notable because we were too politically correct and the teachers were amused with our lies when, for example, we wrote we had to be as prompt as much as we needed to be reasonable because early to bed and early to rise can make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

We have understood their amusement and the irony all around now because early to bed and early to rise can only make a man an early man. And that’s why now again, it makes perfect sense when we say the gun is mightier than the pen in our hometown.

Today, we have a collection of proverbs, or praman panthei that have been contextualised to make them as relevant as when we studied them in primary and junior high school.