to jp, with love

As students of policy, we are taught to design optimal policy based on robust statistical analysis, infused with some ideals of basic human rights, equality, perhaps even democracy and social justice now and then. But we are not taught, and few of us seek, to understand the visceral impact of such policies, whether it is of foreign intervention, denial of access to housing, food, water and sanitation, the tolerance of torture and so on and so forth. We are also limited by the affluence of our surroundings, and the paucity of our own imagination, to fully experience the radical life-altering effects, or the difference between life and death, that the policies we may influence come to have. As the feminist agenda voiced nearly half a century ago, and what we have forgotten, is that the personal is the political.

Ultimately this is what the postcolonial novel, with characters engaged in conflicting internal dialogues that are writ large at the level of the nation, does. It gives a voice to those whose voices are long gone. It takes a bottom up view, and not a top-down policy view, and addresses the very real question of morality, the idea that dare not speak its name in the hallowed corridors of policy. In the end it concludes that a true resolution of what is right and wrong cannot arise out of dogmas about imperialism, religion or ethno cultural hegemony, but must arise out of an unflinching examination of the human condition and the dictates of its time. When a novel has survived this interrogation, when its reflection of its historical moment has rung true throughout the ages, then it becomes a classic, worthy of our time and study, to understand more of the great expanding mysteries of the human condition. Without this primordial knowledge, the study of policy becomes a mere exercise in academic futility.

ash wednesday

Today was Ash Wednesday, and was interesting to see those who chose to brand themselves. (Tradition demands, and as usual it is always interesting to see how tradition is followed in former colonies more than in former empires, that Catholics attend mass in the morning, at which ash is marked onto their foreheads, which should remain for a day. So more than a few people, for a secular policy school, walked around with blackened foreheads today.)

The other anecdote which I truly find eccentric, and it is not many that qualify to that aspirational label, in my books is of a corporate finance professor at MIT, whose class a good friend attends. Said professor, by name of Asquith (whose famous theory shows that stocks that are heavily shorted tend to underperform in the long run), conducts lessons from a bed. Due to back problems, the Professor cannot stand or sit for more than 5 minutes at a time, and for the past ten years, has a bed wheeled into the auditorium, from which he lectures, prone, with his head propped up on one hand, and a dutiful assistant scurries about on the blackboard behind him. To intellect, academia, and the ability to do what you want!

Heart of Darkness

Watching the returns come in yesterday was strangely disappointing. I would have had a lot more to say about politics and presidential elections way back in the day, but right now, I think that plus ca change, plus c'est le meme. Roared through Heart of Darkness yesterday and through Chinua Achebe's critical essay on same, labelled: Images of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There is a lot that could be said about this novel (indeed what hasn't?) and I am not going to add my tuppenceworth right now. But in class this morning, with a wonderful, energetic (sometimes self-congratulatory) postcolonial theorist, I discovered this: that at the Berlin Conference in 1885, when the Congo was divided up between France, Portugal and Belgium, hosted by Bismarck, the major part of Congo, was given to King Leopold, and not to the state of Belgium. It became his own private playground, outside of any supranational power, any civil administration and any constitution. It was raped, pillaged and was a centre of slave trading. Hence the great novel, Heart of Darkness.

I apologize in advance to the readers for the next few weeks will likely be talking about certain books and literature, for this is one chance in a lifetime, for me to recover what another lost youth could have looked like.

bowel movements

Descended into the depths of an ionic/doric column encased faux roman building, otherwise known as Widener Library, to discover an old interview in a now-defunct tattered African journal, with Michael Ondaatje. One hour later, I emerged victorious and slightly dazed, for the quality of the interview, the unguarded responses, was well worth the hour spent in the bowels of Harvard Yard.

I know that (all four) readers of this blog are vividly acquainted with my obsession with Ondaatje, but perhaps not all are acquainted as well with his oeuvres, and so here is a standalone passage, from Anil's Ghost, which might hint to others, of greater works behind.

He was staying at his aunt's house in Boralesgamuwa, and she and her friends were playing bridge on the long porch that surrounded the house. He came towards them carrying a lit candle, shielding the flame. He placed it on a side table a yard or so to the right of them. No one noticed this. He drifted back into the house. A few minutes later Gamini crawled on his belly with his air rifle through the grass, stalking his way from the bottom of the garden towards the house. He was wearing a small camouflage hat of leaves to disguise his presence even further. He could almost hear the four women bidding, having halfhearted conversations.

He estimated they were twenty yards away. He loaded the air rifle and positioned himself like a sniper, elbows down, legs at angles to give him balance and firmness, and fired. Nothing was hit. He reloaded and settled in to aim again. This time he hit the side table. One of the women looked up, cocking her head, but she could see nothing around her. What he wished to do was shoot out the flame of the candle with the pellet, but the next shot flew low, only a few inches above the red porch floor, and hit an ankle. At that instant, simultaneous with the gasp from Mrs. Coomaraswamy, his aunt looked up and saw him with the air rifle hugged against his cheek and shoulder, aiming right at them.

chronoschism

written about Anil's Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje,

This novel is characterized by those abrupt breaks in time, that Ursula Heisse calls , "chronoschisms", ruptures that postmodern novelists, unlike their modernist predecessors, refuse to assimilate to the "unifying time of the individual mind". That is, the politics of Sri Lanka, seem to reflect back postmodern notions of the collapse of grand narratives, the fragility and impermanence of identity, the failure of history to provide us with a coherent account of our origins, and the moral ambiguities of action and character in a world where cause and effect are endlessly complex. That nothing lasts, that granite monuments crumble, seems to drive him to value the briefest fragments of time, to respect the moment of absolute love or generosity, the flash of intuition, the graceful walk of a young woman who will not survive another day. The artist's ability to identify fragments of beauty and nobility, even in times of terror, matches the scientist's ability to identify "permanent truths, the same for Troy as for Colombo," in the mineral traces of a soil sample.

Margaret Scanlan

Whimper anew

The end of the week, to paraphrase Eliot, tapered off, not with a whimper, but with a bang, trekking out to Longwood to meet a f(r)iend from high school, (as C says, what assed-out high school did you go to anyway?! why are your high-school friends everywhere except Singapore!?) in the rain, sleet and snow and just about lost the will to live but managed to see a part of Boston that was urban and inner city, and with its own energy, optimism and problems. Missed the debate on Thursday night, but had a fascinating discussion about housing, mixed-income housing, and mixed-land use, because the problems in rebuilding is that public housing is merely a physical structure which is no doubt essential, but does not by itself solve the problems of education, health, poverty and racial inequality. Instead public housing must be thought of as a site, where other services should also be brought in by government to congregate, and must be cross-incentivized to do sol. Unfortunately it rarely does.

Then watched Juno at 3pm with friends because it was Friday and there was nothing else to do. (I also bumped into Robin Williams the night before at Red House, a charming restaurant with a crackling fireplace where copious amounts of wine was imbibed- he was battered, newly out of rehab, all hairy, but with an irrepressible twinkle in his bright eyes). I finished my case which took 9 hours of bleary-eyed work, far more than ever anticipated. And more importantly; WHO'S YOUR DADDY?!! Because I secured the redoubtable Terence Blanchard, a Grammy Award winning jazz musician to come and play at the conference, from his new Grammy-nominated trumpet album: Tales Of God's Will; A Requiem to Katrina. (http://www.terenceblanchard.com/).

