water

I'm a day late and a dollar short. Graduate school looms ahead of me and I am not sure that I want to buy into it.

Anyhow. I watched Water last night. (As you can tell, this stationary lull in Colombo means catching up as much as I can with film).

To put it briefly, the film is about the state of widows in India, about how they are forced into prostitution for survival, exiled by their families, unable to create a life by themselves, all weighted down by the yoke of tradition and religion which venerates the most glaring of injustice at times. The film is set during the period of Gandhi's rise and has a last, lovely shot of him speaking on a railway platform about how he thought initially that God was truth, but realized that truth was god and exhorted his followers to follow their conscience.

I don't know what it feels like to have a conscience anymore. I don't know what it feels like to have a valid viewpoint. In this state of doubt, it is dangerous to go to graduate school where they fill absorptive minds with ideologies instead of skills, and fill graduates with pre-programmed visions of the world. It is the latter, Big Brother that I am so afraid of. Especially in the United States.

Anyhow. At this moment it does not feel particularly that I will amount to much. The way of mediocrity and the private sector shines bright and overpoweringly.

But then this, the epitaph on Raphael's tomb says too, that men are capable of transcending this world, of creating a bar against which all those that come after them will be judged too.

"This is Raphael's tomb, while he lived he made Mother Nature fear to be vanquished by him and, as he died, to die too".