India's Northeast is one of the country's most diverse, colourful and enchanting regions - but it is also one of the least known. This ugly fact remains a reality more than 50 years after independence.

Whether it is the metropolitan media or the television channels that bombard our print space and air channels with information (largely useless) and entertainment of various kinds, the northeast remains a black hole in the collective memory of India, except when it comes to insurgencies, floods, explosions and ethnic strife. There is little else that is reported or finds its way through the ignorant and disinterested on media news desks.

But even with the media's preoccupation with "breaking stories," what has been surprising has been the little attention paid to a major disaster that struck Arunachal Pradesh, the northern most state bordering Tibet and Bhutan, last month. The causes of the tragedy are not yet clear but the facts are. A huge surge of water thundered across from Tibet, brushing aside everything in its path. There must have been a savage, sudden flash flood or a natural event that caused a mudslide or landslide, blocking the Tsangpo, as the Brahmaputra is known in Tibet. What followed was nothing short of a massive explosive burst of raw, primal energy. Millions of tons of water buried valleys, settlements, destroyed roads and bridges and tossed about giant trees as if they were matchsticks. The water rose not less than 20 meters in the course of a single day or the height of a five-storey building.

The airport at Pasighat, one of the major towns on the Siang, as the Brahmaputra is known in Arunachal Pradesh, was inundated. Many of those who witnessed the Great Assam Earthquake of 1950 (which measured 8.7 on the Richter scale) could be excused for believing that they were witnessing a repeat of that catastrophe. Luckily, the death toll was not as high as it could have been. But the power of that flood was such that every single bridge - suspension, traditional or of iron and steel as the one at a place called Nubo on the northern part of the river - was overwhelmed by the water and destroyed. These days, not a single bridge connects one side of the Siang to the other, causing immense hardship to those without access to roads for their daily needs.

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One of the most wonderful sights on the Siang as it rushes south to the Assam plains were the beautiful, swaying bamboo bridges built with traditional skill and indigenous knowledge by the Adi tribe. Chinese travellers commented on these examples of engineering skill more than 700 years ago. Today, these beauties have gone, posing a fresh challenge to the courage and community spirit of the Adis who build such bridges as a joint endeavour of the entire village.

Apart from some reports in the regional and metropolitan media, there has been a deafening silence about this disaster. The Rajasthan drought and Kashmir's tragedies are closer to Delhi and its scandal-loving, non-serious media. Northeast door ast. And of course, Mumbai and Gujarat are sexier stories: easier to access, etc.But just because parts of the North East are more difficult to access, does that make the story less important? If anything, it adds to the region's distance from New Delhi.

The Rajasthan drought, Gujarat and the Mumbai floods did not have an international touch. The flood in Arunachal did: it originated in Tibet, it came without warning and the same waters flows not just through Assam but into Bangladesh, which is constantly buffeted by floods and disasters, before falling into the Bay of Bengal.

China has declared Arunachal Pradesh as part of its territory and proclaims this in its maps of the region. On these maps, its international border with India's Northeast begins with Assam! This shows China's perception of the issue, even though the ground realities are very different and there are Indians who run the state. It is this perception that makes border mapping extremely difficult, if not hazardous. For China has persistently refused to acknowledge the MacMohan line demarcated in the last century, describing it as an imperialist decision which Beijing cannot accept.

Whatever the situation with the international border, the minimum cooperation that India should seek from the Peoples Republic of China is that its shares data relating to weather in the region. A flood surge in Tibet reaches Arunachal in a matter of days, swiftly rushes into Assam and then pours into Bangladesh. There are humanitarian issues that are above politics, and External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh should raise this flood as an example of the kind of cooperation that India is seeking when his Chinese counterpart comes calling in Delhi later this month.

Floods and weather disasters should not be mixed up with territorial claims or the role of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader.

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Despite its many tragedies and difficulties, the Northeast continues to produce men and women of extraordinary cultural talent. Some of them are dramatists and playwrights; others are dancers and filmmakers. Their names comes to mind easily - Rattan Thiyam and his drama troupe from Imphal, Manipur; Jahnu Barua and Santwana Bordoloi, film makers from Assam; Ariban Syam Sarma and his lyrical films of Manipur.

Ever year, some new filmmakers seek to make the grade. Some succeed. Others don't. One young man of distinct promise is Shankar Borua, whose delightful email address is gahori@hotmail.com. A gahori in Assamese means a pig. And Borua, an intense person, has reared pigs apart from working as a freelance writer and even a waiter. A few weeks ago, he showed his first documentary, Angst At Large, a 60-minute film on the crisis of militancy and identity before Assam.

It was a tough film to make and it has many flaws as Borua's grating "Yeah," an effort at a Yankee accent, screeches grating across the screen, through the auditorium and the audience. But with honesty and dignity, single-handedly, this young man (he did the camera work, sound, direction and commentary apart from the script himself) has addressed issues that Assam and Assamese do not face with honesty and openness. It's also a delightfully fresh experience; there a Hazarika, a hale-fellow-well-met type from a village (no relative of mine) who says coyly that he does serve "English" liquor but only to "decent people." Where the film goes off at a tangent is when Borua tries, through his childhood friends and leftists, to give a "class" and left orientation to the problems of Assam. That is a huge oversimplication.

There are Surrendered militants (known as SULFA, or surrendered ULFA - United Liberation Front of Assam) and others who oppose them. This a brave effort and one that enables viewers, especially those who have not been to the North East, understand a little of its complexities, joys, hopes and horrors. See it, buy it. Mail the man at Gahori.

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Assam is one of the seven states of the Northeast, its largest and home to the majority of the 32 million people who live in the region. The people of the area belong to not less than 350 different ethnic groups, according to some sociologists. There are almost as many languages and dialects, making this an anthropologist's delight and an administrator's nightmare. There are communities with Mongolian features, others who could have stepped out of the Deep South, some from the North of India. There even is a prosperous and hardworking (are they anything else?) group of Sikhs in Central Assam who speak Assamese and know virtually no Punjabi and only a smattering of Hindi! Some of them are the descendants of the followers of Guru Teg Bahadur who visited Assam in the 17th century and set up the great gurdwara at Dhubri, on the banks of the Brahmaputra, as it plunges towards Bangladesh.

The Sikhs are but one of the many migrant groups which have settled in the region; some ethnic groups have come from Thailand and Myanmar; others have moved in from northern India and there is a continuous influx from Bangladesh. Indeed it is the latter which is causing such demographic, ethnic and cultural stress and conflict in the region.