Then Friday night was spent at a 5 hour dinner with M and C, getting drunker and drunker, sillier and sillier, talking about a certain very attractive lieutenant-colonel in the airforce (who does not vote, which sends C into tizzies everytime, sketches apples and trees, separately and is from a family of union members), classes, and our quadrangle of love. And we are getting ever closer to the end, at the end of the first week of class, and talk of graduation and the summer and families meeting families are in the air. In that spirit, here is a poem I have posted before...

God Abandons Antony,

When suddenly, at the midnight hour
an invisible troupe is heard passing
with exquisite music, with shouts
your fortune that fails you now, your works
that have failed, the plans of your life
that have all turned out to be illusions, do not
mourn in vain

As if long prepared, as if courageous,
bid her farewell, the Alexandria that is leaving
Above all, do not be fooled, do not tell
yourself,
it was a dream, that your ears deceived you;
do not stoop to such vain hopes.
As if long prepared, as if courageous,
as it becomes you who have been worthy of
such a city,
approach the window with firm step,
and with emotion, but not
with the entreaties and complaints of the
coward,
as a last enjoyment listen to the sounds,
the exquisite instruments of the mystical
troupe,
and bid her farewell, the Alexandria you are
losing.

Constantine. P. Cavafy, 1911

Itinerantly yours,

In the film Ordinary People (set to a single piece of music that plays repeatedly and is its only source of continuity, Pachelbel's Canon), Timothy Hutton says "You can't break the ball. Can't break the floor. Can't break anything in a bowling alley. And that's what I like about bowling alleys. Can't even break the record".

What is this world we live in now? Are those of us who truly cannot stay wedded to anything, who burn with the desire to be relevant, but who have a heightened capacity to enjoy the quotidian, perpetually unfulfilled? Incapable of generating interactions that culminate in stability? Icarus drowning? I don't know. All I know is that this itinerant lifestyle shows that there is a tunnel at the end of every light.

This is what comes of having far too much time on one's hand, watching more House, My So-Called Life and Big Shots all in one day. As CNS says "How can you possibly have such good taste in literature but such masala taste in films?"!

shattered glass

more shattered glass pasta, and I'm really not feeling well at the moment.
Here is an excerpt, shamelessly stolen from another blog, but extraordinarily prescient, for the newest reader of my blog, JP.

back then, knowing myself beloved, exuberant in your presence, I was the flowering tree: daily transforming, girl-child to tree, careless of blossoms, daily unleafed, daily budding, lavish with words, immoderate in joy, a willing daphne, bride of the king's son.

banana bread

To combat the blues of starting school TOMORROW at 9am, and the blues of having to write a paper before then, (why oh why do I procrastinate until the very last minute?!) I instead, decided to bake banana bread after attending a wine and cheese party with great great food, great Clare Valley wine from Australia, great Stiltons and Roqueforts, great asparagus steamed with olive oil, great apricot and almond tart, great blueberries, walnuts and goats cheese. Totally stuffed at around 7pm, instead of dinner, the house decided to bake trader joe's banana bread ($1.99, what's up sister!!!) and now, an hour later, halfway through, I'm blissed out and panicking simultaneously. I wonder if my strategy of taking time off this semester is really going to materialize. Well one can hope, one can dream! Here is a tried and tested banana bread recipe from CNS

ripe bananas
walnuts
dessicated coconut
some flour, eggs, muscovado sugar and olive oil
bake and eat.

glass

Back to beantown after a lovely interlude in Asheville and then New York where it seems more than likely I will end up post graduation, quite clueless though. The train back sped through Connecticut and Rhode Island, places where some memories of youth and a summer still remain. Back in Beantown, I was too tired to do anything but watch nonstop House. Saturday dawned bright and early and I spring cleaned, did loads of laundry, mopped the floors, went over to a new bride's house to carpet the bed with rose petals before her arrival, more grocery shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's, Blockbuster, came back, talked on the phone, made molten lava cake (alas, out of a mix), and spaghetti with beef, tomatoes, peppers and an entire red onion coz I'm that kind of gal, and goat's cheese and now its only 6pm and onto the last paper I have to write before back to watching House, Superbad and The Crying Game. Oh yes and I broke the bottle of pasta sauce inside the bag, scooped up the remainder into a bowl, and cooked the beef with it, not realizing there were glass shards in it, which I am now discovering while I eat. A few have escaped.

carolina girl

to a lovely carolina girl, who took me in, showed me her birthplace, welcomed me in her family, opened her heart, and got married to another wonderful (of all things), Australian yesterday at a beautiful intimate ceremony with a female pastor, the crackle of a a real fireplace, and snow on the pines outside. From shopping to her wedding dress, to helping her make the final selection on the ring, and even (!) tying a sari for the night itself for myself, and reading I carry your heart at the ceremony, this is to the pottster!

The Light on The Hill

"We have a great objective - the light on the hill - which we aim to reach by working the betterment of mankind not only here but anywhere we may give a helping hand. If it were not for that, the Labour movement would not be worth fighting for.

If the movement can make someone more comfortable, give to some father or mother a greater feeling of security for their children, a feeling that if a depression comes there will be work, that the government is striving its hardest to do its best, then the Labour movement will be completely justified. "

The above is an excerpt from the 1949 speech by Australian Prime Minister Ben Chifley and is regarded as one the seminal moments in Australian politics. (it IS australian politics after all). An otherwise unremarkable phraseology, but notable because it is going to be quoted in a good friend's wedding ceremony, as a couple's joint identification with the best of the spirit of service.

middle east peace crisis

Its a Saturday morning. Woke up at 4am to write a strategy memo, a journal memo and then head to a breakfast meeting at 7am where I met a wonderful individual who is among many things, a renowned journalist, a law professor, a managing partner at a venture philanthropy firm, a chairman of the board of several nonprofits, a White House Fellow, Supreme Court justice clerk. A fascinating meeting on the negotiations on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the energy crisis of the 70s ensued. Then a full day of negotiations workshops ensued, with us simulating a Middle East oil crisis. We are in the 12th hour of negotiations and it has been incredibly frustrating...

tyger

On reflection 2007 was an okay year, but not a vintage year. I don't know what the prognosis for 2008 is, but it seems a little scary.

So I went and bought a cactus. Despite my best efforts, I am sure it will survive.

And then, there is this from Salman Rushdie: "Writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things – childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves – that go on slipping, like sand, through our fingers.”

Finally, why does every Economist article about the LTTE quote Blake?

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

1794

back in beantown

Back in boston after a gruelling 30 hour journey. Why is the east coast so far away from Asia?Things of note: of course theheadlines in Frankfurt, Singapore and the US was the Obama win in Iowa, and what looks like a New Hampshire win, after which he'll be unstoppable to the primaries. I've always been hesitant about endorsing Obama, because it seems so unlikely but that is not reason enough. An email I wrote six months ago when I had the chance to meet him for an all-too-brief but incandescent second, says this: This man will be president, I just don't know when.

On another note, my family and I met a budding author with a book to be published in April 2008, called Love Marriage about diaspora Lankan tamils. I will wait for the book to write comments.

Was met at the airport by C who had received Cold Comfort Farm from me for his birthday and was still laughing a week later to the irritation of his spouse. Its always good to have friends. Crashed into bed after such such travel, (excerpt from nytimes.com on skymall: " Also, you will find the SKYMALL CATALOG, from which you may order a product called “Poop Freeze,” described as a spray refrigerant that “chills animal waste to -62°F, creating an outer ‘crust’ that enables you to quickly place in a bag and dispose.” Feel free to spend the remainder of the flight trying to process this information.). It was however mitigated by Singapore Airlines, in homage to racial harmony screened marudhamalai an absolutely abysmal Tamil film saved only by starring arjun. (At moments like this, I am hugely impressed with Singapore politics).

