Because a close friend said that the Ondaatje poem had left a funny feeling in her , that lasted all day. Viva good literature! Death to drivel!
Because I always wanted to talk about Anil's Ghost and indeed propose to re-read it for the fifth time today. (I never understand people who say that they cannot re-read a novel, who gain about 90% of the book in the first reading). How can anyone love a book then? I find it truly incomprehensible.
Because I found another Indian literary blog today that celebrates Ondaatje amongst others. Because he has never written a false note, incoherent though as it may be. Because he is an excavator, first and foremost. Because his writing yields most after intensive study and can never be read without drowning.
Because Aldous Huxley, once, long ago saw Sri Lanka as a model for utopia and not the dystopia that it has become. Because no one else records Sri Lanka as Ondaatje does. Because I saw him and fell in love with a voice. Because I want to, and don't want to, live at this pitch for the rest of my life and then, drop dead.
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
babbling
Well then. I just finished reading Cry, the beloved country. I remember all the ACS boys had to read it for O level literature, but for some reason, RGS girls had to read something else, for the life of me I cannot remember it, except it was African (and not South Africanand therefore not dealing with racial tension) and dealt with village life and with bare-breasted natives dancing around the fire, tom-tomming to ancient rhythms. Or so.
Anyway, Alan Paton's book is remarkably straightforward, and surprising for such a style only yields pathos in the most gifted of writers, (instead of turning into melodrama, which is what it would do in my hands). He writes of a broken South Africa, in 1948, well before Mandela, of rivers that run red, of tribes that are broken by colonialism, with no new structure of moral order to replace them, of white men who are parochially invested in keeping the African men downtrodden. And he speaks too of an Africa beautiful, where Zulu cries echo across the land, welcoming the new and the old. And he says, "Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear".
And of course it is fear that debilitates, fear of loss of power, fear of urbanization, fear of the white man that leads to assault, rape, pillaging, murder- what South Africa was associated with just a few short years ago. And he says, that only love, and forgiveness will cast out fear. It may have taken South Africa more than 40 years since then, to grant universal enfranchisement and voting rights in the 1994 elections, but the path to reconciliation has been begun and one hopes that there is no turning back.
The sad thing about communal violence, Amitav Ghosh writes is the tragedy of brothers, peoples living in harmony prior, killing each other. Whether it is the partition in India or in Sri Lanka, it is heartbreaking to see families that have lived 20 years together, sharing rituals, breaking bread, taking up violence against the other.
And then, I know that this is random, but i was reminded of Michael Ondaatje's poem which I shall pirate here, for its description of what violence does; create a new language. And I was thinking about it in the trishaw today- that it requires this, this is the historical record of those deaths from ethnic violence. Of dead bodies of priests, that came floating down the rivers. This is all that lasts, of the forgotten. And that is both terrifyingly tragic and ennoblingly commemorative.
The Distance of A Shout
By Michael Ondaatje
We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of winds
as they drove all things before them
Monks from the north came
down our streams floating that was
the year no one ate river fish
There was no book of the fores
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died
Handwriting occurred on waves
on leaves, the scripts of smoke
a sign on the bridge along the Mahaweli River
A gradual acceptance of this new language.
Anyway, Alan Paton's book is remarkably straightforward, and surprising for such a style only yields pathos in the most gifted of writers, (instead of turning into melodrama, which is what it would do in my hands). He writes of a broken South Africa, in 1948, well before Mandela, of rivers that run red, of tribes that are broken by colonialism, with no new structure of moral order to replace them, of white men who are parochially invested in keeping the African men downtrodden. And he speaks too of an Africa beautiful, where Zulu cries echo across the land, welcoming the new and the old. And he says, "Cry the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear".
And of course it is fear that debilitates, fear of loss of power, fear of urbanization, fear of the white man that leads to assault, rape, pillaging, murder- what South Africa was associated with just a few short years ago. And he says, that only love, and forgiveness will cast out fear. It may have taken South Africa more than 40 years since then, to grant universal enfranchisement and voting rights in the 1994 elections, but the path to reconciliation has been begun and one hopes that there is no turning back.
The sad thing about communal violence, Amitav Ghosh writes is the tragedy of brothers, peoples living in harmony prior, killing each other. Whether it is the partition in India or in Sri Lanka, it is heartbreaking to see families that have lived 20 years together, sharing rituals, breaking bread, taking up violence against the other.
And then, I know that this is random, but i was reminded of Michael Ondaatje's poem which I shall pirate here, for its description of what violence does; create a new language. And I was thinking about it in the trishaw today- that it requires this, this is the historical record of those deaths from ethnic violence. Of dead bodies of priests, that came floating down the rivers. This is all that lasts, of the forgotten. And that is both terrifyingly tragic and ennoblingly commemorative.
The Distance of A Shout
By Michael Ondaatje
We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of winds
as they drove all things before them
Monks from the north came
down our streams floating that was
the year no one ate river fish
There was no book of the fores
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died
Handwriting occurred on waves
on leaves, the scripts of smoke
a sign on the bridge along the Mahaweli River
A gradual acceptance of this new language.
Monday, June 05, 2006
angst-
Let the record reflect that I am sick of angst. And the repeated, first-hand experiences where I realize I am weak, weak, weak.
Spent the weekend at our first ever girl's scholarship ceremony. The evening before, we trundled up to the hall, and had bizarre conversations about local implementing partners. Then came a flurry of calls from outraged moralist principals, who had recently discovered that one of our candidates, a 11 year old girl, had a mother who was a , ahem, blue film star. One wonders of course, how these said principals and affronted parents and teachers knew that, but they wheeled out the Rustic Moralism , the hypocrisy that arises out of close, confined, communal living. Where there is a sharp divide between public and private morality. It was all rather hysterical really. Then the other catastrophe of the day was finding out that one of the girl's parents had committed suicide rather recently.
Today we were interviewing, and I met a rather old, lovely distinguished man, who had vision and understanding of the Sri Lankan educational sector, and he talked about Jaffna and how when he grew up in the East,he had two excellent teachers from Jaffna, and they were revered as gods in the village. And we pondered for a minute, that lost, long-ago Sri Lanka, before all this had started.
Spent the weekend at our first ever girl's scholarship ceremony. The evening before, we trundled up to the hall, and had bizarre conversations about local implementing partners. Then came a flurry of calls from outraged moralist principals, who had recently discovered that one of our candidates, a 11 year old girl, had a mother who was a , ahem, blue film star. One wonders of course, how these said principals and affronted parents and teachers knew that, but they wheeled out the Rustic Moralism , the hypocrisy that arises out of close, confined, communal living. Where there is a sharp divide between public and private morality. It was all rather hysterical really. Then the other catastrophe of the day was finding out that one of the girl's parents had committed suicide rather recently.
Today we were interviewing, and I met a rather old, lovely distinguished man, who had vision and understanding of the Sri Lankan educational sector, and he talked about Jaffna and how when he grew up in the East,he had two excellent teachers from Jaffna, and they were revered as gods in the village. And we pondered for a minute, that lost, long-ago Sri Lanka, before all this had started.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
annoyed
So things are entering a lull. Good. I can be lull-ed for a while. Until tomorrow afternoon when a fundraiser enters town and the fun(d) will commence. Sunday is our awards ceremony for the Girl's scholarships, in the hill country. Expect cued, mass-weeping like those Christian cult worshippers. I'm in a strange, isolated mood of sorts- attempted the GMAT out of sheer boredom and was duly rewarded with an awe-inducing score of 570. Needless to say, this will NOT cut any ice with the Admit Gods so I had better buck the fuck up. I'm annoyed at the moment with Sri Lanka. An author was killed in an (inadvertent? can they ever be inadvertent? isn't all war inadvertent?) random landmine explosion and everyone is mourning. I shall have to check his literature out. I plan to cook today, which I haven't done in approximately, oh, 3 months. I also started reading Cry, the Beloved Country and am wading through Underworld and I'm just annoyed in general with life and a pastel mint-green sari that I will have to wear as a bridesmaid. Annoyed annoyed annoyed.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Peace
Peace: The Difficult Yet Necessary Path
By Jayadeva Uyangoda
A large-scale break out of hostilities between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE seems to be now inevitable. As things stand right now, the decision by the European Union on the question of listing the LTTE as a terrorist entity is crucial in shaping the agenda of events in the next few weeks to come.
Mr. Erik Solheim, the Norwegian Minister in charge of Sri Lanka’s peace process, has given expression to an increasing sense of pessimism felt by the international actors, concerning the prospects for Sri Lanka. He spent two days, May 25 and 26, in Colombo, along with the special peace envoy, Mr. Jon Hanssen-Bauer. Then on May 27, he flew to New Delhi to consult the Indian government. As AFP reported on that day, he has said in New Delhi that Sri Lanka “could be heading back to all-out war.”
Solheim has also commented that Sri Lanka’s peace process was “more difficult” than he thought. These are indeed strong words coming from a man who knows the mind of both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. One may also note that Solheim as wells the Norwegian diplomats have always been very cautious in making public statements about the failures in their peace-making task in Sri Lanka.
Banning
Meanwhile, the proposed banning of the LTTE by the EU is most likely to be a defining event in the conflict. It will certainly force the LTTE into a period of isolation and in turn to a behavior of isolationism. Both the international community and the government appear to work on the assumption that the LTTE leadership might become flexible in response to a coordinated campaign of international isolation. It would be interesting to see how this strategy works. Tigers might be less likely to be flexible under conditions which they see as coercion. This is a major policy dilemma for any government in dealing with the LTTE.
In the coming phase of isolation and isolationism, the LTTE might be tempted to act unilaterally. There are already warnings of such unilateralism. In an extreme scenario, the LTTE can withdraw from all their international engagements, including the dialogue with the SLMM and the Norwegian facilitator. Such an action will amount to withdrawing from the CFA, without actually saying it in writing. The LTTE leaders probably think that by such action they would be able to turn the tables on the government as well as the international community.
