"The heart has been fed on fantasy; the heart has grown brutal from its fare" W.B. Yeats

It took me a long time to understand this quote; written in the great fervour of Irish nationalism.

As Ahilan said, there is a great tradition of progressive leftism in Tamil politics; that dealt with the important issues of exclusion, class discrimination and tackled the great problems of caste within the Tamil community. One important outcome of the current political situation is that the Jaffna Tamil hegemony over Sri Lankan Tamil (and indeed Sri Lankan) politics is forever destroyed. And perhaps, it was for the best. The Jaffna Tamils (of the Vellalar caste) systematically propagated their narrow, insular vision of Tamil nationalism. It was a nationalism that saw no space for other minorities (within the Tamil community; such as the Up-Country Tamils or the Muslims), and one that was riven by deep contradictions (see the discrimination against the Eastern Tamils which led to the Karuna revolt and was the beginning of the end for the LTTE) and tragic absolutism.

Well now there is nowhere left to go, and no one left to go to. The heartland is lost, and will be under heavily armed rule for a long time to come. This repressiveness will either be tolerated by default by the Jaffna Tamils in Sri Lanka, sapped as they are from 30 years of suffering; or it will breed new strains of nationalism that will be channeled through democratic processes or through militant movements. But the dream of freedom and self-rule is forever gone.

One asks whether that dream was ever legitimate. It was certainly not expedient. But was it legitimate? Was it legitimate to have also expressed it through violent means after expressing it through democratic means was systematically repelled and thwarted by a Sinhala government in thrall to populist necessities? Was it ever possible that any other way could have worked?

I don't know. The more I know, the less I understand. Even if one can go back in time to unravel the complexities of the 70s that led to the birth of the LTTE; I don't know that it matters. Nobody can forget the things that happened to them; not for as long as they live. And their children can't forget it either. So the sins of the father are revisited again and again. And then the question is should they forget? Or forgive but never forget? Or neither?

I am not sure that one can ever forgive, let alone forget.

this used to be my playground

So I was talking to someone the other day and I said, I was a terrible student at school. In fact if there is one thing I could change in my life, is to change the method of instruction and school going behaviour that I had. By that I do NOT mean I wish I was a 'better' student in the 'traditional' sense (i.e. pay attention during class, do homework, study for tests, manage time well and do extra curricular activities as well, read outside the curriculum, engage with other students re class work (i.e. group study) etc.etc.); but that I had more to show in terms of learning; for the time I spent to school.

And this is true of ALL the schools I went to; from Australia, to Singapore, to London, to the United States. So it wasn't just a cultural and pedagogical issue.

I had friends who were STELLAR students, friends who were far more brighter, more capable, more 'in' with the teachers and principals; all of that. Friends whom basically got a lot out of their education and the time they spent in school. (Of course I made GREAT friends in school, for which I will be forever grateful for. And I learnt how the normal world works, how they think, how cultural modes of production are disseminated etc.etc.)

I pretty much spent most of 'class-time' thinking about either a) boys, b) the newest book I was reading (always fiction), c) politics d) a new movie plot; or fantasy sequence (one memorable incident was when my biology lab partner asked me "What are you thinking about right now?? and I said: I was thinking about me drowning in a lake, and my french teacher rescuing me, and our ensuing 'damsel-in-distress meets heroic rescuer conversation in French. I could never concentrate for more than 10-15 minutes at a time (and clocked in 20 minutes during my peak).
And I never learnt to think logically; which meant I was always unable to argue/debate/converse during high school. I just couldn't follow how other people thought, and how to speak that same language.

Now that I'm older, i'm a little bit more assimilated in the cultural modes of communication. I can concentrate very intensely, unconsciously if a topic engages me. (I tend to be exhausted though, after such periods). But I still tend to have a very Tourette-style mode of thinking AND communicating; in short, random, bursts of questions and thoughts. I do not think logically or linearly (which sounds cool, until you realize that you cannot structure anything and that every comment you receive on any paper is a) lack of structure, b) lack of flow blah blah blah c) irrelevant to the topic at hand (why is it irrelevant??? I THINK IT IS GODDAMNED RELEVANT).

