Every society has its own Shawshank.
Not a prison made of concrete and steel, but a collection of ideas, habits, and assumptions that become so familiar they cease to feel like choices at all. They simply become reality. We inherit them from previous generations, repeat them without much reflection, and eventually stop noticing them altogether.
I have been thinking about this for some time now, though I did not have a name for it until I found myself revisiting The Shawshank Redemption once again.
Like many people, I first watched the film for its story. Based on a novella by Stephen King, it follows Andy Dufresne, a banker sentenced to life imprisonment for a crime he claims he did not commit. Inside Shawshank Prison, he develops an unlikely friendship with Ellis “Red” Redding, a long-serving inmate who has spent most of his adult life behind bars.
But the character who has stayed with me the longest is neither Andy nor Red.
It is Brooks Hatlen.
Brooks is the prison librarian, an elderly inmate who has spent nearly fifty years inside Shawshank. When he is finally granted parole, freedom arrives at last. Yet instead of embracing it, he struggles to survive outside the institution that had shaped his entire life. The world beyond the prison walls feels unfamiliar, confusing, and strangely intimidating.
Later in the film, Red explains why.
“These walls are funny. First you hate them. Then you get used to them. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them.”
He calls it institutionalization.
Most people understand the line as a comment about prison.
The older I get, the more I think it is a comment about societies.
Over the years, my work has taken me across much of India. I spend a good deal of my life moving between airports, schools, teacher-training workshops, leadership programmes, and conversations with people trying to make sense of the world around them. I have had the privilege of working with teachers across the region and speaking with officers at the North Eastern Police Academy on leadership and crisis management.
Travel has a curious effect on a person. It forces comparisons.
Not comparisons of wealth or infrastructure, but comparisons of mindset.
You begin to notice that every society carries certain assumptions about itself. Assumptions about success. About opportunity. About what is possible and what is not.
And the more I travel, the more I find myself asking an uncomfortable question about my own state.
What are the walls Manipur has become accustomed to?
Not the visible walls.
The invisible ones.
The assumptions we inherited so completely that we no longer recognise them as assumptions.
Many of these ideas did not emerge by accident.
They were born from history.
A society facing uncertainty develops habits of survival. A generation learns what works and passes those lessons to the next. Over time, those lessons become culture. Eventually, they become common sense.
The problem is not that this happens.
The problem is that we rarely stop to ask whether yesterday’s survival instincts are still helping us navigate today’s realities.
Take our relationship with success.
In countless conversations with students and young people, I have noticed how quickly discussions about the future tend to converge around a relatively narrow set of aspirations. Government service remains one of the most respected and sought-after paths. There are understandable reasons for this. For some, it represents stability. For others, social mobility. For many families, it offers dignity, recognition, and a degree of certainty in an uncertain world.
There is nothing wrong with that aspiration.
The more interesting question is why it occupies such a large space in our collective imagination.
Why do some dreams feel naturally respectable while others require explanation?
Why are certain pathways immediately understood while others appear risky, unconventional, or even irresponsible?
The issue is not government jobs.
The issue is imagination.
Or perhaps the boundaries of imagination.
The same question appears elsewhere.
Why do we so often look outward for opportunities while underestimating what can be built at home?
Why do we produce extraordinary individuals yet struggle to create equally extraordinary institutions?
Why do we repeatedly place our hopes in leaders while paying less attention to the slow, often unglamorous work of building systems?
Why do we spend so much time reacting to crises and so little time preparing for the future?
These are not criticisms.
They are observations.
And they are hardly unique to Manipur.
Every society has its own invisible walls.
What interests me is how difficult they are to see when you live among them.
That, after all, is the essence of institutionalization.
The walls become normal.
The routines become natural.
The assumptions become facts.
And before long, alternative ways of thinking begin to feel unrealistic.
One of the great ironies of The Shawshank Redemption is that the prison’s greatest power was never its walls.
Its greatest power was convincing people that the walls defined the limits of what was possible.
Andy Dufresne was different.
He never accepted the prison as the final horizon of his life.
While others adapted themselves to the institution, he continued imagining a reality beyond it.
Perhaps that is why his story resonates so deeply.
Not because he escapes.
But because he refuses to surrender his imagination.
As I think about Manipur, I sometimes wonder whether that is the challenge before us.
Not conflict.
Not politics.
Not economics.
Important as all of those are.
The deeper challenge may be the courage to re-examine assumptions that have become invisible through familiarity.
To ask whether some of the ideas that helped previous generations survive might now be limiting what the next generation believes is possible.
To distinguish between wisdom and habit.
Between stability and stagnation.
Between tradition and inertia.
That is not an argument for abandoning the past. Societies that forget their history rarely prosper.
But neither do societies that become trapped by it.
The lesson of Shawshank is not that walls can be broken. Human history has demonstrated that many times over.
The harder lesson is recognising the walls we no longer see.
And as I think about the future of Manipur, I find myself returning to that question again and again.
What are the assumptions we have mistaken for reality?
What are the habits we continue to carry long after the circumstances that created them have changed?
And if we are honest enough to identify them, what new possibilities might emerge on the other side?
Perhaps every society has its Shawshank.
The real question is whether it has enough people willing to imagine life beyond the walls.
Sam Khumanthem writes about home, identity, and the quiet complexities of life in Manipur. His work reflects a deep connection to place, shaped by both love and uncertainty.