Show Down
Meanwhile, it appears that both the government and the LTTE are willing to risk a major military show down. If the war breaks out, it will create immense destruction to both sides. The tragedy is that the two sides know it, but take little concrete action to arrest the sliding back to war. Such is the way things happen in this age of unreason.
What will eventually happen after a mutually destructive war between the government and the LTTE? One distant possibility is the realization of what many Sinhalese patriotic forces are opposing at present, namely the entry of the UN peacekeeping troops to separate the two warring sides from fighting. Those who oppose such a development seem to behave in a manner that will actually create conditions for it. The unkind dialectic of politics is that one often gets outcomes one does not want. If the JVP leadership is really committed to preventing an eventual UN intervention, the best course of action is to prevent a large-scale war from breaking out. But their thinking appears to be based on the assumption that in a full-scale war, there will be a real chance to defeat the LTTE militarily. As this thinking goes, an external military intervention to separate the two warring sides will only prevent such a favorable outcome.
Mutual Bleeding
The second, more realistic possibility is that after a lot of bleeding, the two sides, tired and exhausted of war and violence, might ask the international community to come and mediate in the conflict. This scenario of mutual bleeding will interestingly create a new strategic equilibrium between the government and the LTTE on an ‘I lose-you also lose’ framework. This would be an original contribution that the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE would be making to the theories of conflict resolution: A lose-lose outcome is as important in defining conflict dynamics as is a win-win outcome.
This is where Sri Lanka has to learn lesson from Nepal. A country that does not boast of its achievements as we Sri Lankans do, Nepal has shown a tremendous example of a low-cost path to political change and reform. There is a low-cost path to conflict management in Sri Lanka. It is the path of political engagement. Return to political engagement is not only a low-cost path to peace. It is also the most humane and rational option.
Window of Opportunity
The reported statements made by President Rajapakse insisting that he does not consider war as an option can constitute a new, though narrow, window of opportunity for re-opening the path to political engagement. But the effects of these statements need to be further strengthened by elaborating a broad framework statement for a new process of political engagement between the government and the LTTE.
This ‘framework statement’ can have three main components. It should fist re-iterate the government’s assurance to fully implement the CFA as well as the commitments made in Geneva in February this year. By making this point, President should invite the LTTE’s reciprocity. Secondly, the framework statement should propose broadening of the scope of political engagement, from talks on the CFA and de-escalation to political negotiations suspended in 2003. Thirdly, it should propose a political-constitutional framework for ethnic conflict resolution, conceived in terms of extensive regional autonomy.
Time, indeed, is running out for Sri Lanka. More than ever, the fate of Sri Lanka depends on the decisions made by one person, Sri Lanka’s head of state. One can only hope that President Rajapakse has the strength to continue to defy the counsel given to him by some of his advisors and allies for a military solution, and without delay inaugurate a new phase of political engagement with the LTTE. This is difficult, but necessary. Even if does not work fully, it is a path worth taking.
By Jayadeva Uyangoda
A large-scale break out of hostilities between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE seems to be now inevitable. As things stand right now, the decision by the European Union on the question of listing the LTTE as a terrorist entity is crucial in shaping the agenda of events in the next few weeks to come.
Mr. Erik Solheim, the Norwegian Minister in charge of Sri Lanka’s peace process, has given expression to an increasing sense of pessimism felt by the international actors, concerning the prospects for Sri Lanka. He spent two days, May 25 and 26, in Colombo, along with the special peace envoy, Mr. Jon Hanssen-Bauer. Then on May 27, he flew to New Delhi to consult the Indian government. As AFP reported on that day, he has said in New Delhi that Sri Lanka “could be heading back to all-out war.”
Solheim has also commented that Sri Lanka’s peace process was “more difficult” than he thought. These are indeed strong words coming from a man who knows the mind of both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE. One may also note that Solheim as wells the Norwegian diplomats have always been very cautious in making public statements about the failures in their peace-making task in Sri Lanka.
Banning
Meanwhile, the proposed banning of the LTTE by the EU is most likely to be a defining event in the conflict. It will certainly force the LTTE into a period of isolation and in turn to a behavior of isolationism. Both the international community and the government appear to work on the assumption that the LTTE leadership might become flexible in response to a coordinated campaign of international isolation. It would be interesting to see how this strategy works. Tigers might be less likely to be flexible under conditions which they see as coercion. This is a major policy dilemma for any government in dealing with the LTTE.
In the coming phase of isolation and isolationism, the LTTE might be tempted to act unilaterally. There are already warnings of such unilateralism. In an extreme scenario, the LTTE can withdraw from all their international engagements, including the dialogue with the SLMM and the Norwegian facilitator. Such an action will amount to withdrawing from the CFA, without actually saying it in writing. The LTTE leaders probably think that by such action they would be able to turn the tables on the government as well as the international community.
Show Down
Meanwhile, it appears that both the government and the LTTE are willing to risk a major military show down. If the war breaks out, it will create immense destruction to both sides. The tragedy is that the two sides know it, but take little concrete action to arrest the sliding back to war. Such is the way things happen in this age of unreason.
What will eventually happen after a mutually destructive war between the government and the LTTE? One distant possibility is the realization of what many Sinhalese patriotic forces are opposing at present, namely the entry of the UN peacekeeping troops to separate the two warring sides from fighting. Those who oppose such a development seem to behave in a manner that will actually create conditions for it. The unkind dialectic of politics is that one often gets outcomes one does not want. If the JVP leadership is really committed to preventing an eventual UN intervention, the best course of action is to prevent a large-scale war from breaking out. But their thinking appears to be based on the assumption that in a full-scale war, there will be a real chance to defeat the LTTE militarily. As this thinking goes, an external military intervention to separate the two warring sides will only prevent such a favorable outcome.
Mutual Bleeding
The second, more realistic possibility is that after a lot of bleeding, the two sides, tired and exhausted of war and violence, might ask the international community to come and mediate in the conflict. This scenario of mutual bleeding will interestingly create a new strategic equilibrium between the government and the LTTE on an ‘I lose-you also lose’ framework. This would be an original contribution that the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE would be making to the theories of conflict resolution: A lose-lose outcome is as important in defining conflict dynamics as is a win-win outcome.
This is where Sri Lanka has to learn lesson from Nepal. A country that does not boast of its achievements as we Sri Lankans do, Nepal has shown a tremendous example of a low-cost path to political change and reform. There is a low-cost path to conflict management in Sri Lanka. It is the path of political engagement. Return to political engagement is not only a low-cost path to peace. It is also the most humane and rational option.
Window of Opportunity
The reported statements made by President Rajapakse insisting that he does not consider war as an option can constitute a new, though narrow, window of opportunity for re-opening the path to political engagement. But the effects of these statements need to be further strengthened by elaborating a broad framework statement for a new process of political engagement between the government and the LTTE.
This ‘framework statement’ can have three main components. It should fist re-iterate the government’s assurance to fully implement the CFA as well as the commitments made in Geneva in February this year. By making this point, President should invite the LTTE’s reciprocity. Secondly, the framework statement should propose broadening of the scope of political engagement, from talks on the CFA and de-escalation to political negotiations suspended in 2003. Thirdly, it should propose a political-constitutional framework for ethnic conflict resolution, conceived in terms of extensive regional autonomy.
Time, indeed, is running out for Sri Lanka. More than ever, the fate of Sri Lanka depends on the decisions made by one person, Sri Lanka’s head of state. One can only hope that President Rajapakse has the strength to continue to defy the counsel given to him by some of his advisors and allies for a military solution, and without delay inaugurate a new phase of political engagement with the LTTE. This is difficult, but necessary. Even if does not work fully, it is a path worth taking.
caste-away
Have I told you about the ancient house where my office is quartered? It's a sprawling, old-style Sri Lankan house with open courtyards and high ceilings, made out of stone and brick, and in the garden, butterflies flit, hyacinths and red lilies bloom, and fruit falls from the neighbouring mango and sarsarapilla tree. (The papaya tree for some reason, stubbornly refuses to bear fruit). The house was built in the 30s, and the inside fittings, antique frosted glass and the like, reflect that. None of the cheap stuff. (Although of course the plumbing and electrical fittings could do with a hand!).
Anyway I was talking to the proprietor today, an old Muslim man who hails from the Eastern province, who is quite a character in himself. His heart, he says, belongs to the rice padi fields of the East, but his head is in Colombo, where his wife and children are. He said that in 1983, during Black July, with the worst of the communal riots when Sinhalese mobs were prowling the streets of Colombo, armed with scythes and chopping up those suspected of being Tamil (to be fair the Tamils did that too, but it is widely agreed that one side was more culpable than the other. This event is also a landmark symbol in the Tigers' quest for freedom, such has it penetrated the national consciousness). Anyway, during that month, the owner (Muslims were left largely alone) hid 4 Tamil families here, in this very house for weeks, in one of the back rooms, locked and refused access to by mobs. And then when it was finally safe, he took them to the refugee camps that had been set up.
The strange thing he said was that while they were in the house, as refugees, they all lived, ate and slept together. In the camp however, the same social stratification governing normal life, began to take hold. People segregated themselves according to religion, caste and origin of birth (northerners held themselves apart from the easterners and likewise). And in Sri Lanka, that was the impediment to true democracy.
Anyway I was talking to the proprietor today, an old Muslim man who hails from the Eastern province, who is quite a character in himself. His heart, he says, belongs to the rice padi fields of the East, but his head is in Colombo, where his wife and children are. He said that in 1983, during Black July, with the worst of the communal riots when Sinhalese mobs were prowling the streets of Colombo, armed with scythes and chopping up those suspected of being Tamil (to be fair the Tamils did that too, but it is widely agreed that one side was more culpable than the other. This event is also a landmark symbol in the Tigers' quest for freedom, such has it penetrated the national consciousness). Anyway, during that month, the owner (Muslims were left largely alone) hid 4 Tamil families here, in this very house for weeks, in one of the back rooms, locked and refused access to by mobs. And then when it was finally safe, he took them to the refugee camps that had been set up.
