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Tribal communities initiate and manage coal mining in Nagaland and Meghalaya. Laws banning coal extraction have been challenged and resisted by local communities. The right to extract coal is tied to protecting tribal land rights. Tribal autonomy in coal policy is progressive, yet enables capture by local elites. Where there has been regulation of coal mining it has come from unexpected sources.

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In the last decade, large numbers of indigenous youth from the uplands of Northeast India have migrated to metropolitan cities across the country. Many end up in the new service sector, getting jobs in high-end restaurants, shopping malls and spas. The demand for their labour is due to their un-Indian 'exotic Asian' appearance and a reputation for being hardworking and loyal. Such labour market value is a remarkable reversal of their position considering the earlier colonial stereotypes of their savagery and disobedience, reproduced through the de-politicisation of their armed insurrections during the post-colonial period. This paper addresses their daily experiences of vulnerability and marginality as well as the freedom and aspirations that a migratory life seem to engender.It was the second time we were meeting with Choro-this time in his home, a twobedroom apartment where he lived with his wife and three-year-old daughter. A few weeks earlier, we had visited his workplace, one of the top five-star hotels in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. Choro had heard about our research and, as soon as we sat down, he began telling us a story about a magical stone he had found in the village where he grew up in the hills of Manipur, a state adjacent to the border of Myanmar. It was a rare blue stone, traditionally used for ritual purposes, which he had brought along to Thiruvananthapuram. During the last year, Choro's family had faced exceptional misfortune and Choro had been forced to travel back and forth to his home village, exhausting most of his savings on airfares and medical treatments for sick family members. In a dream he learned that it was the stone that was causing all this ill fate. After consulting his mother, he threw the stone into a lake. After this, things started to improve, he conveyed cautiously.Despite a successful career in the service sector that has made him a senior manager of one of the hotel's restaurants, Choro claimed he could think of nothing else than to return home, to the hills of Manipur. His family was there and he had several younger siblings in need of monetary support and encouragement to finish school. The plan was to settle in Ukhrul, the nearest town and the district headquarters, mainly populated by Tangkhul Nagas, the ethnic group to which he and his wife belong. The question they struggled

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