But I guess that's life, and now, it's too late to change the way one thinks.

But, in no obvious order, the following are things I wished I had been taught in school, and how I wished school was different.

a) Shorter school days, 20 minute lectures on ideas, experiments, equations, and problems. i.e. not time spent explaining the concept since most teachers are REALLY poor 'teach'ers, but rather, let children learn HOW to learn, figure out stuff for themselves, run into road blocks etc. Of course this is a far more intensive teaching process than the standard 'lecture-problem set marking' mode.

But the shorter school days was one reason where I felt that the place where I learnt the most was in LSE, where the 'class' time was so short, the subjects were so in depth and taught over long periods of time (12 months rather than the 10 weeks in the US it takes for one subject), and where you spent long hours staring out of the Chancery Lane st library windows either thinking about a) cake or b) Rousseau and the nature of man (I spent a lot of time on this topic.)

b) Group work was by far the most painful thing in the US, to do. Not only did people come to the table with different capacities and blocks of knowledge, they came with different communication styles a) the 'rhetoric' person who loved the sound of his own voice, b) the ideas person who wanted to talk about every tangential idea, b) the 'rules' person who just wanted to stick to the narrow structure of the assignment task, and d) the 'leader' who wanted his vision mapped out.

I just wanted to go home.

But at the same time, I realize how it can be useful for understanding how other people communicate, how real world problems are solved mainly through a mixture of haste, fatigue, verbal compromise (where the guy who talks the loudest gets heard), and deadlines.
I would say definitely to HIGHLY limit the group work, make it more about negotiation and communication, and use the classroom format for a larger discussion (that was more facilitated and structured and inclusive).

c) The other things I didn't learn at school included a) how to interact with people (or as David Brooks said in the NYT this week: how to select a spouse, how to maintain a relationship with someone you love. By far this is the most important decision that you will make in your life, as well as the most important choice that has the most bearing over your lifetime happiness. On this topic there was neither instruction nor role models).

d) how to manage money: enough said. how to maintain checking, savings, trading, retirement, health, college accounts. how to manage discretionary spending, mortgage debt, student loan debt, credit card debt. How to build wealth. On this: NOTHING.

e) how to write: Not writing subordinated to a specific topic where the writing was judged on the topic, and what was taught was the topic itself; but actual writing. How to be concise, relevant, engaging, compelling and investigative. On this; nothing. I don't know where I learned to write (and I still cringe at my writing), but I think it was only towards the last semester of LSE, and my boss at Morgan Stanley; Tim who had the best writing style I saw personally, who really hung, drew and quartered my writing and forced me to write better and better (for non fiction of course).

f) how to negotiate: Now this I learned somewhat in Harvard, but only by choice. Everyone should have these lessons learnt at an earlier stage rather than later. The art of getting what you want in a world with competing demands and scarce resources without compromising your integrity or someone else's integrity or needs is essential. These techniques come in handy everywhere: from buying a car, to getting a promotion, to making joint decisions with spouses, to handling your parents.