The strange thing he said was that while they were in the house, as refugees, they all lived, ate and slept together. In the camp however, the same social stratification governing normal life, began to take hold. People segregated themselves according to religion, caste and origin of birth (northerners held themselves apart from the easterners and likewise). And in Sri Lanka, that was the impediment to true democracy.
Friday, May 26, 2006
felled
I have been felled by a prawn, laid low by the devastating damage that a bad prawn can do, weakened.
Nevertheless, I plod on. Have managed to finish Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie, in between bouts of wracking pain where my stomach tried to eat itself, and between hours spent in the stalls. So it may have coloured my perception of this work, but let it be said that he attempts (unsuccessfully I think) to eviscerate Naipaul and Coetzee (both Nobel laureates, which of course Rushdie is not) saying that Coetzee's characters lack humanity (which is their strength, in that they are human, and express emotion through action and not through diarrhea) and that Naipaul is a bigot (which to be fair, many Indian writers have in not-so-many-words accused him of being). Which is somewhat beside the point really. Naipaul in turn, eviscerates India, in two of his nonfiction books, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: An Area of Darkness , cf. titles being descriptive of content in this case. However Rushdie does manage to hit a few highlights of his own, particularly in his specialty of 'cultural commingling', of the writer as traveller, as migrant.
Particularly Rushdie is most insightful when he writes about Frontier. The existence of the frontier, whether it is America expanding West, India rebelling against her Raj, whether it is Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations most forcibly expressed in the war between Islam and modernity, changes the imagination. The perception in itself, of there being an as-yet-unseen frontier, changes the perception of what is possible. The frontier exists between what is known and what is not. In that sense, quite obviously, crossing the frontier, stepping across that line, creates an increase in the sense of self, (as Rushdie says). Whether that increase in dimension is good or bad is not yet immediately known, but more is capable. Of course there have been attempted frontier-crossings that have failed, and not everyone can cross it, but for those who do, it represents an increase in human possibility and for that, everyone should be encouraged to step across the line.
Nevertheless, I plod on. Have managed to finish Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie, in between bouts of wracking pain where my stomach tried to eat itself, and between hours spent in the stalls. So it may have coloured my perception of this work, but let it be said that he attempts (unsuccessfully I think) to eviscerate Naipaul and Coetzee (both Nobel laureates, which of course Rushdie is not) saying that Coetzee's characters lack humanity (which is their strength, in that they are human, and express emotion through action and not through diarrhea) and that Naipaul is a bigot (which to be fair, many Indian writers have in not-so-many-words accused him of being). Which is somewhat beside the point really. Naipaul in turn, eviscerates India, in two of his nonfiction books, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: An Area of Darkness , cf. titles being descriptive of content in this case. However Rushdie does manage to hit a few highlights of his own, particularly in his specialty of 'cultural commingling', of the writer as traveller, as migrant.
Particularly Rushdie is most insightful when he writes about Frontier. The existence of the frontier, whether it is America expanding West, India rebelling against her Raj, whether it is Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations most forcibly expressed in the war between Islam and modernity, changes the imagination. The perception in itself, of there being an as-yet-unseen frontier, changes the perception of what is possible. The frontier exists between what is known and what is not. In that sense, quite obviously, crossing the frontier, stepping across that line, creates an increase in the sense of self, (as Rushdie says). Whether that increase in dimension is good or bad is not yet immediately known, but more is capable. Of course there have been attempted frontier-crossings that have failed, and not everyone can cross it, but for those who do, it represents an increase in human possibility and for that, everyone should be encouraged to step across the line.
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
never let me go
So I was catching an auto to work today, standing on the main road under the burning sun, next to a steaming heap of rubbish with mongrel, mangy dogs prowling its circumference, when a car stops in front of me, and the driver checks me out and says, get in darling.
I wanted to clobber him over the head, but I just gave him the nastiest look, and said "get lost" and walked off.
And yet, even in the awful auto that I managed to flag down, as I was weaving past pedestrians, cows, dogs and blind women, head-on into incoming traffic, swerving wildly to avoid buses and trucks, I wondered, how could I ever let this go? and that title from Ishiguro kept coming back, as it has been of late. Oh darling, never let me go.
I wanted to clobber him over the head, but I just gave him the nastiest look, and said "get lost" and walked off.
And yet, even in the awful auto that I managed to flag down, as I was weaving past pedestrians, cows, dogs and blind women, head-on into incoming traffic, swerving wildly to avoid buses and trucks, I wondered, how could I ever let this go? and that title from Ishiguro kept coming back, as it has been of late. Oh darling, never let me go.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
airplane sleep
I was flying in today, in the airplane, huddled up in a corner, sleeping, with my face smashed endearingly against the middle seat rest. And a hunky airline steward from Sri Lankan Airlines touched me on my arm, and looked into my sleep-drugged eyes, and spoke in the softest tone, and said "can I get you something to eat? A glass of water even? You haven't had anything the whole flight" and I sleepily smiled up at him and was about to respond, when I realized it wasn't a dream and he was real and I said no thanks and went back to sleep, comforted. I slept the sleep of the safe, even if it was only for five hours and it was sweet, and bitter, and never to be had again.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
on daatje
So I was googling Michael Ondaatje (as I often do, what can I say, I have OCD) and I found out that his new book (as yet untitled) is finished and due to be published NEXT YEAR!! Crikey. I'm insane with anxiety and impatience waiting for it.
I have read and re-read Anil's Ghost and the English Patient many times and I marvel at the fact that I was drawn to Ondaatje before Sri Lanka began. And now when I go back to his poetry, from The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife to Elimination Dance (below), always, the originality, the immediacy, the warmth, the passion, leaps off the page and reminds me it has nothing and everything to do with the common point of origin, the nostalgia for a Sri Lanka before....
Elimination Dance
by Michael Ondaatje
"Nothing I'd read had prepared me for a body this unfair" JOHN NEWLOVE
"Till we are roten, kan we not be rypen" GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Those who are allergic to the sea
Those who have resisted depravity
Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs
American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman's stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host's missing contact lens along with the dessert
Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice
Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail
All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been 'an urine sample'
Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers
Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquete sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)
Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book The Mastery of Life in order to release the inner conciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul
Those who have accidentally stapled themselves
Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie
Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet
Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store
Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport
Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic
Men who have never touched a whippet
Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts
Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks
Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor
Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators
Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one's enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches - one into each nostril - and so gassing him to death
Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont
Anyone who has been hired as a 'professional beater' and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother
Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis
Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal
Those who have used the following techniques of seduction: -small talk at a falconry convention -entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford -making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear -underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad
Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law
Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; study ing the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one's own book
The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn't notice
Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board
Anyone with pain
I have read and re-read Anil's Ghost and the English Patient many times and I marvel at the fact that I was drawn to Ondaatje before Sri Lanka began. And now when I go back to his poetry, from The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife to Elimination Dance (below), always, the originality, the immediacy, the warmth, the passion, leaps off the page and reminds me it has nothing and everything to do with the common point of origin, the nostalgia for a Sri Lanka before....
Elimination Dance
by Michael Ondaatje
"Nothing I'd read had prepared me for a body this unfair" JOHN NEWLOVE
"Till we are roten, kan we not be rypen" GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Those who are allergic to the sea
Those who have resisted depravity
Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs
American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leaf hockey sweaters
Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem
Gentlemen who have placed a microphone beside a naked woman's stomach after lunch and later, after slowing down the sound considerably, have sold these noises on the open market as whale songs
All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform
Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool
Any dinner guest who has consumed the host's missing contact lens along with the dessert
Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice
Any person who has lost a urine sample in the mail
All those belle-lettrists who feel that should have been 'an urine sample'
Anyone who has had to step into an elevator with all of the Irish Rovers
Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquete sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)
Those who have written to the age old brotherhood of Rosicrucians for a free copy of their book The Mastery of Life in order to release the inner conciousness and to experience (in the privacy of the home) momentary flights of the soul
Those who have accidentally stapled themselves
Anyone who has been penetrated by a mountie
Any university professor who has danced with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jean Genet
Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store
Any woman whose i.u.d. has set off an alarm system at the airport
Those who, after a swim, find the sensation of water dribbling out of their ears erotic
Men who have never touched a whippet
Women who gave up the accordion because of pinched breasts
Those who have pissed out of the back of moving trucks
Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor
Anyone whose knees have been ruined as a result of performing sexual acts in elevators
Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one's enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches - one into each nostril - and so gassing him to death
Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont
Anyone who has been hired as a 'professional beater' and frightened grouse in the direction of the Queen Mother
Any lover who has gone into a flower shop on Valentine's day and asked for clitoris when he meant clematis
Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal
Those who have used the following techniques of seduction: -small talk at a falconry convention -entering a spa town disguised as Ford Madox Ford -making erotic rotations of the pelvis, backstage, during the storm scene of King Lear -underlining suggestive phrases in the prefaces of Joseph Conrad
Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law
Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; study ing the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one's own book
The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn't notice
Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board
Anyone with pain
Saturday, May 20, 2006
perf art
Went last night in Colombo to a 'performance art' session, where mediocre artists 'performed' mediocre poetry. It was one hour of my life that I would never get back. Needlessly theatrical, completely unsubtle, without any substance or depth, it was the kind of thing that would never make it past an audition for anything elsewhere. It was also sad because this 'represented' homegrown Sri Lankan talent. I have nothing against the people behind the production, but there is so much that is rich and original to exploit in both Sinhala and Tamil literature, and instead, this derivative, derisive free-verse bathetic performance was held up as an example of 'local' art. One can be anglicized, anglophonic even, but unlike India, Sri Lanka has very few authors writing in the English language about Sri Lanka. Sigh. One piece in particular was aggressively sexual, which again, is fine if it is meant to promote the virtues of sexual choice in a repressive society, but this was pointlessly sexual. Given the proliferation of issues in Sri Lanka today, ethnicity, religion, conflict, the tension between modernization and the nostalgia for a rural past, there was enough to be inspired by, or construct art around. Instead, this , which represents the avant-garde movement in Sri Lanka, was what we got, gibberish about midnight blue versaces and tits and adultery. Utter tripe. And yes, I am angry and not objective. I'm angry because there is enough to dramatize, to highlight, to generate social awareness about. I'm also glad because I realized again, where my identity fell, that though I was diaspora, English-educated, I could not identify with this so-called social elite that I was a part of.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
groupie!
