You want to flake out?

Pick a number and take a hike buddy. Because this may just be as good as it gets.

hills

Spent the weekend up in the hills, amongst the tea plantations, where the weather was around 14 degrees and unbelievably pleasant. The drive was arduous, snaking up the hillside, on two land crazy bends, in the rain on potted roads in a dilapidated van. Made a stop at the Pinnewala Elephant orphanage and saw a lame elephant rescued from a border village, a leg blown off by a landmine. Talked about the problems of development in India, and of innovative programs, where street children are taught on railway platforms and finance workshops run by ex-investment bankers for women's savings groups in the Himalayas. Then the night spent in the hills, waking up in the morning to fir trees and pines and the scent of tea in the air. Walking amidst the golf courses and the bustling market town, reminiscent of Khurg, or Darjeeling or Ooty, or Kodaikanal. Reminiscent, remarkably, of Hyde Park. It was good for the soul and I forgot for a brief moment I was in Sri Lanka. Then driving back after the short stay, stopping at a random guesthouse and finding out it was the famous Kitulgala resthouse, on the banks of foaming rapids with a wooden swaying bridge which looked distinctly un-Sri Lankan and very Vietnamese, and then discovered that this was the river where, improbably, Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed!. How bizarre. Came out of the guesthouse to discover a Rolls and a Jag parked in the garage! Then the skies opened for the umpteenth time and we ran for cover.

back in the saddle

Just a week back and already it feels like a lifetime. I think this stint will be good. highlights include attending a gala reception at a five star hotel of an international NGO, which was started up in the 1950s as a recognized front for the CIA and the State Department for its Cold War activities in the Asia-Pacific region (and as a result has been banned from certain countries). Even now, this NGO trains local foreign service personnel and is involved in defence issues. Met the old trustee emeritus of this NGO, who talked to us about declassified information about American military movements in the Phillipines in the 50s and how he still influences the strategic direction of this NGO. Over 50% of their funding comes from the US govt, some reputedly from slush funds, although 10% is still voted on by Congress.

Then, went to a school opening ceremony in the South, in a resettled village by a Texan, with journalists and reporters. There was a poster welcoming me and my colleague by name, as well as our organization, and it was beautiful. I released a white dove into the sky, trembling (the dove), terrified, strangely feeling alive at that moment. There was an auspicious ceremony at the time, where the Buddha was installed in his shrine, and Rebs was telling me how she had transported him last night from Ambalangoda, in the back seat, with seat belts on.

We were driving along Galle Road past Weligama, and we came to secluded beach cove, and the three of us snatched a moment, the first time since I've come to Sri Lanka where we've just kicked off our shoes, ran into the waves with our clothes on and got half-drenched and felt so alive, with a storm brewing off the coast and the palm trees bending double in the wind. Getting back into the van, the driver started playing Eminem and as we drove past a Buddhist shrine, he switched it off for 2 minutes and then immediately switched it on as we passed it. Such reverence! A true devotee. And so it goes.

ipod

I've never been a lackey of capitalism, hostage to 'programmed' desires, but I have to admit; I am captivated by the ipod nano. I am a shameless convert to iApple. Welcome to iEarth. The next computer I buy is an ibook. Forget the rest.

In 1984, Apple came out with an ad (at the Superbowl), declared in 1995 as the best ad of the last 50 years and directed by Ridley Scott.

the third world

back from another developing country. The term 'Third World' or developing, is so illusory. The Human Development Index lists three bands, of development or progress. Sri Lanka for example, is ranked 93 of last, and India 127 of last. But yet, there are wide disparities in these two countries- consumer goods penetration is higher in India, road infrastructure is better in the capital cities, there is a better network of public transportation (railways and buses) across the country, there is a huge surge in upward class mobility due to the widespread cable tv penetration as well as the booming economy benefiting from outsourcing, there is a wider critical mass of educated English speaking workers unlike Sri Lanka. Yet, calculated on a 'per capita' basis, India lags far behind Sri Lanka.