Woke up this morning at 630am, spent a few hours jobless, chatting on the phone. Then went to the supermarket for some MAJOR shopping. A 166 dollars later, I was cooking black bean chicken with sugarsnap peas and green peppers, lemon roasted beans, red onions with walnuts and jasmine rice. Opened a bottle of bordeaux, promptly downed a glass, chomped away watching A Preacher's Wife and now I am heading to bed and its only 2pm. Still have a infrastructure paper to write on British Water, and a memo for class tomorrow, but slowly slowly does it. Oh bed!!

Live Life

On this eve of another end to a semester, I am reminded of what happened exactly a year ago, in one particular class, in its last lecture. All are direct quotes

There are three conceptions of an "economist" self.

a) The Developing Country is my White Man's Burden (i am solving their poverty)

b) I am a Greek/Arthurian hero: A Dragon Slayer (slaying poverty)

c) I am a Nietzchean Hero: Self-Expression (solving poverty is about me)

whatever it is, I cannot be your therapist. But here it is; make your mark. Leave a Legacy. And live life as an epic adventure.

paralysis

A Call to Action for all friends and and even former acquaintances:


I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE.

Business School vs. Policy School

A Day In The Life Of

A Business School Student (quotes taken from the business school website)

5:40am: Alarm goes off. I quickly debate whether I should call my trainer, Joe at Shad Gym and tell him I can't make it.

8:39:50am- The doors close, silence falls, and class begins at 8:40am on the dot

10:00am: I go to the gift store (the Coop) to see if they have screen protectors for my new high tech cell phone

11:40am: I feel actual angst over whether to join the sushi or the pasta line. Oh the decisions we MBA students must make!

1:00pm: Yay! Its a two case day, which means naptime. Sleep is precious!

3:00pm: Back in my cosy corner room, I check email- no urgent communication with potential employers. I will try to get through the LCA ase before 4pm when Tony Robbins speaks in Burden.

4:00pm: Like the Swiss Railway system, the Tony Robbins presentation starts on time. Before I know it, he has us hugging, jumping, yelling and cheering. An hour well spent.

7:30pm: I head across campus and reach the Grille at Spangler within three minutes. The food is great! Jenny, one of the friendly chefs, humourously greets me in Chinese and prepares my usual meal.

8:50pm: It has been a full day. I shower and look over my notes for tomorrow.

A Public Policy School Student (taken from anecdotal and personal experience)

5:40am: Go to sleep. Wake up five minutes later after a nightmare about a monstrous p value and thank god I have three more hours of sleep. What's Shad?

8:39:50am: I conduct a cost benefit analysis of waking up and conclude costs outweigh benefits.

10:15am: Slide into seat, five minutes late for class. Wince in pain upon remembering that I didn't do the reading on detainee interrogation in Guantanamo bay today. Open Facebook. Raise hand in class to talk about how a democracy cannot support capital punishment instead.

11:40am: Consider buying lunch, but remember I'm broke. Instead I hover near the table outside Executive Education classroom, trying to pounce on pastries and fruit when no one is looking.

1:00pm: Spend ten extra minutes getting to class because of traffic jam on Littauer Steps. Democratic Caucus students and Republican Caucus students are going at it on Huckabee. Stop by cafeteria anyway due to excess acid from excess coffee. Dry Chicken Wrap or Wet Chicken Salad Wrap? Dry.

3:00pm: Back in my cozy Forum couch, I check email. No communication with potential employers. I will try to get through my first reading of the day before 4pm when some motivational speaker guy talks about stuff across the river. Free coffee there.

4:00pm. Like Amtrak, I show up 20 minutes late to the speaker as my cheap shoes can't handle the ice, only to realize that I would rather shoot myself in the head than work in the private sector.

7:30pm. I read some blogs. Then I start a response paper due at 9pm on human rights in Iraq.

8:50pm: Start reading 200 pages and plot downfall of nemeses before heading to the computer lab to print out work. Thwarted by a group of ping pong enthusiasts in Taubman. End up at 11pm in Tommy Doyle's after the the third cost benefit analysis of the day leads me to join in.

May we

live in interesting times.

I think I can safely say that there have been ups, there have been downs, but there's never been steady and that I have always lived, in interesting times.

More interaction with men who call me ma'am (in an 'un-old' way).

The question was posed today: What would you do if you have 2 million dollars to spend in New Orleans post-Katrina? Would it go to housing, or charter schools, or primary care for the uninsured, or at-risk youth programs, or job regeneration programs, or small business incubation?

My answer: I would spend 2 million dollars, finding out what the people of New Orleans wanted, from top to bottom, across racial lines and across class lines. Not what we think they need, but what their demand is, which is entirely different. Then I would see where those demands are aligned, and then I would be able to map potential coalitions and get a consensus around a plan of recovery, and especially from getting some of that 180 billion dollars assigned to Gulf Coast recovery.

On another note, more talking about fantasy/extremist ideology: The heart has been fed on fantasies, the heart has grown brutal from its fare. Its so dangerous and so compelling to accept some kind of all or nothing in life.

And the last note: I have made a major discovery about myself: I would be rather happy than be accomplished.

hubris

my fatal flaw is I am a sucker for men who can reproduce dialogue like this in email banter/verbal conversation/non-verbal cues.

Jules: And what's Fonzie like? Come on, Yolanda! What's Fonzie like?
Yolanda: Cool?
Jules: What?
Yolanda: He's cool
Jules: Correctamundo! And that's what we're gonna be. We're gonna be cool.

Pulp Fiction

And ma'am. I'm a sucker for any man who calls me "ma'am". As in "Yes, ma'am".

minus 8 degrees celsius

I am officially gloved, booted, mufflered, hatted, pouffy-coated and jobless.

bachelorette

Let me say that, having seen a male stripper now, taking everything off, that it just was not appealing in any way. On a second note, bachelorette parties down South are an entirely different event from the tamer "hen" parties of England and elsewhere. There was nothing remotely "hennish" about this one, replete with bridal veils, tiaras, sashes and sceptres and a whole lotta alcohol, pole dancing and a mechanical bull (don't even ask). And not to mention the private stripper. A whole new educational frontier was busted. I, in true fashion, was hovering near the bathroom, ready to lock myself in should this person even come 1 metre near my vicinity. Oh dear.

On the other note, I am absolutely beat and it is the weariness that sleep just isn't going to solve and one which needs 2-3 weeks in a coma. Thank god that is only ten days away for I really have reached the end of my tether.