Okay. Reading the below post, it sounds as though I'm an insane political groupie. A junkie even. I am though. I've drunk the Kool-Aid and leapt onto the bandwagon. Choo choo. Let the future bring what it may. But I talked to him about the possibility of some alliance, with me personally through my years at grad school and he was likewise excited about the prospect and I'm fawning now and I should stop.
and then there are days like today
Its like being elected president, on this platform of promise and hope and coming into office with idealism and a grand vision of how one will implement change, save the world, renew, rejuvenate. And then just like getting bogged the fuck down during the presidency. Having to push through bills that are compromises, farcical pork-pie legislation. And then realising that your constituents are disaffected,unmoved. Then coming to the end of the Presidency and looking back at the legacy you've left, the successes, the failures, the compromises. Older, wiser, sadder. And then in the last 100 days, counting down. Vowing to do as much as possible to set in stone irrevocable, positive change.
That's how I feel right now. I'm in the last 100 days. The countdown begins. I had started this term of office with such energy, vision, hope. The ensuing months saw me bogged down in a haze of bureaucracy, battling against the inertia of local culture to inject dynamism, capacity-building on every single level, unable to work in the areas of most need due to legal complications and donor complications, battered on every side. Days when nothing seemed to work and my entire tenure just seemed like a long timespan of futility. And then days like today, when I knew, for a brief shining moment, that this country had entered my blood (and broken my heart time and time again) and that I never wanted to leave, and that my work here was far from over.
Today I had a meeting with a politician that is tipped to take over the leadership of the main opposition to the current coalition government. We are doing a large amount of work with his local NGO, through a financial intermediary. It was the first time I met him. For the record, his father was the President of Sri Lanka when he was brutally assassinated by a suicide bomber, a 12 year old Tamil boy in his own house, amongst his retinue of servants. A boy who had been with him since he was five years old. I can’t even imagine the betrayal, the sadness, the alteration of a nation’s destiny and a family’s tragedy when such a thing happens. This is what one calls the national arc of narrative. All the post-colonies have it, transition, confusion, the emergence of a broken national identity, the internecine strife in the subcontinent, the poverty, the struggle for definition. The religious turmoil, the political fundamentalists, the socialists, the conservatives, all fighting to own the national narrative. In countries like India, the Nehru dynasty captures and loses it time and time again, and that family is wedded to the concept of India no matter what, from the moment Jawaharlal Nehru said at the stroke of midnight that that was when the soul of a nation ‘finds utterance’ . The concept of Sri Lanka is just as alien, a national identity as difficult to form, and the assassination of P* is a vital moment in Sri Lankan history.
And to meet the man who was aboy when it happened, like JFK Jr in the pictures when Kennedy was shot, to have him not mind that I was Tamil. To talk equally and hopefully about development, poverty, need. To see a glimmer of hope that there were at least some politicians in the country like this, politicians that were able to transcend class perceptions, intelligent politicians that could maybe unite the country one day, or change its destiny, was extraordinary. The man had charisma too, a hard-charging, hard-working, ambitious, young, educated politician with a hope of winning both the elite urban vote and the rural vote, with a hope of bridging the segregated parts of Sri Lanka. It almost made me want to sign up for UNP and come back here next year campaigning for them. It made me realize that my work was far from over. And the way the meeting ended was funny because he was talking about Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore of all things! And how it was necessary to rule at times with an iron fist. And I countered and said, “but an iron fist in a velvet glove” and he paused and stopped and looked at me. I could see he was surprised and he said that is a good line, did thatcher say it? And I said Churchill, actually. (it turns out both of us were right)
And as I left, he said “we should get together more often”. And I turned back and said “definitely”. And we walked out, free, happy, thinking about the future and the nation and wanting to be involved. A man who can inspire such thoughts, is an extraordinary man indeed. And I thought, this is it, this is my job, this is what makes it worthwhile, to be able to work with people like this, reaching the poorest of the poor, having my destiny intertwined with Sri Lanka’s. Grandiose? Perhaps.
(a little later)
OHMYGOD he just called me. The son I mean. Personally. To talk. We talked personally for half an hour. And I offered my services. To him at any time. I mean, you know. Not that kind of services! . This has been a very strange day. I’m going to stop now.
That's how I feel right now. I'm in the last 100 days. The countdown begins. I had started this term of office with such energy, vision, hope. The ensuing months saw me bogged down in a haze of bureaucracy, battling against the inertia of local culture to inject dynamism, capacity-building on every single level, unable to work in the areas of most need due to legal complications and donor complications, battered on every side. Days when nothing seemed to work and my entire tenure just seemed like a long timespan of futility. And then days like today, when I knew, for a brief shining moment, that this country had entered my blood (and broken my heart time and time again) and that I never wanted to leave, and that my work here was far from over.
Today I had a meeting with a politician that is tipped to take over the leadership of the main opposition to the current coalition government. We are doing a large amount of work with his local NGO, through a financial intermediary. It was the first time I met him. For the record, his father was the President of Sri Lanka when he was brutally assassinated by a suicide bomber, a 12 year old Tamil boy in his own house, amongst his retinue of servants. A boy who had been with him since he was five years old. I can’t even imagine the betrayal, the sadness, the alteration of a nation’s destiny and a family’s tragedy when such a thing happens. This is what one calls the national arc of narrative. All the post-colonies have it, transition, confusion, the emergence of a broken national identity, the internecine strife in the subcontinent, the poverty, the struggle for definition. The religious turmoil, the political fundamentalists, the socialists, the conservatives, all fighting to own the national narrative. In countries like India, the Nehru dynasty captures and loses it time and time again, and that family is wedded to the concept of India no matter what, from the moment Jawaharlal Nehru said at the stroke of midnight that that was when the soul of a nation ‘finds utterance’ . The concept of Sri Lanka is just as alien, a national identity as difficult to form, and the assassination of P* is a vital moment in Sri Lankan history.
And to meet the man who was aboy when it happened, like JFK Jr in the pictures when Kennedy was shot, to have him not mind that I was Tamil. To talk equally and hopefully about development, poverty, need. To see a glimmer of hope that there were at least some politicians in the country like this, politicians that were able to transcend class perceptions, intelligent politicians that could maybe unite the country one day, or change its destiny, was extraordinary. The man had charisma too, a hard-charging, hard-working, ambitious, young, educated politician with a hope of winning both the elite urban vote and the rural vote, with a hope of bridging the segregated parts of Sri Lanka. It almost made me want to sign up for UNP and come back here next year campaigning for them. It made me realize that my work was far from over. And the way the meeting ended was funny because he was talking about Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore of all things! And how it was necessary to rule at times with an iron fist. And I countered and said, “but an iron fist in a velvet glove” and he paused and stopped and looked at me. I could see he was surprised and he said that is a good line, did thatcher say it? And I said Churchill, actually. (it turns out both of us were right)
And as I left, he said “we should get together more often”. And I turned back and said “definitely”. And we walked out, free, happy, thinking about the future and the nation and wanting to be involved. A man who can inspire such thoughts, is an extraordinary man indeed. And I thought, this is it, this is my job, this is what makes it worthwhile, to be able to work with people like this, reaching the poorest of the poor, having my destiny intertwined with Sri Lanka’s. Grandiose? Perhaps.
(a little later)
OHMYGOD he just called me. The son I mean. Personally. To talk. We talked personally for half an hour. And I offered my services. To him at any time. I mean, you know. Not that kind of services! . This has been a very strange day. I’m going to stop now.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
a dead bird
It all started with a dead bird falling, plummeting out of the sky to land at her feet. From then on, everything was downhill.
Spent the day at the lawyers yesterday in a bizarre tangle. The law in this country is so fucking ridiculous. No wonder we’re still mired in the dark ages. Jurisdiction capacities are given to people who have no legal background and who adjudicate on the basis of emotion. As a result, even if one has a watertight legal case, it counts for naught (syk).
Spent the day pep-talking and rallying up morale. Leadership is bloody hard. I want to send a note to her, saying : enjoy your blood-money, bitch. But of course I will remain a professional to the very end.
Yet, there is a glimmer of hope, that we can put all this behind us, soon enough and move forward, and deal with the larger problems that is our job. I look forward to that day. I have learnt a lot in the last two days about people who talk about ethics, but in the end, come groveling for money instead. I have lost my faith in someone who I thought was above the materialistic fray.
Never-mind.
Am reading Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie. It is surprisingly good for someone whom I have hitherto regarded as a pseudo-intellectual. There are some passages that I find quite relevant, specifically the concept of ‘respect’. Rushdie talks about how we live in such extreme political correctness, that we have to give ‘respect’ to those who preach messages of hate etc. Respect does not mean that the critical faculty cannot be exercised, that one cannot disagree, disavow, shame, tear down. He also talks about the writer as a moralist, as one of the few purveyors of truth left in a spinning world. It is the duty of the writer to a) discover and b) stand up for truth. But so few writers recognize this moral imperative, merely existing as tape-recorders, observers of trite encounters. Also talks about how few writers have the will or ability to tackle the larger topics, to write about national arcs of narratives.