In Bhutan, there is a 'happiness' index, to measure development.

Talking recently about the politics of foreign aid, and how aid is always conditional, though it may be years for those conditions to be articulated, demanded and met. Unconscious, whether it is imposing a 'value system' on those recipients, to conscious. And yet, there is one thing that makes the world go round and as I get older, i see it more and more, it is the almighty dollar and all that that implies. It is the currency of the world, whether in values, social issues or in economic might.

and

"I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return." - Bertrand Russell

He won a Nobel prize for.. literature by the by.

In a haste, last minute 'big-sky' thinking and strategizing and documenting the budget and plan for , oh, approx the next four years, organization-wise. In between squeezed in Lords of Dogtown, The Company and due to watch In the Mood for Love as well as overdosing on classical music and have ordered the West Wing. When one cannot go and live, one must order life off the internet. Or something. Am taking a break from reality. Will jack in later.

flyby

From the one person in this world who has the same blood combination as I do (and clearly other elements run in common as well)

"My mgr and I have a psycho-obsession with movies. We always order a ‘Royale with Cheese’ at the burger joint.
We quote lines from top gun. we have a mutual obsession with the movie, even though im not an 80s girl.

he goes 'you can be my wingman anytime'. i go 'bullshit, you can be mine'. to accelerate our pace on the assignment, he goes 'i feel the need.....' i go 'the NEED for SPEEED'when i do anything well and good, he goes 'gutsiest move i ever saw'when im going to do something brazen, i go 'request for flyby' and he goes 'negative ghostrider, the pattern is full' and lets me do it anyway.

when he leaves before i do, he goes 'let me know if you feel alone out there. i'll fly with you anytime' and then leaves anyway.when he says he's going to finish something and he doesn't, i go 'your ego's writing cheques your body can't cash' (HAHA)if im about to screw up, he goes 'if you even THINK about screwing up, ill make sure you're flying cargo planes full of rubber dogshit outta HONG KONG!'and since then, i have never screwed up. thats the highlight of my life"

pop culture

"Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes. We need gigantic revolutionary changes. Schools should be palaces. Competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be getting six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge for its citizens, just like national defense. That is my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet."

From the West Wing.

"You ask me if I have a God complex? Let me tell you something. I am God".

policy

Someone advocated the fact that we need an intellectual and emotional combination to come to a solution, particularly so because otherwise the 'intellectual pontification' takes place at the expense of providing a rapid, efficient solution for those who are in need (and not those who pontificate, who almost always are removed from the true ground reality).

I see the validity of that. And of course I understand that no matter how much I would wish to believe that I am a truly objective rational decision-making machine, I understand that unconsciously there are all sorts of instincts, intuition, irrational emotions and all influencing me. But, I am not convinced of the validity of my emotions. I'm not even sure that I should have emotions! In the ideal world, I would prefer to be emotion-free.

No doubt this comes from someone in deep need of therapy (!), but I dislike chaos, and confusion. I look to simplify things, in order to understand them, and in order to solve them. No doubt the solution then becomes simplistic and based on a set of unverifiable, and impractical assumptions, but I guess I don't know what else to do, and I'm not yet convinced that any other way is right. And I still believe that that solution is not wholly redundant and it can impose some form of order on the chaos.

However, in one extremely foolhardy moment, i made the decision to get involved. I don't think that I thought for any moment, that it would ever make any difference to the country's need (and I feel that even more after my time there: that whatever we do is so minimal, so negligible, a drop in the ocean) but I did think that it would (selfishly) make a difference to my life. I recognized that there were many things about the reality of a war-torn developing country that I did not know, could not know, at a academic level, without purposely situating myself there.

Well now I am beginning to know. I think I'm learning how to be patient. I think I'm learning it takes much more, to identify the half-distinct blurred impressions of truth that move in us, to learn how to cohere them together. I think that I am beginning to see the way forward, and it is long and hard. I think that doing what I do has given me a real sense of time, of how we move one step forward and always two steps backward, how to accept pace and when to fight against it.

