bits

Israelis blockading Lebanon and I have an email from a future classmate-to-be, detailing the reality of strikes and spending the night in bomb shelter and being unable to leave the country. Another future classmate-to-be writes of the Mumbai train explosions. Sri Lanka of course has its own conflict, less immediate, smaller-scale, but still absolute. We all paused for a moment today to think of the hatred that conflict spawns, of the inevitable vitriol against the Hezbollah, Israeli government, Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Sinhalese, Tamils. Will the hatred never end? Will only too few people ever have the courage to love?

I was talking to a close friend last night, over crab rolls and chilli cheese toast and iced coffee Sri-Lankan-style, who is in the field of peacebuilding/conflict transformation (violently opposed to the term conflict resolution, because resolution is a false concept, indicating the possibility of finality to a conflict which is never true). And she was saying, that it is forgiveness, reaching out, the act of love, which takes the most courage of all.

Am on a rampage through non-fiction at the moment, finished reading the superlative Alistair Cooke's Letters from America detailing 50 years of transatlantic radio dispatches, nearly finishing Imaginary Homelands which I managed to track down in a behemoth bookstore in London (and who says chainstore book-dumps don't have their benefits?) which is not quite as good as Step Across the Line which was more thoughtful and anyway I'm not the biggest fan of Rushdie at the best of times and also reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman and a book of BBC dispatches from Britain through the war. I never thought I could get into this stuff, but it is intensely fascinating, in the absence of motivation to read literature which is sometimes quite exhausting. Like the codebreaker nonfiction of Battle of the Wits which a dear friend gave to me on a birthday many many eons ago.