Spent the day at the lawyers yesterday in a bizarre tangle. The law in this country is so fucking ridiculous. No wonder we’re still mired in the dark ages. Jurisdiction capacities are given to people who have no legal background and who adjudicate on the basis of emotion. As a result, even if one has a watertight legal case, it counts for naught (syk).
Spent the day pep-talking and rallying up morale. Leadership is bloody hard. I want to send a note to her, saying : enjoy your blood-money, bitch. But of course I will remain a professional to the very end.
Yet, there is a glimmer of hope, that we can put all this behind us, soon enough and move forward, and deal with the larger problems that is our job. I look forward to that day. I have learnt a lot in the last two days about people who talk about ethics, but in the end, come groveling for money instead. I have lost my faith in someone who I thought was above the materialistic fray.
Never-mind.
Am reading Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie. It is surprisingly good for someone whom I have hitherto regarded as a pseudo-intellectual. There are some passages that I find quite relevant, specifically the concept of ‘respect’. Rushdie talks about how we live in such extreme political correctness, that we have to give ‘respect’ to those who preach messages of hate etc. Respect does not mean that the critical faculty cannot be exercised, that one cannot disagree, disavow, shame, tear down. He also talks about the writer as a moralist, as one of the few purveyors of truth left in a spinning world. It is the duty of the writer to a) discover and b) stand up for truth. But so few writers recognize this moral imperative, merely existing as tape-recorders, observers of trite encounters. Also talks about how few writers have the will or ability to tackle the larger topics, to write about national arcs of narratives.
Friday, May 12, 2006
change
I have decided to apply to business school as part of the concurrent degree program, which means that if I get in, then it shall mean 2 and not 3 years of study and living on the East Coast. Horrors. Let's see what that brings, but in the interim it shall mean completing at least 7 essay questions and of course, the dreaded GMAT satisfactorily which all points to the next few months of rather hard work and WHY! oh WHY can't I just disappear somewhere and take a break? And if I don't get in then I shall feel lousy. Sigh.
A naval bombing off Point Pedro (where we have 13 schools) has led to aerial carpet bombing of civilian suburbs in Kilinochchi which luckily was forewarned to some extent. Now begins the inexorable descent into perpetual no-war no-peace. Buckle up.
On a side note, the finance/admin manager went into the Immigration Department to request a resident visa for me and was asked by the clerk "what gift did he bring her". A good slap should have been the answer. Jeez-us.
A naval bombing off Point Pedro (where we have 13 schools) has led to aerial carpet bombing of civilian suburbs in Kilinochchi which luckily was forewarned to some extent. Now begins the inexorable descent into perpetual no-war no-peace. Buckle up.
On a side note, the finance/admin manager went into the Immigration Department to request a resident visa for me and was asked by the clerk "what gift did he bring her". A good slap should have been the answer. Jeez-us.
girls
We had gone up into the hills recently to launch a teenage girl support program, providing materials such as shoes, uniforms, books, pens, exercise copies, bags of rice, and more importantly things like tuition, training on gender, human rights, leadership, confidence, communication, and the like. Especially to deal with parents' (both mothers and fathers) alcoholism, domestic violence and sexual abuse.
We interviewed personally about 90 girls and their families over a three day period and it was a harrowing experience to say the least. Tears welled up at least 3 times even in me, to hear their difficulties, of parents who had worked in garment factories and had life threatening diseases due to exposure to chemicals but whom factory management had compensated with 300 dollars, of fathers who had put their children's hands on burning stoves to discipline them, of children who had to work to support the family, of sexual abuse. Of children who had to walk 2 hours to school one way without shoes up hillsides and mountains. Of being cold enough and having to forage for your own firewood. And still the Hindu festivals and religious devotion burns strong, fanatical perhaps. Trade Unions are also incredibly mobilized and powerful there.
Of course i understand why everyone bootlegs their own moonshine and drinks until the cows come home. Hell, i would do that for sure! And then the children grow up, are taken out of school at year 9 and used as child labour. Murders etc and violent crimes also abound in these remote hilltop communities, which are ill-policed due to difficulties of travelling etc. Most people live without electricity and piped water (in this day and age) and studying is the most difficult option, not the easiest. God. What a nightmare! I can't even imagine. And of course the perpetual guilt of others like me, in this profession. Forgotten by the rest of the country, the situation has remained the same in the plantation community for the last 50 years.
We interviewed personally about 90 girls and their families over a three day period and it was a harrowing experience to say the least. Tears welled up at least 3 times even in me, to hear their difficulties, of parents who had worked in garment factories and had life threatening diseases due to exposure to chemicals but whom factory management had compensated with 300 dollars, of fathers who had put their children's hands on burning stoves to discipline them, of children who had to work to support the family, of sexual abuse. Of children who had to walk 2 hours to school one way without shoes up hillsides and mountains. Of being cold enough and having to forage for your own firewood. And still the Hindu festivals and religious devotion burns strong, fanatical perhaps. Trade Unions are also incredibly mobilized and powerful there.
Of course i understand why everyone bootlegs their own moonshine and drinks until the cows come home. Hell, i would do that for sure! And then the children grow up, are taken out of school at year 9 and used as child labour. Murders etc and violent crimes also abound in these remote hilltop communities, which are ill-policed due to difficulties of travelling etc. Most people live without electricity and piped water (in this day and age) and studying is the most difficult option, not the easiest. God. What a nightmare! I can't even imagine. And of course the perpetual guilt of others like me, in this profession. Forgotten by the rest of the country, the situation has remained the same in the plantation community for the last 50 years.
Monday, May 01, 2006
weekend blues
It's been a long, dreary, desperate weekend where I consumed singlehandedly a bottle (yes, that's right) of arrack and at least two packs of cigarettes. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I'm still recovering from the arrack. My body can't take such local abuse. We seem to be inching back to the limbo of no-war, no-peace. Work is really fucked up at the moment, all I seem to be doing is frantically fire-fighting and putting up with silly requests. I have all this pent up rage that is still waiting to be expressed. I want to hurl things at someone's head. Anger and hate destroy the person who is holding it instead of the object of hate. I know that and I still can't let go. I just want to disappear somewhere. For a long while.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
over
I am so over this country right now. Everything has ground inexorably to a climax and my nerves are actually shattered right now. I can't believe that this was the week where there was a suicide attempt at the General, followed by airstrikes by the GOSL and people fleeing the East. Also some relationship drama last night just makes me want to howl and to throw things and just release anger and bitterness and sadness and the stupid thing is that its' not about him at all, its about me, about my inability not to fuck things up time and time again. I'm filled with acute self-loathing. And the week ahead promises some major drama at work and by the end of this coming week, I'll be ready to just open the dammed-up reservoir of tears at this whole country, my whole year here, the people I've met and screwed (and vice versa) and then I'll blithely jet off to grad school and abandon everything.
Friday, April 28, 2006
intros
The funniest thing all week (side note: things are tense but calm here). There was a yahoo group created for new admits to my grad program and predictably everyone has felt compelled to post detailed CV summaries about themselves , ostensibly 'introducing' themselves on the group emails. . .. Here are a few classics (name and school edited out for anonymity!)
"(my) career has straddled the private and public spheres - did a few stints at Bangladesh Government/World Bank/UNDP projects as an economist, presented keynote papers at business chambers and government ministries on market access, regional cumulation, sustainable environment management, MDGs, also ran my own small international trading company engaged in the pharmaceutical and apparel industries, currently involved in consulting and political campaigning"
"My instution is the sole body for designing foreign trade policies of Turkey...since i am working in the Asia and Pacific department, I've been to many places in the region and met different people. To be more specific, my section is dealing with the trade negotiations for bilateral agreements. And I am in charge of the bilateral trade and economic relations of Turkey with the Asian and Pacific countries as well as negotiator in trade and economic cooperation agreement negotiations ..I am most confident that Harvard would be an excellent opportunity and reference for all of us during our carrier"
"After my undergrad schooling, I was commissioned as a Korean Air Force Second Lieutenant in 2003. During the past three years as a junior officer, I haved worked at the Korea-US Combined Forces Command and the Ministry of National Defense dealing with intel/ops planning, policy, and protocol"
"For the first time in a long time, I feel very shy and humbled by my future classmates. My intro will be very boring, comparatively. I am an entering MPP candidate. I am probably the youngest of the bunch, having turned 21 just four short months ago. "
"I consider myself more or less a political realist and am interested in the International Security and Development PAC, then perhaps writing (and here I betray much) for AEI, Cato, or the Heritage Foundation. On a slight side-note, is it not incredible that we will be studying at the same place Samuel Huntington teaches? Love him or hate him, it’s impossible not to be amazed, being that close to he who is, for lack of a better term, the master.
While an undergrad, I have presided over our Student Government (supervising the first overhaul to our Honor Code since its inception), edited our school newspaper, and enjoyed Kappa Sigma among other things".
Somebody please kill me now.
"(my) career has straddled the private and public spheres - did a few stints at Bangladesh Government/World Bank/UNDP projects as an economist, presented keynote papers at business chambers and government ministries on market access, regional cumulation, sustainable environment management, MDGs, also ran my own small international trading company engaged in the pharmaceutical and apparel industries, currently involved in consulting and political campaigning"
"My instution is the sole body for designing foreign trade policies of Turkey...since i am working in the Asia and Pacific department, I've been to many places in the region and met different people. To be more specific, my section is dealing with the trade negotiations for bilateral agreements. And I am in charge of the bilateral trade and economic relations of Turkey with the Asian and Pacific countries as well as negotiator in trade and economic cooperation agreement negotiations ..I am most confident that Harvard would be an excellent opportunity and reference for all of us during our carrier"
"After my undergrad schooling, I was commissioned as a Korean Air Force Second Lieutenant in 2003. During the past three years as a junior officer, I haved worked at the Korea-US Combined Forces Command and the Ministry of National Defense dealing with intel/ops planning, policy, and protocol"
"For the first time in a long time, I feel very shy and humbled by my future classmates. My intro will be very boring, comparatively. I am an entering MPP candidate. I am probably the youngest of the bunch, having turned 21 just four short months ago. "
"I consider myself more or less a political realist and am interested in the International Security and Development PAC, then perhaps writing (and here I betray much) for AEI, Cato, or the Heritage Foundation. On a slight side-note, is it not incredible that we will be studying at the same place Samuel Huntington teaches? Love him or hate him, it’s impossible not to be amazed, being that close to he who is, for lack of a better term, the master.
