rhapsody

There's something about Bohemian Rhapsody isn't there? I keep listening to it and its crazy operatic blend of pop, rock, classic, yearning angst, despair and manic energy and I can't get over it. It's timeless. No wonder it was voted the Nation's favourite song or something in Britain.

Absolutely plastered last night at a Diwali show. Bumped into an old RJC person outside and was in shock. Then tried to get a cab whilst drunk at 3am and it was awful. But we braved the biting winds, got home and collapsed and woke up and I vowed never to drink again.

Rhapsody on a Winter Night by T.S. Eliot

TWELVE o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

kennedy peace talks

I'm angry and I'm tired. I'm angry because clearly even thousands of miles away on a whole different planet you can still have fruitless discussions about Sri Lanka with educated intelligentsia and because the nature of conflict, development, human rights are still so misunderstood by those with the best of intentioned. Brings to mind something that a dear friend said recently: It's the white liberals that I hate the most. I can deal with white conservatives, because I know where they're coming from, but when the white liberals talk the talk and turn around and stab you in the back; that betrayal hurts the most.

I guess that's what I feel here. I feel so vilified by everyone. Abroad, outside, amongst Tamil friends and family, I'm always the one pushing for a moderate point of view, pushing always for the inclusion of alternative political voices into defining Tamil aspirations. Here, of all places, the debate is so limited that I end up inevitably foghorning for the LTTE because otherwise Tamil people would have no voice. Elegant variations of idealism are never realistic.

We are having peace talks every Tuesday as I am on a group project with another Sri Lankan and the title of our project is "solve the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka". He has the patience of an elephant and a frustratingly dialectical-materialist view of time, and I have all the urgency and narrow blinkeredness of a hummingbird and we are getting nowhere fast, which has sadly mirrored the history of peace talks in Sri Lanka.

Oh and I thought I would be able to escape it by coming here, but instead, it is more of the same and since I sought it out, I can't complain and yet, I do.

more

More attacks, for the first time at a tourist spot in Galle. The war is being brought down to the South, ostensibly to start a strategy of provoking communal violence in order to increase sympathy-funding, particularly by the diaspora. The NYT has a not-bad leader (compared to the tripe published by most) found here: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/18/opinion/edlanka.php

Separately there is finally, finally, a new Prize (funded by the sponsors of the Booker) for Asian writers writing in the vernacular. A long overdue prize to recognize the rich literary traditions of East Asia and the subcontinent and I look forward to the gems it will throw up (as inevitably prize-winners will get translated into English)

lanka afar

More death and destruction today with another bombing. I knew that the temporary overtures to peace were mainly just to build up/rest and change the power structure. The peace talks have supposedly been happening since March. Geneva was a total failure, surpassed only by the sheer irrelevance of nearly every member on the government team. Fasten your seatbelts, we're in for a long, bumpy ride. It's hard to get a sense from afar, given the total lack of transparent, bipartisan media reporting but the reports from the ground give some sort of sense.

Had a class on Sri Lanka today and leadership. Professor posited that it was the existence of corrupt/rent-seeking politicians in power that destroyed a developing country and only good leadership could turn the boat around. I agree with the latter, but not necessarily with the former, if that makes sense.

libraries

I hardly ever come to the main library, preferring to stay in policy school campus. But I ventured over to Widener today. It is quite extraordinary, a faux-Victorian building complete with Doric columns (on the infamous Doric columns of the age, read the Fountainhead which expresses the proper contempt for the practice of lifting wholesale Doric columns from Roman times and transplanting them to a new America) and has the most comfortable chairs and tables. In fact I would venture to say that it is exactly like in the movies. One niggling question remains; the notorious practice of each graduating student to have had sex in Widener at least once seems difficult to me, given the expansive, wide open structure of the building. It almost makes me nostalgic for the old LSE library, in the dungeons of Chancery Lane where it was rumoured that people entered (especially to the periodical sections) and were never seen again. One friend of mine went inside, fully five or six floors down in a damp section, and promptly burst into tears when at 9pm, she couldn't find her way out.