I just wanted to say; that I am beginning, slowly, painfully, to understand. When we come face to face with who we are, versus who we think we are, when we realize that all of our impressions and understandings hitherto, are dogmas handed down to us, when we realize that those structures of understanding don't apply in a different society, and when we learn how to carve out an impression of the world and society we inhabit, that is real progress.

Where reality meets a model, where emotions meet rational debate, where reason fails, and what remains to hold something together. As I write, I realize this is even more abstract and I know it frustrates some people and I apologize. In my everyday work for example, people think that I am cold, that I am too focused on action, disinterested in making people like me, disinterested in the human lives of the actors around me.

The truth is, I am afraid to know all that. To have a goal, and implement it in work, is satisfying (and even that takes too much time and is too difficult). I would start to crack if I had to see people as people and not as agents ( i.e. defined by their function). I know it sounds horrible, and I don't think I'm a horrible person, rather I think I am just (as usual) highly confused.

np

Quoted, by Naipaul in his Nobel winning lecture

"I will end as I began, with one of the marvellous little essays of Proust in Against Sainte-Beuve. "The beautiful things we shall write if we have talent," Proust says, "are inside us, indistinct, like the memory of a melody which delights us though we are unable to recapture its outline. Those who are obsessed by this blurred memory of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted... Talent is like a sort of memory which will enable them finally to bring this indistinct music closer to them, to hear it clearly, to note it down..."
Talent, Proust says. I would say luck, and much labour."

Reading a series of essays by Naipaul on writing, fiction, identity and being situated in the post colonial space, as best defines his history and background, not only physical, but cultural, mental, societal.

press on

There's something about classical music isn't there. About Bach perhaps to more of an extent than Beethoven who's slightly darker but equally passionate. Bach is falsely thought to be lighter, the notes are higher, but the music is more complex, full of mathematically complex arias. Plotting pitch against time yields an approximate fractal curve,the same curve that delineates the space-time continuum, quantum physics and the natural structure of snowflakes and mountains, river networks and blood vessel systems. And yet the limited human mind is able to perhaps, be paralysed by the music, recognizing its depth, without comprehending the parameters of the depth, if that makes sense. It all gives one some kind of faith in humanity.

A crisis of faith. Talking about Sri Lanka with some non-domiciled sri lankans and remarking on the scale of the backward decline since the Kumaratunga presidency although no doubt the roots can be traced to beyond that, perhaps from Sirimavo Bandaranaike herself, the first woman prime minister in the world (one small step for feminists, one giant leap backward for a nation). How the country used to be far ahead than India on nearly every human development index indicator. How now it is mired, irrevocably perhaps in its futile ethnic politics, how everything becomes politicized in individual, institutional and state power grabs. How perhaps the biggest obstacle to true liberalization, in both an economic, social and political sense is the absence of a free press, instead of what exists now, lackeys of the Sinhala Buddhist polity. How newspapers that start up, mysteriously get shut down soon after, either due to depletion of funds or more prosaically, the disappearances and murders of journalists and editors. Mired in a quagmire of their own making. Bureaucracy, corruption for the smallest of things (such as getting a goddamned car license or getting a passport paperwork filled out).

illusions

Reading a poem about how we miss things, how unexpectedly we realize their value only when they're gone: how when you sit down at one tree with a friend, you get leave to realize that you have discovered another, and how things hide one another, memories on top of memories, obscuring.

Back from the south after a gruelling but relatively pleasant trip meeting with government school principals who've requested libraries and facilities in their impoverished schools. Met principals who're local JVP politicians (extremist Marxist Buddhist party), and whose schools are relatively well-furnished. Met principals who've had to fight to keep their schools open, their building roofs falling down due to poor construction, their children leaving because of the lack of teachers, teachers who've contracted cancer but who still fight to come to school everyday, scarved, to keep libraries open. Why do some people fight against a system, when they know the odds are stacked against them? And why do others, who have everything, relatively, give up at the sight of the first obstacle? What is it that animates someone, that life-spirit that refuses to let them give up?