While an undergrad, I have presided over our Student Government (supervising the first overhaul to our Honor Code since its inception), edited our school newspaper, and enjoyed Kappa Sigma among other things".
Somebody please kill me now.
analysing peace
The below is a good analysis of the dynamic in Sri Lanka and was written before this week's events. It is by Dr. Jayadev Uyangoda, a leading (rational, unbiased) intellectual from the University of Colombo. I found it on another blog (full disclosure!)
Can the Peace Process be revived.
1. The peace process that began in 2002 in Sri Lanka appears to have reached an end. It has exhausted its potential to produce a settlement agreement, even an interim one, between the GOSL and the LTTE. The main tangible outcome of the 2002 peace process is the Cease-Fire Agreement between the GOSL and LTTE. The CFA has also been under great strain in a twin context of regime change in Colombo that began in October 2003 and increasing violence primarily in the northern and Eastern provinces. The emergence of a new peace process seems to be quite difficult.
2. There seems to be some fundamental dissatisfaction, on the part of the GOSL, LTTE and the Muslim community on the outcome of the 2002 peace process. The GOSL views the CFA and the peace process as having resulted in negative consequences for state sovereignty and national security. The LTTE’s assessment of the no-war no-peace situation is that it has not brought any tangible outcome to the LTTE or the Tamil people. Meanwhile, the Muslim political parties are angry that they have been excluded from the bi-lateral peace process between the government and the LTTE. They fear that even an interim agreement between the government and the LTTE would endanger their interests. The absence of a strong social support base for the 2002 peace process has been a major impediment to its success.
3. The Geneva Talks between the Rajapakse Administration have a limited agenda. It focuses on the proper implementation of the CFA. The Geneva talks are not intended to resume political negotiations between the two sides. Even with a limited agenda, the engagement between the two sides has been valuable in managing violence and protecting the CFA.
4. The CFA is facing a crisis of existence. One party to it defends it in its existing form while the other party wants to revise it. It is the pragmatic need felt by the two sides to control violence that can sustain the CFA as well as Geneva talks. Without GOSL-LTTE partnership, the CFA can survive only as a strategic condition. Sooner than later, it will become clear that without returning to political negotiations, the two sides may not be able to sustain the CFA. A post-CFA scenario can have two possibilities – all-out war or protracted low-intensity violence.
5. Concerning the future of the peace process, a maximalist trajectory of conflict resolution appears to be both unrealistic and impossible. Political conditions that exist in Sri Lanka do not provide space for a maximalist program of conflict resolution. Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim societies as well as major political actors representing these ethnic formations expect contradictory outcomes from peace. They conceptualise the idea of peace differently and expect different outcomes from peace. For example, UPFA government’s notion of ‘peace with dignity’ is conceptually and politically different from the LTTE’s notion of ‘just’ peace. The goal of peace has not yet become a shared political perspective either. The inclination among the major parties to the conflict is to view peace as an outcome with unilateral gains.
There is also a fear of a peace settlement. In all the three ethnic formations, the fear of peace emanates from the apprehension that external actors – the global state system — might impose on Sri Lanka a settlement conceived externally. A peace settlement is certain to have its gainers as well as losers, but the fear of a settlement is a state of collective mind. It is concerned with the anxiety that an externally conceived peace agreement might favor one group over all the others. Then, there is the deep-seated suspicion of a peace settlement itself. Sinhalse nationalists fear that a settlement with regional autonomy would be a stepping -stone for secession. Tamil nationalists, particularly the LTTE, do not believe that the Sinhalese political class, even after signing a peace agreement, will implement it. They want to maintain their military structures and war preparedness in order to ensure that the terms of a settlement agreement will be implemented fully and comprehensively. Meanwhile, Muslim nationalists fear that a peace settlement between the GOSL and the LTTE would reduce the Muslim community to the status of a permanently disempowered minority. Finally, the Sinhalese political class, which controls the Sri Lankan state at present, does not seem to be ready for a political settlement acceptable to the LTTE. It is extremely difficult to conceive an early peace agreement signed and implemented in Sri Lanka.
6. What, then, is the path to peace in Sri Lanka? In my assessment, there is no direct, or straight, road to ethnic conflict resolution and restoration of peace in Sri Lanka. It is a crooked path with many zigzags, turns and blockades. Sri Lanka’s protracted conflict requires a protracted process of transformation, reconciliation and settlement. The first breakthrough in the peace deadlock in Sri Lanka will have to be a conceptual one. I suggest that the realization of the protracted, contingent and recurrently unstable nature of the peace process constitutes that conceptual breakthrough. No sensible observer of Sri Lanka’s politics can think of any other breakthrough in the peace process, except opportunistic and pragmatic ‘deals’ between the President and the LTTE leader.
7. A protracted period of no-war with no formal peace agreement without the GOSL and the LTTE relapsing to all-out war, seems to be the best available option for peace through conflict transformation in Sri Lanka. The maintenance of no-war no-peace is predicated on the willingness of the GOSL and the LTTE to honour, strength and amend the CFA. At the moment, the two sides appear to have a rather narrow approach to the CFA. The government thinks that the CFA violated the constitution and the law of the country. It has committed to properly implement the CFA purely as a pragmatic necessity. The LTTE, on the other hand, does not see any need or political space to revise the CFA. Both these are narrow and partisan approaches to the CFA. To maintain the present no-war no-peace situation further, it is crucial that the two sides agree to strengthen the CFA by amending it at least in one crucial area. It concerns the capacity of the SLMM to monitor, enforce and ensure compliance on the proper implementation of the CFA. If the SLMM cannot perform these crucial functions, there should be an international body with powers to monitor and investigate violations and ensure compliance with the decisions of the monitoring body.
8. A protracted period of no-war will not be able to sustain itself without addressing humanitarian issues of the people living in the North and East. In this regard, the government and the LTTE need to build up a partnership. Such partnership will be based on the realization that addressing humanitarian issues should be linked to a rapid economic development process covering entire Sri Lanka. External assistance for a humanitarian agenda needs to be seen only as a short-term measure. Rapid economic development in the North and East requires the assistance of the Sri Lankan state and linking the North-East economy with the economy of the rest of the island. Similarly, rapid economic development in one region will enhance the economic development in the other. Realization of inter-dependence and mutuality of outcomes in economic development can ideally be an incentive for the government and the LTTE to work out a framework of partnership.
9. The question of political democracy will invariably emerge in a long period of no-war. This will pose a major challenge to the LTTE. The LTTE needs to realize that without democracy and plurality in representation, its agenda of representing the Tamil nation will face a serious crisis. The goal of peace needs to be conceived not as prior to democracy. In the politics of ‘national emancipation’ peace, justice and democracy should be simultaneous processes.
Can the Peace Process be revived.
1. The peace process that began in 2002 in Sri Lanka appears to have reached an end. It has exhausted its potential to produce a settlement agreement, even an interim one, between the GOSL and the LTTE. The main tangible outcome of the 2002 peace process is the Cease-Fire Agreement between the GOSL and LTTE. The CFA has also been under great strain in a twin context of regime change in Colombo that began in October 2003 and increasing violence primarily in the northern and Eastern provinces. The emergence of a new peace process seems to be quite difficult.
2. There seems to be some fundamental dissatisfaction, on the part of the GOSL, LTTE and the Muslim community on the outcome of the 2002 peace process. The GOSL views the CFA and the peace process as having resulted in negative consequences for state sovereignty and national security. The LTTE’s assessment of the no-war no-peace situation is that it has not brought any tangible outcome to the LTTE or the Tamil people. Meanwhile, the Muslim political parties are angry that they have been excluded from the bi-lateral peace process between the government and the LTTE. They fear that even an interim agreement between the government and the LTTE would endanger their interests. The absence of a strong social support base for the 2002 peace process has been a major impediment to its success.
3. The Geneva Talks between the Rajapakse Administration have a limited agenda. It focuses on the proper implementation of the CFA. The Geneva talks are not intended to resume political negotiations between the two sides. Even with a limited agenda, the engagement between the two sides has been valuable in managing violence and protecting the CFA.
4. The CFA is facing a crisis of existence. One party to it defends it in its existing form while the other party wants to revise it. It is the pragmatic need felt by the two sides to control violence that can sustain the CFA as well as Geneva talks. Without GOSL-LTTE partnership, the CFA can survive only as a strategic condition. Sooner than later, it will become clear that without returning to political negotiations, the two sides may not be able to sustain the CFA. A post-CFA scenario can have two possibilities – all-out war or protracted low-intensity violence.
5. Concerning the future of the peace process, a maximalist trajectory of conflict resolution appears to be both unrealistic and impossible. Political conditions that exist in Sri Lanka do not provide space for a maximalist program of conflict resolution. Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim societies as well as major political actors representing these ethnic formations expect contradictory outcomes from peace. They conceptualise the idea of peace differently and expect different outcomes from peace. For example, UPFA government’s notion of ‘peace with dignity’ is conceptually and politically different from the LTTE’s notion of ‘just’ peace. The goal of peace has not yet become a shared political perspective either. The inclination among the major parties to the conflict is to view peace as an outcome with unilateral gains.