g) And the last, that I can think of right now, which is for me the most important was : how to learn. On this point, I cannot say enough. I did not say 'how to think', but 'how to learn'. This is so important for everything; for the growth of an individual, for the growth of a society, for the growth of government and policy, for the progress of ability in ANY field. It requires teaching how one can first, a) identify the unknown: i.e. know what you do not know and know what you do know. This sounds basic, but very few people can do this. b) identify inter-relatedness. Nothing happens in isolation; not even algebra. Understanding how a particular topic; pick any topic: e.g. rain water harvestation is connected to a variety of competing influences and pressures from how its history evolved, to how the product or process or topic works, to the subject of rainwater and harvestation, to how the product is used and what influences its take up (from cultural, to agricultural practices, to policymakers, to distribution channels, to colonial influences, to desertification) and knowing or being aware that all of these create a certain topic; is essential. So knowing that, even if you do not know it in GREAT detail is essential. Then comes the 'investigating", or the 'going deep' process where one has to know when one has reached a limit of learning (which is of course either a) personal or related to the task at hand) and when one hasn't reached it yet; asking the right questions to inform understanding; knowing that there is more (i guess this is connected to 'know what you don't know'). All that sort of thing. And the last thing is managing memory. We all have a limited and declining capacity to remember things. Learning how to a) expand one's memory, b) make the relevant trade offs in choosing what to remember and what not to, and c) managing declining capacity (i.e. procedures not to forget) are key. Right now I have a pretty decent photographic memory, but it has seriously declined and I just KNOW that I am going to get Alzheimer's and should start learning how to manage it!

This also brings to mind the research done in this field about intelligence, knowledge and memory. The research shows that in terms of intelligence (i.e. speed of grasp, reach, lateral thinking and in depth thinking, investigative thinking); we hit our peak at 17 and steadily decline. When I look back on my own life; this is definitely true. I thought MUCH more and much faster when I was 17, then I do now. (I will leave it to the gods to judge whether the 'topics' on which I focused my capacities on were worthy or not!!!). Now, it takes me longer to understand something, I get tired quicker or more impatient quicker, I tend to stop thinking before I should, I am lazy in thinking about the satellite issues even though what I KNOW at 28 is FAR greater than what I knew at 17.

But yeah, if I ever have kids; I'm going to find someone who can teach them all this.

And now, to the trenches.

"The world has changed, and we must change", President Obama, Inauguration speech, Jan 20,2009

If I went to bed in June 2008 and woke up in June 2009, I would have found myself in an entirely different world, from such a short time ago. In my own life, and those of my closest friends around me, there was turbulence galore, volcanic eruptions of lingering issues that had been pushed under the carpet; repressed so to speak; the structures of daily life that were carefully imposed over the cracks of the foundation were finally giving away to tectonic shifts underneath. In the world outside, well; besides the election of an enormously intellectual policymaker (who unlike many before him was able to bridge that seemingly impassable divide between thinking AND doing; who married great intellectual heft with extremely strategic politicking); there was a Great Recession, with many people laid off. Ivy leaguers and blue collar workers mourned the passing of the era of the Masters of the Universe, of Detroit.  America was no longer Motown, and day after day, companies folded, factories whirred down, newspaper presses became silent. And of course in Sri Lanka, in the past year, another 20,000-30,000 Tamil civilians perished, the LTTE was defeated and a lookalike body of Prabhakaran was paraded in the streets, and the senior Tiger leadership decimated. It seemed as though the death blow to separatist aspirations was finally delivered by the Rajapaksa government, who now enjoyed the widest Sinhala support ever by any Sri Lankan president. 300,000 Tamil refugees still exist in camps, starving and under the watchful, repressive eye of the armed forces. The UN, blinkered and hamstrung as always, in a session intended to reprimand the Sri Lankan government, instead ended up praising it for its 'liberation' operations, and also praising it for not allowing emergency humanitarian aid workers into the camps. 

As the song goes: There's a reason to believe we almost got it right. 

But the differences contained in almost are vast, infinite, uncontainable. Indeed, the world has changed, and now we must change. Caught in a great dilemma of action, we must choose instead to reflect, mourn, grieve and then begin the arduous, and lengthy task of reimagining democracy, putting our faith back in the power of truth, settling down for the long haul instead of the romanticisim of immediate revolution. Whether we want to or not, we must now imagine ourselves to be part of one country, and force that country to recognize us, and our demands, expressed democratically, expressed through civil resistance and non violence. For those of us who have the luxury of reading and thought, we need to reimagine resistance, and mobilization. I don't know how it is going to happen, and whether I have decided that it is my battle to fight, or to leave. But I am hoping that a door is going to open somewhere soon for me, and that this great burden of indecision will be lifted.