I don't know. Images passed us by, a cowherd washing his water buffalo, waist deep in a river, coconut trees bent double by the force of the wind, rice paddy fields ruffling in the breeze, a Muslim town boycotting a newly built road because it was badly built, with blocks of stones placed in the middle of the road rendering passage of vehicles impossible (but in the end, it's the town who suffers, not the government who built the road). Met a child who paints well and has won all island competitions, and commissioned a painting for the office. So much talent, so randomly placed. This is why structures and equality of opportunity are so important in a well designed government and society, so that everyone has a chance, at some point, to bloom, to make their lives better, to progress.

I believe in the importance of the cause. But I don't know how it's all going to come together.

Went to the Koggala lake, a 2000 acre tranquil lake near the seaside, hidden away by brush and forest. There are plans to develop a seven star luxury villa resort on this island, with wooden chalets on stilts nestled among trees in a 300 year old cashew forest, cantilevered out from the cliff onto the lake. They're not going to tell the foreigners that the waters is 30% contaminated by agrochemicals. The approval process from 3 different ministries to construct the property took 2 years and about 20,000 USD in bribes.

How do you fight a system? How do you get enough money and power in order to fight a system? How do you remain without compromise in life? I don't know.

So.

So is all that I can say at the moment.

It's been a totally crazy couple of days and everyone's been PMSing on each other and tensions are high due to the escalating political situation. Everyone's loyalties in the office are caught in a bind and we are seeing exactly where they entangle, snap and in some cases rip each other. As each day passes I feel only that I am increasingly unqualified at what I do and the facade of competence that I maintain becomes increasingly wearying. I sound like a victim half the time and I'm angry the rest of the time and it isn't healthy.

Focusing on language and the way we understand things. Coming back somewhere after 24 years, it's too late to remember the lullabies sung when i was three, too late to understand the subtleties of a language that I spoke fully when I was seven and then tapered off, too late to understand the intricacies of social structures and social norms here, too late to want to change, too early to accept that some things can never change.

And always the endless waiting, in perpetual uncertainty for an answer.

bone and chalk

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20). Your plan clearly isn't working. Don't give up, but do try something radically different. Franz Kafka once wrote that there are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

I'm leaping alright. In single bounds.

Back from a bone-shattering trip to the East. Our team is by now reaching near-complete physical exhaustion as our punishing schedule continues.

A series of difficult meetings with our partner organization concluded with near-vitriol and some personal attacks. Not quite cricket with this British organization. Apparently our need for monitoring, frequent visits and quality control procedures with regard to construction (an anyway haphazard, mine-ridden process) is unsupportable and conflicts with their ethos of being a 'happy' organization (that awards contracts to their friends and that builds homes for all their employees (none of whom were tsunami-affected) using donor money. This is apparently the striking model of the best charity currently operating in Sri Lanka.

The man even had the cheek to say to me: "I am the most intelligent person you'll ever meet", when trying to explain his side of how we are unnecessarily bureaucratic. Most trying, under the circumstances, exacerbated by a 50 year age difference (approx). Reason cannot breach everything, and particularly an unconsciously voiced prejudice against the Tamils and the TRO. We try so hard to be bipartisan, but such sentiments incite the opposite, in me at least.

Anger blows out the lamp of the mind, according to Buddha.

Other than that, was told by someone recently that my favourite phrase was : I am NOT having this discussion! Followed by whatever!

On our way back, we passed through the outskirts of a national park and saw a bunch of wild elephants, grazing in the scrubland, dirt on their backs, tusks growing proud. And then a lone bull-elephant a few miles away, ostracized by the herd. (Apparently each herd has one of these, a thani elephant, a loner/cranky hermit). We also saw snakes crossing the road and the ride, as usual was one filled with violent swerves and near-death experiences as we missed water buffalo blithely crossing the two lane dirt track that serves as a highway here, as well as the random assortment of cows, goats and domestics.