There is also a fear of a peace settlement. In all the three ethnic formations, the fear of peace emanates from the apprehension that external actors – the global state system — might impose on Sri Lanka a settlement conceived externally. A peace settlement is certain to have its gainers as well as losers, but the fear of a settlement is a state of collective mind. It is concerned with the anxiety that an externally conceived peace agreement might favor one group over all the others. Then, there is the deep-seated suspicion of a peace settlement itself. Sinhalse nationalists fear that a settlement with regional autonomy would be a stepping -stone for secession. Tamil nationalists, particularly the LTTE, do not believe that the Sinhalese political class, even after signing a peace agreement, will implement it. They want to maintain their military structures and war preparedness in order to ensure that the terms of a settlement agreement will be implemented fully and comprehensively. Meanwhile, Muslim nationalists fear that a peace settlement between the GOSL and the LTTE would reduce the Muslim community to the status of a permanently disempowered minority. Finally, the Sinhalese political class, which controls the Sri Lankan state at present, does not seem to be ready for a political settlement acceptable to the LTTE. It is extremely difficult to conceive an early peace agreement signed and implemented in Sri Lanka.
6. What, then, is the path to peace in Sri Lanka? In my assessment, there is no direct, or straight, road to ethnic conflict resolution and restoration of peace in Sri Lanka. It is a crooked path with many zigzags, turns and blockades. Sri Lanka’s protracted conflict requires a protracted process of transformation, reconciliation and settlement. The first breakthrough in the peace deadlock in Sri Lanka will have to be a conceptual one. I suggest that the realization of the protracted, contingent and recurrently unstable nature of the peace process constitutes that conceptual breakthrough. No sensible observer of Sri Lanka’s politics can think of any other breakthrough in the peace process, except opportunistic and pragmatic ‘deals’ between the President and the LTTE leader.
7. A protracted period of no-war with no formal peace agreement without the GOSL and the LTTE relapsing to all-out war, seems to be the best available option for peace through conflict transformation in Sri Lanka. The maintenance of no-war no-peace is predicated on the willingness of the GOSL and the LTTE to honour, strength and amend the CFA. At the moment, the two sides appear to have a rather narrow approach to the CFA. The government thinks that the CFA violated the constitution and the law of the country. It has committed to properly implement the CFA purely as a pragmatic necessity. The LTTE, on the other hand, does not see any need or political space to revise the CFA. Both these are narrow and partisan approaches to the CFA. To maintain the present no-war no-peace situation further, it is crucial that the two sides agree to strengthen the CFA by amending it at least in one crucial area. It concerns the capacity of the SLMM to monitor, enforce and ensure compliance on the proper implementation of the CFA. If the SLMM cannot perform these crucial functions, there should be an international body with powers to monitor and investigate violations and ensure compliance with the decisions of the monitoring body.
8. A protracted period of no-war will not be able to sustain itself without addressing humanitarian issues of the people living in the North and East. In this regard, the government and the LTTE need to build up a partnership. Such partnership will be based on the realization that addressing humanitarian issues should be linked to a rapid economic development process covering entire Sri Lanka. External assistance for a humanitarian agenda needs to be seen only as a short-term measure. Rapid economic development in the North and East requires the assistance of the Sri Lankan state and linking the North-East economy with the economy of the rest of the island. Similarly, rapid economic development in one region will enhance the economic development in the other. Realization of inter-dependence and mutuality of outcomes in economic development can ideally be an incentive for the government and the LTTE to work out a framework of partnership.
9. The question of political democracy will invariably emerge in a long period of no-war. This will pose a major challenge to the LTTE. The LTTE needs to realize that without democracy and plurality in representation, its agenda of representing the Tamil nation will face a serious crisis. The goal of peace needs to be conceived not as prior to democracy. In the politics of ‘national emancipation’ peace, justice and democracy should be simultaneous processes.
Thursday, April 27, 2006
language
"We are in a state of readiness and are awaiting for the instruction from our leadership to respond with a force that will be catastrophically disabling and devastating to the enemy," said Mr.S.Elilan, Trincomalee district political head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam commenting on the current situation in Muttur east, sources said"- source Tamilnet.com
This is the kind of language flying around Sri Lanka these days. With over 40,000 Tamils fleeing Trincomalee district, with both sides upping the rhetoric and literally teetering on the brink of war, with nearly all INGOs pulling out of the Trincomalee district, this kind of language ensures that the stove is always set to burn.
This is the kind of language flying around Sri Lanka these days. With over 40,000 Tamils fleeing Trincomalee district, with both sides upping the rhetoric and literally teetering on the brink of war, with nearly all INGOs pulling out of the Trincomalee district, this kind of language ensures that the stove is always set to burn.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
sad
Everything feels so sad right now. Everything I've spent the last year killing myself for, all the back-breaking toil, seems to have evaporated in smoke. The shelling continues in the Northeast. Apparently orphanages, offices, even a primary school has been hit in the 'crossfire'. The deliberately provocative statement by the LTTE in attempting to assassinate Sarath Fonseka has almost probably started a cycle of war. The future looks grim. If we slide back into war (like the 90s), it could be another ten years until another resolution comes. We simply cannot continue like this. All these lives snuffed out. Why? Why is violence always the only answer between nations? Our schools will be used as bomb-shelters, maybe as refugee camps. The next five years will see us working with not the poorest-of-the-poor. Everything that I paused my life for, it has all become meaningless. I can't even think straight and I am totally defeated.
obits
I found this on a blog today and it matches my mood perfectly and I hope I shall be able to say the same when my time comes.
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith
2 Timothy 4:7
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course,
I have kept the faith
2 Timothy 4:7
more
The ceasefire agreement is dead in the water. If I was a political commentator I could make my bones on this conflict, but since I am only an NGO activist, all I can say is that there is an inexorable, irreversible slide back into war.
The army hasn't stopped bombing LTTE-controlled areas in the East. We have had to pull out completely out of Trincomalee and all our existing projects in the East will go unmonitored for another year. This escalation was not anticipated until June/July. If this is reality, I'm ready to check out. It is enormously stressful wondering when the next bomb will detonate and who will be caught in it. I wish I knew what to do. My father, in a rare intervention actually asked me whether I thought I should stay and whether I should come back. (They're the most laissez-faire parents ever- when I proposed going to Iran my father wanted to come along for the adventure too, and when my friend proposed to her dad about going to Iran, he confiscated her passport at the age of 23!).
The army hasn't stopped bombing LTTE-controlled areas in the East. We have had to pull out completely out of Trincomalee and all our existing projects in the East will go unmonitored for another year. This escalation was not anticipated until June/July. If this is reality, I'm ready to check out. It is enormously stressful wondering when the next bomb will detonate and who will be caught in it. I wish I knew what to do. My father, in a rare intervention actually asked me whether I thought I should stay and whether I should come back. (They're the most laissez-faire parents ever- when I proposed going to Iran my father wanted to come along for the adventure too, and when my friend proposed to her dad about going to Iran, he confiscated her passport at the age of 23!).
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
bombs
This is how it begins
Had a lunch meeting with a partner at Slave Island. After lunch, one of our staff members gets a call to say that there has been a bomb blast in Fort (ten minutes away from where we are).
We frantically try to call staff/friends who are known to be in the area. No response as all the networks are frozen and only high-priority military communication can get through (so as to also not incite immediate communal violence)
.
We get into a car and put on the radio and the news filters through: General Sarath Fonseka, the new military commander under the new administration is dead after a bomb blast inside the high-security army headquarters.
Silence inside the car. This marks the beginning. We had all expected it to start soon, but probably in July and certainly after the Geneva peace talks had finished their second round. Such a deliberate and successful suicide bombing is provocative. It will result in increased army clampdowns and brutality in the Northeast which will in turn provoke a violent response by the LTTE. It means escalation and immediate escalation at that.
As we drive back the calls and messages start flooding in. Everyone is safe. I get back to the office and make sure we have emergency contact details for everyone. The other news filters in slowly: a female suicide bomber, almost certainly from the LTTE, blew up the General's 5 bodyguards and herself. The General himself looks like he will survive. The attack it turns out was not successful. But then these politicians have always had nine lives.
It also means that Colombo is not going to be immune to attacks and as someone said, every day when we go to work now, we do not know whether we will come back. It is this culture of fear and uncertainty that is most difficult to live with. And even that I could live with. What I fear is the day that communal violence will begin and even the most pacifist amongst us will be turned into raging bloodthirsty mobs, hunting down Tamils and Sinhalese to kill. Like in July 1983.
Had a lunch meeting with a partner at Slave Island. After lunch, one of our staff members gets a call to say that there has been a bomb blast in Fort (ten minutes away from where we are).
We frantically try to call staff/friends who are known to be in the area. No response as all the networks are frozen and only high-priority military communication can get through (so as to also not incite immediate communal violence)
.
We get into a car and put on the radio and the news filters through: General Sarath Fonseka, the new military commander under the new administration is dead after a bomb blast inside the high-security army headquarters.
Silence inside the car. This marks the beginning. We had all expected it to start soon, but probably in July and certainly after the Geneva peace talks had finished their second round. Such a deliberate and successful suicide bombing is provocative. It will result in increased army clampdowns and brutality in the Northeast which will in turn provoke a violent response by the LTTE. It means escalation and immediate escalation at that.
As we drive back the calls and messages start flooding in. Everyone is safe. I get back to the office and make sure we have emergency contact details for everyone. The other news filters in slowly: a female suicide bomber, almost certainly from the LTTE, blew up the General's 5 bodyguards and herself. The General himself looks like he will survive. The attack it turns out was not successful. But then these politicians have always had nine lives.
It also means that Colombo is not going to be immune to attacks and as someone said, every day when we go to work now, we do not know whether we will come back. It is this culture of fear and uncertainty that is most difficult to live with. And even that I could live with. What I fear is the day that communal violence will begin and even the most pacifist amongst us will be turned into raging bloodthirsty mobs, hunting down Tamils and Sinhalese to kill. Like in July 1983.
crap-
I'm in a really crappy mood and I hope it passes.