NB. Should any of my friends organize a stripper for me in any occasion, I will suffer permanent trauma.

om shanti om

Mayhem. Utter mayhem. Is what happens when four subcontinent born graduate students decide to see a 10pm show of Om Shanti Om in Times Square New York. One of these people should have been safely back in Boston a long time ago instead of hanging out in New York inviting disaster. More mayhem when the only people in the theatre are these self-same four people and hooliganism begins by shouting: TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF SHAH RUKH!!!! to see his six pack and dancing in the aisles to the songs and the women come onscreen and the boys faint. An utter nonsensical farce which had us falling off our chairs laughing at Quick Gun Murugan and Shah Rukh Khan going "Yenna!!!" at every possible random moment in time. Mayhem exacerbated by going out drinking at the end of the movie from 2am to 6am at a college undergraduate bar where the main song of the night is Sweet Child of Mine (my ex ringtone) and the lingua franca a bizarre mix of Bengali-Tamil-Hindi-English. Nail in the coffin is when Boston-bound subcontinental individual goes from bar to train with no sleep and from train to class where quite promptly her body shuts down. Utter mayhem. And now I have work coming out of every orifice.

enchanted

just came back from watching Enchanted and couldn't help but make an enthusiastic plug for it! It's an absurd confection, which bizarrely reminded me of Bollywood (especially a song and dance routine in Central Park with ensemble choreographed dances and all), and the manichean view of good and evil and love and happily ever after and surprisingly, or not so surprisingly for one who is a Bollywood fan, it worked rather well, with James Marsden, Patrick Dempsey (who does rather well) and Susan Sarandon. It was one of a few movies, where the mainly adult audience clapped, enchanted, at the end.

a day in the life of

The day started off with a negotiations case on the Good Friday Agreements in Northern Ireland between the Ulster unionists, the Taoiseach Prime Minister, Blair and of course the republicans and Sinn Fein. The important thing I learned from that, as I look towards my own country so fractured and bloodied, was that the negotiated agreement/settlement is only the beginning and that negotiations can never produce social justice and that 99% of an agreement in its implementation. At best, it can be a functioning machinery, an explication of a commitment to a Road Map, a la Camp David. Finally, one cannot include every party, but marginalizing the smaller parties radicalizes their responses- in Northern Ireland it led to more bombings, but one that was surprisingly condemned and not condoned by Sinn Fein. I think I finally understand the bare bones of the Irish Peace Process, though I am still unclear as to why Britain wants to be unified with Northern Ireland. It makes me wonder what I am doing with my life when all these battles are yet to be fought and won, in our generation.

Next I talked to C, who has the flu, before he flies out to DC for final round interviews. C is a prime example of one who crossed the aisle, working with both the Carter Institute and IRI and now viewed with suspicion by all myopic Dcites.

Next I changed my flight to come back home early and had a meeting to craft our negotiation exercise on two “stan” countries that have a water conflict and are bombing the hell out of each other.

Then I had a meeting about the conference and our 22 panels and shaping them into tracks of giving, institutions, governance, services and innovation. (I know how innovative). We might bring in jazz musicians from New Orleans to play some compositions about the storm.

Next I had class on valuing a Brazilian state owned power distribution company and how the bankers (as usual) wanted to value it as low as possible (as they were representing international bidders) and the crazy assumptions on the discounted cash flow models they were using. Thank god I am no longer doing that every day of my life.

Next I had a meeting with my thesis advisor. We are writing a group thesis with ACCION, the largest microfinance provider in terms of asset valuation, about formulating a new code of conduct for equity investments in international MFIs. We think we might be able to travel to Paris in January for “research”. AHAHHAHAA.

Next I had office hours and tutored students on foreign exchange and forward contracts. I didn’t realize I actually knew something about this until I realized everyone else knew less than me.

Then I went to trade class, looking at free trade agreements and the cotton case brought by Brazil against the US to the WTO dispute settlement system. Suffice it to say that as usual I did none of the reading and was at sea, so finished reading about Northern Ireland.

Next I met with my co chair on our conference in our weekly meeting. We talked about creating a blog on our site for incubating future enterprises as well as further tired ideas.

After that with my team from MIT, two doctoral students in mechanical engineering and I are involved in a business plan to provide advertising/media access to rural villages for our developmental entrepreneurship class.

Then a brief pitstop at the gym while dwelling on how four days of food at New Orleans can seem like heaven with hell to pay for. Watched a James Bond movie onscreen. Bumped into a whole lot of people and found that one friend was dating another friend. OMG!

Then out for dinner and drinks with the crew who I haven’t seen for a WHOLE week since I’ve been in New Orleans. Besides catching up with the usual gossip, I think we crafted an idea for me to do a reading and research study next semester instead of a class on doing a negotiation analysis of why the Sri Lanka negotiation talks failed (and will fail).

Then back home, thinking that I had a few minutes to throw laundry and whizz around cleaning the room, but instead my room mate had broken up with her boyfriend so 2 hours went into a post-mortem. Suffice it to say that I have become a pro at all of this.

Finally, catching up on email at 1am, researching flights to Asheville, NC for a wedding in january, changing my flight to go back home to Singapore early, calling Singapore and Oz, and waiting to put my laundry into the dryer so I can legitimately fall into a dead faint.

NB. This is just for my records and for posterity, for it to feel like that my day wasn't entirely taken up by pace, but by substance too and that the incessant activity might have actually been productive, and not just a submission to the tyranny of the urgent.

New Orleans

2 years later and still the neighbourhoods of New Orleans are ravaged, prey to the same government paralysis, infrastructure breakdown and inertia that characterized the post-tsunami aftermath. And yet there is an extraordinary resilience and spirit to the people here who lost everything, from the Fats Domino, to Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu who had to get on a boat and rescue people from stranded rooftops when his state system broke down. The great debates of Katrina revolve around racial inequality and extreme poverty, that the storm (as it is referred to around here) flashlighted. (There are t-shirts here with the following headline: FEMA’s Evacuation Warning: Run Bitch, Run).

The rest of the US may have forgotten two years later, exactly how and why the levees broke, and why there is an extraordinary amount of buck-passing aroundabouts here, but the people of New Orleans themselves haven’t forgotten. The jazz is still here, whether at Preservation Hall, or elsewhere and this is of course the home of Buddy Bolden, subject of a novella by Ondaatje called Coming through Slaughter.

We went to a jazz club, owned by the legendary Antoinette Doe (an ex-Ikette with Tina and Ike Turner). Her husband, K-Doe was a one hit wonder way back in the 60s I think, and then turned to drink and died shortly afterwards. She had a life-size wax replica made of K-Doe her husband, clothed him in his trademark red velvet jacket and white crisp cravat, and put him in a wheelchair and takes him everywhere she goes, in a black hearse. They dine together at respectable places and the waiters serve him as though he was real and all of New Orleans knows about it. Can I tell you that this is who I want to be in my old age (and have every likelihood of becoming?!) We also went to Dooky Chase, an old establishment of around 50 years, home to the plotting of the early civil rights movement and the early jazz musicians. Ray Charles was served there!.

I also met John Thompson at a dinner. John spent 18 years on death row, with one capital punishment sentence and 49 years of another life sentence, for two murder counts. After 18 years, DNA found him to be wrongfully convicted on both counts and he was released. He has now founded Resurrection After Exoneration, a transitional home for ex cons and exonerees, to overcome the pull of recidivism and start a new life. A sweet black man, he had spent most of his life to date in jail. 40 days after he got out, he got married to a) over come deprivation!!! (in his own words) and b) lock himself into a life so he wouldn't feel the urge of "institutionalization". He went through seven execution dates, and always got a stay of execution at the last minute. He was led to the chair seven times, and thought he was going to die seven times. How does one come out of that alive? with hope and strength and conviction? How does one overcome the fact that 18 years of one's life are spent in a prison cell? I don't know but John is testament to hope not in institutions, but in human beings. He was convicted at the age of 22, when he was involved in drug dealing and had sold the murder victim coke right before someone killed her. As he said: that judge could have slapped ten life sentences on me and I wasn't going to open my mouth. i was a black man with an all white jury in Louisiana in the 80s. They could have blamed Kennedy's assassination on me. What a travesty of injustice.

