By Amar Yumnam
One traditional strength of the society in Manipur has been the shared collective performance of actions for social facilitation by keeping the social above the individual in the execution of the acts. This is what is now at stake and at an increasing pace. Now this trend has put the institutions – both in the sense of organisations and norms – into a reverse gear. In other words, the institutions have been just made the means and media for practising the dictum of “heaven helps those who help themselves” by adopting enhancement of interests of spouses and own products of marriage as the prime objective of performance of social interactions and official responsibilities. Robert I. Rotberg co-editor of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, President of the World Peace Foundation, and Adjunct Professor and Director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University writes: “Societies work best, and have always worked best, where citizens trust their fellow citizens, work cooperatively with them for common goals, and thus share a civic culture. A civic community is marked, in Putnam’s words, “by an active, public-spirited citizenry, by egalitarian political relations,