There was a school opening in a Hindu village in Ampara, a resettled tsunami refugee village. The children had prepared a concert for us and one of the items, underneath the tent beneath the heat of the Ampara sun, in this dusty, sandy scrubland village, was a girl, with flowers in her hair and a pavadai, reciting W.H. Davies, and " What is this world, full of care, if we have no time to stand and stare"? And finally there was the carnatic song sung, alai payuthey, in homage or in recognition, of the tsunami.

So then, this is perhaps what makes it worthwhile. A simple thank you, almost carelessly given, but meaning more to the team than any series of grand speeches.

self-edit

Okay so I got totally 'outed' and the nightmare scenario happened. Someone from work, i.e. one of my employees, discovered my blog and my cathartic rage about Sri Lanka, the workplace and herself. I may even have denigrated her, I just can't remember. So now, this remains totally and completely anonymous. No names, no pseudonyms, just x, y, and fucking z.

Man what a week. If anyone can tell me how I can password protect my blog, I would sincerely appreciate it. Both Live Journal and MSN Spaces as well as Xanga only offer this option to other members of these places. I doubt my entire universe of friends has a hotmail address so it's perhaps just as well.

Inhale. Exhale. It's been one of those weeks. I feel like blogging my heart out but unfortunately, some latent sense of self-preservation prevents me from further digging myself into a hole.

Came back from the north on Friday night after an intense four day trip (which was intense due to other reasons than work). The LTTE have called back their political officers from all government areas, and as of Friday all had withdrawn. The long term NGOs were also trucked in for a special meeting on Wed with P, the leader of the LTTE who also called an urgent meeting at HQ with other staff.

We went into the uncleared areas during the week and I had to make a special detour to K (LTTE HQ) to register my 'presence' in Tamil Eelam, something which I've not previously been required to do. I had to go through an interview with LTTE personnel, which basically was an unwelcome interrogation of why I wasn't doing more for the 'uncleared' (read: LTTE controlled) areas. I told them politely that the reason why most NGOs stayed away from these areas was not because of the political situation but because it was so damned logistically difficult to work alone in these areas. The only way to create viable projects in these areas was to work with the TRO (the registered NGO arm of the LTTE), which to put it euphemistically, most INGOs were loath to do, preferring to operate independently. (Not to mention that it's a frikking nightmare just to get in and operate in these areas, which are massively underserved no doubt, but logistically burdensome).

What else? I've been doing an informal survey of the sexual practices of local youth and am coming up with surprising results. Firstly, there's a lot more homosexuality than anticipated, as well as fears that the AIDS virus is severely underreported a la India. Not new, but disturbing hearing it from personal accounts. Second is the fact that sex here is more adventuresome than previously realized, and that most youth take their cue from blue films (porn). However they don't try out various ways on their wives or gfs, but pay to have one-off encounters to experience these. Do I hear a resounding ick? Yeahh. In Jaffna, unless you're married or related, you can't sign up for a hotel room coz the owners will report you to the landlord. So business takes place in unfinished construction sites at the dead of night. Lesbians get married, only to spend their wedding night on the floor, or with their mothers as they usually do. Marriages involve 3, or sometimes 4 secret alliances, known only to all those who participate. Such are the dangers of living in a closed society. Preserving virtue my goddamn ass. As for the prostitutes, well the men who use and abuse them are never in danger of being derogated. Its the rest of society that cross the street when they see them coming. Sometimes I get so angry with men, despite the irrationality of it, that I can't help myself fantasizing about castrating the lot of them.

It's funny but am at work on a Sunday and strangely, it's the Watcher Man (a la Preacher man) who cares if I've eaten lunch, him and the cleaning lady who both watch over my safety like hawks and natter after me if I'm here too late. Them and another 23 year old ex-child soldier who's on our team who calls from the north to see if I'm spending my evenings alone.

What else? We're on a tight travelling schedule and I'm fielding calls from ex-involvements, current involvements, family, sisters, sister's bf and finding out about pasts. And to think that I wanted to grow up and be alone. Hell is other people said Sartre. Perhaps so. Can't live with em, can't kill em.