Such is New Orleans, this crazy beautiful city of brokenness and abandonment, energy, resilience and spirit. Katrina was a storm that exposed race, poverty, corruption and inequality to America, and the City will never be the same again. As one person put it, this was one of the last strongholds for black power in America and now its gone, to be replaced by Martin Luther King's white power structure.

neruda

Poetry by Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age,
Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense
pure wisdom,
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadows perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

indian clerk

After a particularly drunken rout last night, I could not emerge from my bed, as each memory came back with startling, unwelcome clarity. So, I turned to The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. The writing was not good, particularly as it was an American voice trying to write in a British voice about a Tamil man, a century ago. Quite a feat of ventriloquism for anyone to pull off and sadly the writer was not up to the task. It has decent passages though, but rather too much descriptive detail of homosexual acts for my taste, jarring as it is interspersed in a story about an aging Cambridge don. But there is a good tone of sadness which is sustained in parts.

I also watched American Gangster a movie that aspires to greatness but does not quite reach it, let down by the lack of urgency in the narrative, the lack of exploration of right and wrong. Finally, Denzel Washington makes drug trafficking look far too attractive, and that edge of menace which was there in Training Day was missing here. And Russell Crowe, actually looked like a sweet cop, as opposed to a thuggish one. It was worth the watch though.

end

The phone began ringing off the hook yesterday as soon as I got up. Condolences, sharing, grief, worry, uncertainty from the relatives all across the world. Another key leader dead. Just one more to add to the thousands. When will it all end?

ideology

I found this on another blog, but it is acutely so.

“It doesn’t do to dwell in fantasy, which is not the same as imagination. Imagination is the power to reshape reality, to find hope where there appears to be only despair. Imagination creates signs that speak of the future and bring it closer. Fantasy is in some ways its opposite. It is a form of despair that flees from reality rather than seeking to reshape it.

‘We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare”.- W.B. Yeats

This is true of all ideology.

I don't want to know you because you may destabilize my world.

change

I feel like hiding under my desk again. Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme. (The more things change, the more they stay the same). Why do we pretend it's any different?

more

Looking over this blog recently, it looks like I have been incredibly self-absorbed, which really is not true! I came to a school of politics and think I have blogged less about politics than any other time in my life. Perhaps because I finally realize that it is true, erase all names! erase all nations! Power is the same everywhere and everywhere has the same problems with it, and every side is the same side. The anarchist is the only principled one.

Other than that, I have been watching Sports Night (when in life-related doubt, watch Sorkin) and it is his first work and it is rawer than his other work but it still shows brilliance, sentiment of the best kind and intelligence and I'll take that these days in whatever form I can get!

But the problems of the world do concern me. It just seems, so overwhelming. We flit here from event to event from The Humanitarian Crisis in Darfur to The Role of Government in Capital Markets to Natalie Portman talking about Increasing Access to Microfinance (not kidding) to Celebrate Hillary's (the Clinton I mean) 60th Birthday to Renaming the Surge in Iraq. I know I sound stupid, but I have lost the ability to translate my horror and outrage at tyranny, war, poverty and disease and all I have at that thought is a bone-deep weariness.

The guy sleeping above me (I live on the first floor of a 3 storey house) snores really loud and I can hear it through my ceiling. He doesn't seem to be getting any more action though. Small mercies.

roses

I bought red red roses on sale, because they were dying. Showy large blooms, petals blackened with age, a dozen of them are sitting in a glass of water and they look wonderful, past their youth, one last hurrah. Am debating seriously a doctorate. Oh God.

w bankers

In a Q and A with the Guardian, Douglas Copeland is asked what makes you depressed, and his answer is Boring people who have money.

Here is my theory about bankers and consultants (and of course all my friends are excused here as am I, having been one of these people and contemplating returning to the profession).

These people have too much money and too little time. They are by definition risk-averse, and also less motivated by social causes. They also have few interests outside of work besides purchasing larger homes and more luxurious holidays. (In fact, all that bankers do besides talk about work is to talk about their holidays in which they sleep besides the pool in some exotic location). Finally, and worst of all, their thinking is limited, box-like because that is how they are trained to think. By rejoining these professions, I would be losing everything that is unique about myself, or that forms a self-identity.

Sigh. If only choices were as simple as the above. Went to a reception last night at the Massachussetts State House (yes, the building of the golden dome for those who have watched the Departed) and it was bland and boring, so I got drunk on the free wine. Thrashed out in a drunken state the night prior, a memo on private operators of public infrastructure, which was rather a decent effort.

Am flirting briefly with the idea of doing a doctorate in English. Please someone, hammer some sense into my head before I become TOTALLY un-employable.

choices

On the whole job nightmare, I was talking with H.
" So I want to work for a nonprofit, preferably Teachers without Borders but I can't afford to pay off my loans on a salary of X, and so my plan is to write a best selling novel by May, get a massive advance and do that. After all, B and D spent their summers writing their novels. D's book is a horror story with a moral overtone, and B's book is autobiographical. How hard can it be? Then I can go to Cuba and teach salsa dancing which is what I really want to do".

Ah. Choices.

teaching

Am bleary eyed after marking 113 finance problem sets. Its 2am and of course I left it until the last possible day before it was due. It was an interesting exercise, but if I ever mention that I ever wanted to go into teaching, somebody please do me (and the world) a favour and shoot me and leave me for dead. I NEVER want to repeat this. Having said that, there were a few bright moments. Bearing in mind that this was entirely a quantitative finance problem set, here were some smart (aleck) comments that students made and handed in! (Aside: its amazing how students get excited by tangency points i.e. every time there is a curve and a tangent to the curve, the tangency point must be the answer to every question!).

I tried but I do not understand at all what this question is talking about. Please go through this in class.

I am confused. Hence the question mark instead of an answer.

and my favourite

If only I can understand the English that is being used, I could at least make sense out of it. It sounds gibberish to me and I am not sure that I can begin to make sense of that sort of English. Thanks for your time.

the divine mr. northam

So after reading Possession and recalling that the image of Ash has become inevitably intertwined with the image of a rather ravishing Jeremy Northam playing the same in the film adaptation (particularly the description in the book of a 'feral male') I embarked upon an English period film watching phase, successively blowing through the Austen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility (rather good with the very British Emma Thompson executing repressed passion rather well) and then Emma with Paltrow (insipid and boring) and the divine Mr. Northam. (I was in a terrible Northam phase years ago after the release of the incredibly romantic sci-fi thriller Cypher and even hunted down the Golden Bowl which was ghastly. But in Emma, he is simply debonair, sweet, English and rather appealing in all the best senses of the word. If there is a classic cry of why is this actor so underused, then it is for him.

time

I shall snatch this day from the gods and damned be the consequences.

possessed

I went on strike yesterday and simply turned the alarm off and refused to go to school, cancelling at the last minute classes and meetings. It was simply imperative. I unpacked my newest sage green sheets, woven thick and warm, and unravelled my bed accordingly and when it was done, it looked like fields of rice. And I scrubbed the bathroom clean, hands and knees, and washed my hair and drowned myself in lotion and then lay on the bed and finished reading Possession, the American edition (of which must has been written about, but its true, Roland now has an "amused smile" that "arouses"- the character was deemed too unsexy for American readers and subsequently revised in the American edition). The rain pounded away, it was a dark night in Massachussetts all around and perfect for reading. Went to a party, came back drunk and continued reading. I baked brownies and the tray was left in the hall to be ravaged by passing hordes of graduate students. It was glorious (I even cleaned my shoes) though now, I am irrevocably behind.