chichester psalms

A dear friend was singing in the difficult-to-get-into university choir at an old church last night, for a gala night of leonard bernstein (composer, conducter and university alumni). The leaves have started to turn and walking through cambridge is to walk through a crescendo of autumnal colours, red, oranges, deep rust, amidst falling leaves. There is talk of apple-picking next weekend and cherry blossoms in washington in the spring. Perhaps a weekend up in Maine too where the wind comes rolling in off the coasts. The choral piece was the Chichester Psalms by the eclectic Leonard Bernstein. His family were in presence at what I think last night was his sixteenth death anniversary. I had never heard it before and in the cavernous halls of the church, as the draughts whispered through the pews; it was perfect and wintry and everything I had never thought I had already imagined.

diner

The world continues to turn, imperfectly, fitfully. More strange dreams. I dreamt that my dog turned into a human being, but then it left, too.
I was told that I should attend conflict resolution workshops to learn the skill of compromise and negotiation since I clearly don't have any of those skills. The subject? A group project on "How to Solve the Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka". Well yes then. Watched Diner, a strangely satisfying movie about exactly nothing.

The thing I like about this place is the type of conversation I can have. Yesterday it went from indifference curves and compensating variation to the use of market facilities in managing emergency responses to experiential education within a traditional curriculum (and how a student, an ex-teacher got his children to translate hip-hop into normal English) to leadership and the MBTI and Dead Poet's Society to more on Rawls and all in a day.

sch

Slammed again as usual, overloaded. I wake up, eyes reddened, stagger zombie-like to school, during class I do work for other classes and get through the crazy email load, and then stagger onto more classes. The work accumulates, as do the people which is good. the south asian diaspora here is quite hilarious. there is one nepali guy, one bangladeshi, one sri lankan (me), two Indians and about fifty million Pakistanis. Apparently the composition and political bent of business school and policy students reflects the presidential administration in power at any given time.

I did want to blog about something interesting, but I have completely forgotten what it is. Dinner at a friend's house, and it was nice, lovely, perfect to drink wine and talk about Rawls and this is why I had come to graduate school

on history

"We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it" Nietzsche

"To understand nationalism as an historical reality, it is essential to step outside the history that nationalism gives itself"- Sudipta Kaviraj

mfa

Well the week has finally found down, an interminably long one that had a first major assignment due. Total classes missed: 5 this week as well (and I was trying to be good too!) but a friend was in town, and so ended up inevitably going out and drinking a lot (which was a lot of fun) and trying to regression-analyze growth variables and write about utilitarianism and Bayesian probability. Sometimes being in school is good and sometimes , well, it plain sucks. I'm always exhausted, running hard to stay in the same spot, not researching or doing the things I wanted to do by coming here and in general just being perpetually rushed. But anyway.

Friend and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston which has quite a few good pieces and is not just a token museum in a small city as I imagined it would be. It also happened to be the first Friday of the month, and so Bombay Sapphire was sponsoring a social gathering in the Old Master's wing, and so under Renaissance pictures of bleeding Christs, we drank gin martinis.

another week

So another week draws to a close and a new one begins. It's October 1st today. Did you know that? I don't know what happened to the time. This weekend also marks the first weekend that I am fully set up. It took far longer than it expected. I'm behind by oh, about a thousand pages or so, but somehow, listening to Chet Baker right now, it all seems rather far away. Falling ill really did give me the opportunity to stop for a bit. I'm not sad or anything, but everything seems so impossible at the moment. Just how, everything is going to work out in the future, seems quite impossible and a true state of happiness seems so distant. I wonder how we all get there, sometime.

ill

Lately, I have been discovering that as I consume more alcohol I am starting to do sillier things than I would do normally, last night being a chief example. I'm trying not to cross a line, but these lines are drawn in the sand sometimes anyway. I'm also really ill at the moment and this has got to stop and so i am not going to any parties tonight which will mean that I will be at home on a saturday night and as my room mate said, that does not make me the reject of the K school.