HermitIsland, Maine

We went camping, the whole crew, C, M, B, H, A and I. S couldn't make it, but we wrote in the sand on the water against a sunset, Bite Me S and sent him the photo via my blackberry. Trekked on a trail along cliffsides and saw the sea, the Atlantic, churning against black rock and silica for two hours. Boiled lobsters on our campfire, wincing as we stuck them live and wriggling in the pot. We stood along the pot and gave them an elegy though. Then took the JD out to the sand, a few metres from our tents (I pitched a tent!) and under the moonlight, talked without agenda or burden. Slept in our tents as the Maine winds howled across the dunes. In the morning we rose to the dawn and made campfire bacon and eggs and potatoes, went shell-picking and prising barnacles off the rocks and watching them wince. Read poetry standing on top of the rocks far into the sea. And everything was right with the world. Then we piled into the car and drove back to Boston with the windows down and the song from the JC Penney Sweater Commercial on high and repeat. A brief moment, snatched from the jaws of time.

unrelated things

"And ever has it been, that love knows not its own depth, until the hour of separation", -Khalil Gibran

I was talking to C today, a person who makes the darkest day glow with laughter.
"I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to apply to all these damn corporate jobs because I feel like I should, and I have loans and debt and when I finally I get my offer letter, after having gone through anal probes and coma-inducing case interviews, I'm going to look at it and then look at my wife and she'll say "Is this what you really want to do?" and I'll die a little bit inside and take the job".

youth?

What happened to our youth? What happened to lugging around dog-eared copies of Catcher in The Rye, quoting Shakespeare, spending hours in couches in Starbucks intellectualizing poverty? What happened to the urgent necessity to enter new worlds, be disruptive forces, change an order, to be giants in a field?

losing

I just wanted to say that today (roughly) marks the end of 1 year in the States. I would like to commemorate it by listing the following things I have not lost AT ALL!

a. ATM card. (Average loss of twice a year- to three times a year).
b. Mobile Phone (average loss of also twice a year)
c. Pen (Average loss of about five times a year). I have not lost this pen AT ALL. I only own one pen so it would be a disaster if I lost it.

I have also recently acquired a blackberry. Game over.

The Journey By Mary Oliver

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice--

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save

pathetic!

back stateside and OMG as a dear friend would say. The pace has consumed me already. Still haven't unpacked, everything is in a mess, and away this weekend and another dear friend is in town tomorrow for a few days and OMG. Such is the pathetic state of affairs that I am reduced to ordering underwear online. Irretrievably sad.

perhaps all true desire is illicit

back in beantown

Back in Boston and oh so blue! The only thing that redeems it is J coming to town and R potentially getting her act together to come to town too... Otherwise it looks like a long dreary fall ahead weather wise. Class wise, I am determined to learn something, against the odds this semester so am going to focus on infrastructure, trade and the Middle East as well as a Start a Biz in a Developing Country. Its 30 celsius here so at least the weather is holding up. Feeling decidedly antisocial and not going to the usual round of parties celebrating the return of school. Oh, I'm decidedly getting older... SIGH!

enthee-yah.

So. One more day left and what are the things I am going to miss about India and not miss? Here are the moments.

Missing (terribly)
a) I never thought I would say this of all things, but I will miss the heat that sticks to you like silk, that smothers and frees.

b) The autorickshaw wallahs and the conversation about life, the movies and politics (in that order).

c) The television channels full of random masala songs of half naked women and men with brains the size of their pecs all in high-gloss high-blare fashion

d) The people, hospitality, kindness, graciousness, everything that is South Asian and Indian.

e) The food. Searing curries, larger than life organically grown vegetables (a tomato that tastes like a tomato, chicken that's been reared on whatever chickens eat in the wild)

f) Last, but not least, the head wiggle. Enough said.

Things I will safely un-miss until the next time

a) The pollution. Thought Colombo was bad but India takes it to another level.

b) Idlies. I hate the damn things and will not miss them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

c) The redefinition of customer service. You know what I mean.

d) The revolution that the human body is capable of staging in India (i.e. the various things I have fallen ill with in such an impossibly short space of time). It is amazing biologically what can happen when things go wrong with the body. Emotional angst is no comparison to physical pain.

e) the total lack of privacy.

tamil cinema

Iconic moments in tamil cinema

« I’ve been thinking about number one most iconic moment for a long time. In my mind, it has to go to Nayakan, and the last scene, when he dies, shot, in a Godse-like moment, by his disciple, a child he had brought up himself. He dies, falling face forward, with his hands up, asking for forgiveness, that a court of justice has already given him, but God may deny him. And in that moment, his life is narrated in flashback, the compromises he has made, the soul he has sold in order to gain power and dispense his moral version of justice to those who are unprotected. Was it worth it? Was he right? Do the wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly small?
« Number Two. Another Kamal Haasan moment. In Salangai Oli, when the woman he has loved has had her deserted husband come back, and his love is never spoken. And he turns to drink and his extraordinary talent is driven to waste. And on the plank of wood, above the well, he dances in the rain to one of cinema’s most evocative songs, and says, never expecting to see her again, naan vallkaiodu kovarm ellai, annal kaathal ennai kaathalikavillai. (I am not bitter with life, but love did not love me back). And she comes out in the rain, bereft and she extends her hand, and there is a flash of lightning and he sees her.
« Number Three: When Devaraj, the minor don asks Rajnikant (in the single best role in his life followed, perhaps by Baasha), why? Why did you give up your brother, your mother for me? Why? And he says, because you are my friend. And chills go down the spine. It is a very Lutheran stand: Here I stand, I can do no other. And it is both obvious and astonishing at the same time.
« (In the same film, is another moment, when Shobana tells him that her father wants to marry her off to someone else. And he asks, angry, was I the one who came and said I liked you? And he’s shouting at her, and she’s crying and she leaves him, walking through the cavern of two rocks, and she doesn’t turn back, and all his anger is a mask for how utterly bereft he is, sitting there as she walks away from him. )
« Great dramatic comic moment: In Agni Natchathiram, when Karthik is loafing, sitting smoking, one leg up on the parapet, arm lazily over an upraised knee, a leg dangling downwards, just loafing basically and Nirosha pulls up in her car, dressed in a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, and she leans over her steering wheel, with her dark skin setting off the white dress and hair cascading and mouths I love you. And he is so shocked, he nearly falls off the parapet and is like telling his friends and then she zooms off in her car and he gets on his motorbike and follows her (which is a funny twist on the typical guy going: I love you for no rhyme or reason).

Others?

seamus heaney

from his Nobel Prize lecture

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

lage raho munnabhai

Absolutely astounding. Sweet, sentimental, hilarious, true, inspirational, lovely and utterly Indian in all its sensibilities. Watched it last night, seamless blending between humour and poignancy, between love, devotion and of course Gandhianism. And Sanjay Dutt, truly exceptional and sweet in a comic/villain type role. Welled up at quite a few moments, for a comedy that I thought was going to be totally disastrous. Particularly touching was the sidekick, proving that old tales can be continually rejuvenated if done right. And so sad too, this man, condemned to six years in Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai, for illegal arms possession, this man who, despite his imposing build, would not hurt a fly or so it seems. Some people are just cursed, whatever they do.
Can't wait to watch the first Munnabhai M.B.B.S.

ending

"Happiness is when what you think, and what you say, and what you do, are in harmony" Mahatma Gandhi

I wish someone had told me that earlier. But I feel like the orthogonal change in my life is somewhat progressing towards this truth. I only wish I had more diligence and discipline to chart it so.

Only two more days to go in proper employment and then freed, again, to travel, to rest, to learn and to think.

I never promised you a rose garden.

hmm.

Sometimes, all the hoopla disappears, the bustle and noise recedes, and the streets are quiet, as though a bombing just happened and a curfew had been announced. But its only Independence day, and millions have left the capital, to make pilgrimages to holy sites, to sit, enjoy and be at peace. And the silence is restful almost, just as it should be after a week of travelling cross country and beyond. The summer is drawing to a close, with only 3 short weeks to be spent backwater-hopping in Kerala with the fam, and then back to school, and all that that represents. I feel as though my heart has slowed down here, even though my body has been busy, and even though I haven't had a moment to myself really for more than a day. Its been good. Filling up the silences has been good, and things have healed. Or are beginning to. I don't know what the coming year will bring, but I am sure things will come together. It always does, right? Oh 20th of August.

omkara

Back from a week in the north, where the colour, vibrancy, urbanization seem exuberant in contrast with this gentle South, of muted tones and temples, of stones, granite and rain, of safety and calmness. Watched Omkara at the Delhi Film Festival, an Indian take on Othello and it was remarkable to see how far along Indian cinema had come, in terms of mastery of plot, screenplay writing, authentic dialogue, setting and scenes and cinematography, while still retaining a uniquely Indian look, feel and sensibility. The movie was let down only by the acting, which unfortunately is where the Indian talent falls short, but there were some stellar performances that transcended script and directing. Particularly I think Saif Ali Khan who valiantly tried to come to terms with the script and Ajay Devgan who merely stalked around as a brooding general, both these performances missed the genius of the original writings, to show the complexity of these man, Othello and Iago. Nevertheless before the movie came on, Vivek Oberoi came out in person to talk to the audience for a brief Q & A and impressed us with his charm and sheer heart (something I think that every Indian person has) and gallantry, thus forgiving his innate lack of intelligence and sensitivity.

shantaram

Getting through Shantaram right now, despite the initial scepticism, a friend made me read the first page and then I immediately went and bought the 936 page doorstopper and am wending my way through it now, and reading it now, ensconced in the North, brings alive the beating heart of an India that I had never quite known I had known. It seems that it is very easy to fall in love with men who are in love with life and some people have a wisdom, born from having fought the difficult fight, without losing their hope or idealism. Despite its lack of literary talent (read discipline) and knowledge of literary grammar, yet, there is a honesty to the writing, a soaring romanticism and a deep understanding of life, through the author, who for all his faults, has never been afraid to live and to most of all, love. And what more could one want in a book?

"The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love".

" The past reflects eternally between two mirrors- the bright mirror of words and deeds and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say"

"Sometimes you break your heart in the right way"

i love india

So, I love India.

I know its a tired cliche, and I've hated it on many an occasion too, but I actually adore the subcontinent. Who would've even thought for a second that I could live anywhere else except in this part of the world now that I have made it here? Of course I still think Sri Lanka is god's gift to planet earth, and that Eden like it has never existed before or after (and like Eden, its inhabitants are similarly cursed, but it seems as though wars are always fought in paradise). Am off to Delhi tomorrow for a week, and the bustling pitch of the north can be compared to the south, and the exuberant hindi spoke on the streets will ricochet off the extreme poverty (more so than in the South) and maybe I'll venture out to some teak/jasmine/coconut/rubber plantations armed with a survey and ask them ridiculous questions and maybe I'll fall in love with life all over again, because its home, and this craziness will always be home. And tonight I am going to watch shivaji and it'll be awesome and nothing in my life will capture my senses as much as an indian film, and that too a tamil film!

and a google quote seems particularly apt: play: work that you enjoy doing for nothing. which is exactly what I'm doing.

excerpt

Paul Theroux from the Guardian's Great Escape

In the monsoon season of 1970, I boarded the MV Keningau in Singapore bound for Borneo. The ship was small, not much bigger than a ferry, the inexpensive way for rubber-tappers and their families to travel to the plantations of East Malaysia. They were down below - hundreds of them, off to work. I was sailing to Kota Kinabalu, for the fun of it, and also to climb Mount Kinabalu. In a few months, my wife would be giving birth to our second child, and this was a selfish and solitary jaunt, before I became fully engaged as a father of two. I also had the notion that this solitude would help me in my writing project at the time, a novel with the provisional title Saint Jack, about a middle-aged American who dreams of getting rich in Singapore. In my small bag with a change of clothes were my notebooks and my book for the trip, a hard-cover copy of VS Naipaul's novel A House for Mr Biswas. Because there were so few of us in first class, we all ate together: the captain's wife and his son; a planter's wife, part-Malay, and her small son, in the cabin next to mine; and a Tamil lawyer, travelling on his own - he was about my age, which was 29. What seems like a cast for a Maugham story was in fact a pleasant and sedate group. The captain and his family were friendly people but all of them chewed food with their mouths open, a family trait I have never encountered anywhere else. Some evenings, I played cards with the Tamil and the planter's wife, usually the game of Hearts. Then I became engrossed in the Naipaul novel, slipped into the life of the Tulsi family and its odd-man-out, Mohun Biswas. The novel is without mannerisms, seems almost not to have a style, yet is so detailed and humane, it offered me a whole world; and as with the greatest novels, it made me care. I memorised a paragraph beginning "The mind is merciful . . ."
"Paul's laughing," the planter's wife said from the card table.
"At a book!" the Tamil said.
I hardly noticed the voyage. Most of the time, I was in Trinidad with Mohun Biswas and Anand. I was dismayed that in a day or so I'd be finished with the book, and I thought - as young writers do - I could never write this. But the passion of this novel helped me see that I had my own novel to write.

Oct 20 2004

from an old email.

Today, my world changed and my life was dragged along with it. It wasn't a big dynamic change, announced with lightning and moving tectonic plates, as one would imagine these things were. It was instead, a shifting of sands. The world as I knew it fell away from me for an instant, and when the clouds had stopped blurring everything was the same again, although imperceptibly changed. I had finally discovered who I was, and who i could never be again. I was a writer.

Whether time would tell me if I was good or not was irrelevant. Today I found out who I am. Whatever I had expected upon attending his reading, I had not expected this. I had not expected this instant awareness, this instant attraction. I felt as though upon meeting him, an old memory of mine was rewoken. I felt as though I had known him my whole life and I felt as though I had the rest of my live to devote to him. It is known that I am particularly susceptible to passions. But I knew his body too,his vigour, his quick movements belied the hyperawareness of a man not used to people or to society. A man uponst whom everyone else necessarily imposed themselves on. A man who I had fallen in love with when i was 16.I know that all this will seem incredibly fanciful, and melodramatic. A writer has to write a story about everything and this will seem one in a thread of many. but believe me when I say this, I had not expected this. I had expected to be provoked, to be stimulated, to see the head that had produced lines that were never to be forgotten,etched into my awakening mind at 16. I had not expected this... absolute knowledge.I could not take my eyes off him. He was home, as in Sri Lanka, a land he knew better than me, a land that he had written about much more evocatively than I could ever hope to do so, he represented the West, and its voices, but most horrifically of all, the thing I did not expect, was that he represented a Dutchman living in Asia. Of which all had one in common, the same alert piercing eyes, the same uneasiness with which they integrated into society, the same hesitance before they spoke ofthemselves. He reminded me most of someone I had once known deeply, of Home, of the war and of the book that had changed my life.

All this I could not tell him, although I wanted to. For the first time that evening he spoke of himself. And I could tell after he spoke, for he ended abruptly as though having spoken more than he had wished to, that it was as surprising to him as it was to me. He spoke of how he had started to write another novel set in Sri Lanka, but the voice and the structure was similar to Anil's ghost and so he had stopped. He spoke also of how he had gone back, how he had gone back after Anil's Ghost and how he would always continue to go back.I could no longer speak. The man's voice when he read of the history of stones, of writings in leaves of palimpsests, of genesis,of lives in Polonaruwa and places I thought only I knew about, for none of my friends or people knew this except my parents. And he said something that he didn't say to anyone else, this man of few words, this man who said it took him 2 years to read his own book out to the public because that was how long it took him to be comfortable with the own characters he had written. The man who had refused to talk about the work he was currently engaged on.Perhaps I am romanticizing as I am wont to do. but this encounter, I can only tell you in this moment, my life changed. I had gone into that room, thinking of being a writer, and I had come out, knowing that I wanted to write something that he would be proud of.

ode to studio 60

the best scene in studio 60- the now officially defunct Aaron Sorking post-West Wing comedy? The scene where the black jazz musicians from hurricane-ravaged Katrina play music without lyrics to scenes of new orlean and the snow falls on the stage. The soaring notes of the trumpet and the softer deeper notes of the saxophone send chills down the spine. And then bradley whitford delivers his line: .....but you'd better get a head start because I'm coming for you.

another day in madras and I don't want to leave. prospects of clubbing madras style tonight. Yeah! any excuse to drink imported liquor at exorbitant prices, spend the night at the friend's place because I have a curfew of 10pm and wake up to die another day. And my eye is improving so I don't look like something out of a porn/horror film. Nice.

mumbling

I'll die as I have lived, with a book in my hand says manguel perhaps?.
I'm tired. and i want to lay down somewhere and i want the universe to stop spinning and I want the earth to slow down and I want to read and mull and not do much of anything else. except I have always dreamt of thinking, of having time to think, of walking and thinking and sleeping and thinking, but I only at best, have an hour to think everyday and that too only because I refuse to come to work after I get up and I lie in bed after a shower, with the fan whirring, thinking.

reading the reluctant fundamentalist now and while it is delicate it is not subtle and neither is it revelatory but resorts to narrating the cliched experience of fundamentalism, painting Princeton on top of it does not change it, nor imbue it with gravitas. madras is lulling me constantly to sleep and think I have also developed a mild version of madras eye. on another note, a conversation or two does not actually change reality, even if it offers the brief hope of choosing an alternate reality, yet in that choice between vectors, a whole host of other inevitables are at play and one can change some, but as lincoln said you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. likewise with one's self-awareness and the inevitability of certain behaviours at the ripe old age of 26.

lky

From Lee Kuan Yew: "The Man and His Ideas"

"We have got to live with the consequences of our actions and we are responsible for our own people and we take the right decisions for them. You look at the old Philippines. The old Ceylon. The old East Pakistan and several others. I have been to these countries and places. When I went to Colombo for the first time in 1956 it was a better city than Singapore because Singapore had three and a half years of Japanese occupation and Colombo was the centre or HQ of Mountbatten's Southeast Asia command.
And they had sterling reserves. They had two Universities. Before the war, a thick layer of educated talent So if you believe what American liberals or British liberals used to say, then it ought to have flourished. But it didn't.

One-man one-vote led to the domination of the Sinhalese majority over the minority Tamils who were the active and intelligent fellows who worked hard and got themselves penalised. And English was out. They were educated in English. Sinhalese was in. They got quotas in two universities and now they have become fanatical Tigers. And the country will never be put together again.

Somebody should have told them - change the system, loosen up, or break off. And looking back, I think the Tunku was wise. (The reference is to Tunku Abdul Rahman the Malaysian Prime Minister under whose rule Singapore separated from Malaysia). I offered a loosening up of the system. He said: "Clean cut, go your way". Had we stayed in, and I look at Colombo and Ceylon, I mean changing names, sometimes maybe you deceive the gods, but I don't think you are deceiving the people who live in them. It makes no great difference to the tragedy that is being enacted. They failed because they had weak or wrong leaders ".

in india

you know you're in India when the moment you land, someone rushes from the back of the plane to the front, already having perfected his strategy of being a first-mover at Customs and secretly disobeying orders to unload luggage from the cabin head. You know you're in India when standing in customs, some old guy trying valiantly to be hip with newly-acquired American accent and a passel of kids and a large fanny pack busts out ice gum and offers it to everyone around him saying: want some ice breakers? You know you're in India when some auntie/long-lost third cousin's great-cousin's grand-aunt says to you warningly about her friend/long lost third-cousin's daughter that she was a very bright girl, went to Stanford pre-med, but then switched majors and now is doing Teach for America and shakes her head and says :"and her parents are very disappointed". You know you're in India when you're sitting in an auto, rushing headlong into oncoming traffic, heart pounding wildly, hair flying out of the 2 by 2 hair cabin, and the auto driver having completed a u-turn worthy of Hamilton spinning on one wheel, then spots a lad pedalling on a bicycle standing up, ahead of him, and the lad's butt swerving with every motion, and in madrasi tamil, the autodriver bawls him out for his butt going this way and that way and tells him to sit down, and the youth, undaunted, tries to make a quickwitted retort, but instead crashes into an oncoming van and falls off his bicycle to much merriment of auto driver and passengers. You know you're in India when you start speaking tamil/hindi/marwadi/hyderabadi urdu to a telephone seller, who upon seeing your crisp blue foreign passport, starts yakking back at you in broken English, deaf to whatever else. You know you're in India when the gelato from a five star cafe is a colonic irrigation substitute, and fresh curd from the rural roadside makes you believe in God again. You know you're in India when ... you wake up, and the air is wet with the smell of monsoon rains, and the leaves greener than anywhere else, and the stench from the roadside households mixes with the diesel of the maruti cars and melds with the jasmine and the mangoes and the sandalwood from a nearby shrine and you know you're home, some way, again.

a commencement speech

Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the occasion of Wellesley's 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969:

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us -- the 400 of us -- and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot.

Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade -- years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program -- so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.
Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.T
he hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair.
And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

madras

So. Having lived in Sri Lanka for a mammoth year and a half, one would assume that living in its subcontinental neighbour for just three months, especially where one spoke the language unlike in Sri Lanka, would be a relative walk in the park. Or if not exactly a breezy jaunt, then at least not angst-inducing. But a year in the developed world with every luxury and convenience to hand has simply marinaded me in my usual comfort expectations such that even taking a normal auto ride in the heat of noon amidst traffic and pollution of the Indian variety leaves me dazed and confused and utterly bereft of the will to live. Add to that spending one days in a sub-arctic airconditioned office researching, sleeping on a bed with a mattress of crushed stone, violently swatting at mosquitoes mid-dream, and worst of all, eating South Indian food (once is a novelty, twice is nice, more than that, Sri Lankan food it just ain't) ALL THE TIME has made me depressed. So, regardless of the cost, I am off. To Barista for a fake-latte but right now, even the semblance of espresso will have me up, and then back to work no doubt. (And of course it isn't as bad as all that, there're a great bunch of people here and lots of laughing at how insane India is, and everyone meddling in everyone else's business here and general Indian life, which is just on crack). Just a little dejected right now that's all, and looking forward to a long, hot, dry (of that OTHER variety too) summer.

temperatures.

Someone please explain to me how it is possible that it is the beginning of June nearly, it is 35 degrees celsius in Boston and when I land in London, it is SEVEN DEGREES CELSIUS? It boggles the mind. I had to immediately purchase on the cheap, a white fishermans' cable knit sweater. While it does nothing to hold up the fashion front, I am warm. The BBC has quite a funny series of pictures on the weather: check it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6698607.stm