Some oddbits- Kaavya Viswanathan, author of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" has been accused of plagiarism and vows it was unintentional.
I've also become vegetarian for the next three months, at the end of which I will re-evaluate. Primarily because I think it's the morally correct thing to be.
I've also been asked to emcee at someone's engagement in a sari.
I'm also trying not to succumb and go crawling back to an ex, grovelling for affection.
I'm just in a crappy mood and I hope it passes. I miss everyone and I want to go home.
Some oddbits- Kaavya Viswanathan, author of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" has been accused of plagiarism and vows it was unintentional.
I've also become vegetarian for the next three months, at the end of which I will re-evaluate. Primarily because I think it's the morally correct thing to be.
I've also been asked to emcee at someone's engagement in a sari.
I'm also trying not to succumb and go crawling back to an ex, grovelling for affection.
I'm just in a crappy mood and I hope it passes. I miss everyone and I want to go home.
Monday, April 24, 2006
in the off-ing
Organized an offsite off a beach resort in Beruwala during which many topics including program implementation calendars were discussed. The evening saw a water polo match and a lot of drinking, including a session by the beach with all of us dancing and singing baila and assorted tamil songs. Then it was a session with the 'cool' clique (every office has one) where cigarettes and more alcohol were passed around while 'love failure' was discussed in great depth drawing on the personal experiences shared.
Then I met 'Amden'. Amden was the name of a German warship which eluded Allied capture during World War 11 and managed to sneak through Allied defences. It has become the nickname for those who are basically clever, manipulative and capable of achieving their own ends. (Ranil Wickremasinghe, ex-presidential contender was nicknamed Amden). Anyway Amden also is the name of a cartoon character, and there are thousands of stories spun in the collective national consciousness about Amden. (Amden stories are told at funeral gatherings, when according to Buddhist rituals, the body has to be accompanied for four days prior to the funeral and for all 4 days there is to be no sleep, to watch over the body. So to pass the time, and keep awake, Amden stories are told and exchanged.).
I suppose they lose the flavour, and the humour when not told in ribald Sinhala, but here are some anyway.
Amden is coming out of his mother's womb. Being the naughty fellow that he is, he wants to come out feet first, and not head first. So he keeps pushing his feet out and back in, playing a game with the doctor and nearly killing his mother. So then the doctor takes a cigarette butt and singes his feet the next time he shoves his feet out. Then Amden leaps back, puzzled and sticks his head out to see what was up and the doctor hauls him out with both hands.
Amden is at school and asks his teacher a question: Why are fish so flat? Nobody else knows the answer and Amden puts up his hand to answer the same question. Frustrated the teacher asks why? And he says because the whales sat on it!
Amden asks another question: Why do the eyes of prawns bulge out so?Nobody else knows the answer and the teacher, increasingly frustrated asks him why? And he says that the prawns were watching the whales who sat on the fish!!!
Last one for today: Amden is a great graffiti artist and adorns the school walls with three dimensional pictures. His teacher calls his father and says: his art is really fantastic but he can’t keep drawing them on school walls. The father said: Better he draws them here than at home: At home he drew a 3D picture of a naked female and so realistic it was that the father tried to… you-know-what and in the end ended up getting his you-know-what twisted!
Then the weekend was spent morosely moping around the place for no substantive reason really other than the mood struck me and I was annoyed with and at everything so I stayed at home and watched eight episodes of the second season of the O.C. which didn’t work it’s magic and then I fell asleep reading the Economist, which by the way, rocks. Girls and boys, we have a new editor in da house and boy, is the difference marked and noticeable. There is poetry in every article. And I love it. Here’s to good writing!
Then I met 'Amden'. Amden was the name of a German warship which eluded Allied capture during World War 11 and managed to sneak through Allied defences. It has become the nickname for those who are basically clever, manipulative and capable of achieving their own ends. (Ranil Wickremasinghe, ex-presidential contender was nicknamed Amden). Anyway Amden also is the name of a cartoon character, and there are thousands of stories spun in the collective national consciousness about Amden. (Amden stories are told at funeral gatherings, when according to Buddhist rituals, the body has to be accompanied for four days prior to the funeral and for all 4 days there is to be no sleep, to watch over the body. So to pass the time, and keep awake, Amden stories are told and exchanged.).
I suppose they lose the flavour, and the humour when not told in ribald Sinhala, but here are some anyway.
Amden is coming out of his mother's womb. Being the naughty fellow that he is, he wants to come out feet first, and not head first. So he keeps pushing his feet out and back in, playing a game with the doctor and nearly killing his mother. So then the doctor takes a cigarette butt and singes his feet the next time he shoves his feet out. Then Amden leaps back, puzzled and sticks his head out to see what was up and the doctor hauls him out with both hands.
Amden is at school and asks his teacher a question: Why are fish so flat? Nobody else knows the answer and Amden puts up his hand to answer the same question. Frustrated the teacher asks why? And he says because the whales sat on it!
Amden asks another question: Why do the eyes of prawns bulge out so?Nobody else knows the answer and the teacher, increasingly frustrated asks him why? And he says that the prawns were watching the whales who sat on the fish!!!
Last one for today: Amden is a great graffiti artist and adorns the school walls with three dimensional pictures. His teacher calls his father and says: his art is really fantastic but he can’t keep drawing them on school walls. The father said: Better he draws them here than at home: At home he drew a 3D picture of a naked female and so realistic it was that the father tried to… you-know-what and in the end ended up getting his you-know-what twisted!
Then the weekend was spent morosely moping around the place for no substantive reason really other than the mood struck me and I was annoyed with and at everything so I stayed at home and watched eight episodes of the second season of the O.C. which didn’t work it’s magic and then I fell asleep reading the Economist, which by the way, rocks. Girls and boys, we have a new editor in da house and boy, is the difference marked and noticeable. There is poetry in every article. And I love it. Here’s to good writing!
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
and back.
And so, I'm back in the muck again. Just two days ago, life was all about having crepes for lunch and choosing what kind of earrings to buy and here choices revolve around having to withdraw aid completely from the northeast in the light of recent increased violence, thus setting back our implementation agenda by at least four months. Or endangering staff and project assets instead. And those decisions lie with someone phenomenally inexperienced and incapable of having to make those decisions.
So predictably, I went home and shared a bottle of wine with a colleague in town and we talked about aid, about our NGO, about the developing world, about education, about film and it was the kind of conversation that I had missed in Sri Lanka all this while. While I was on the plane coming over, all I could think about was how much I missed my friends and family despite the relatively short-haul in front of me. But a day of being back in the office and it feels right, and the sun is shining and it feels as though i had never left.
Someone mailed me some music composed and I was thinking that it was an incredibly personal thing to do for when I hear that music, I think of him which surely isn't right?
Also reading the Israel Lobby (from the London review of books, read if you have a chance) an academic paper from the Kennedy School of Government detailing the extraordinary and inexplicable power of the Israel lobby in American politics.
So predictably, I went home and shared a bottle of wine with a colleague in town and we talked about aid, about our NGO, about the developing world, about education, about film and it was the kind of conversation that I had missed in Sri Lanka all this while. While I was on the plane coming over, all I could think about was how much I missed my friends and family despite the relatively short-haul in front of me. But a day of being back in the office and it feels right, and the sun is shining and it feels as though i had never left.
Someone mailed me some music composed and I was thinking that it was an incredibly personal thing to do for when I hear that music, I think of him which surely isn't right?
Also reading the Israel Lobby (from the London review of books, read if you have a chance) an academic paper from the Kennedy School of Government detailing the extraordinary and inexplicable power of the Israel lobby in American politics.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
on currency
In the past year, I have used
The Great British Pound
The Euro
The Singapore Dollar
The Malaysian Ringgit
The Cambodian Riel
The Sri Lankan Rupee
The Indian Rupee
The Australian Dollar
The New Zealand Dollar
The U.S. Dollar
The Vietnam Dong
The Thai Baht
Cities I have been in the last year in chronological order since leaving MS: London, Paris, London, Singapore, Siem Reap, Singapore, Colombo, New Delhi, Colombo, Singapore, Langkawi, Singapore, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Phuket, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore and back to Colombo now.
I need a new passport. But it takes 17 days to get one in Singapore and I don't want to get it in Sri Lanka since I don't want me turning up in Karachi with a beard and being 52 years old running an arms cargo.
The Great British Pound
The Euro
The Singapore Dollar
The Malaysian Ringgit
The Cambodian Riel
The Sri Lankan Rupee
The Indian Rupee
The Australian Dollar
The New Zealand Dollar
The U.S. Dollar
The Vietnam Dong
The Thai Baht
Cities I have been in the last year in chronological order since leaving MS: London, Paris, London, Singapore, Siem Reap, Singapore, Colombo, New Delhi, Colombo, Singapore, Langkawi, Singapore, Sydney, Christchurch, Auckland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, London, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Ho Chi Minh, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Phuket, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore, Colombo, Singapore and back to Colombo now.
I need a new passport. But it takes 17 days to get one in Singapore and I don't want to get it in Sri Lanka since I don't want me turning up in Karachi with a beard and being 52 years old running an arms cargo.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
trinco violence
Jesus Christ. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with this country and why they are so intent on ripping each other's brains out, for twenty fucking years and obviously there is no real peace process but neither is there any real intent or incentive on either side to create the conditions for peace. Finally the reason for war is war. A bomb blast on Wednesday in Trinco in which 16 were killed while shopping for the upcoming New Year, and 50 wounded. Followed by 'an ethnic cleansing' rampage by a Sinhalese mob (although the bomb was most likely set off by the Tigers) in which 7 Tamils were cut, chopped and killed. Police finally intervened the next day by declaring a curfew when Manmohan Singh was leaned upon to call the Sri Lankan president to ask for an intervention for the civilians. This is so FUCKING ROTTEN. This will also mean an end to all our work done so far as we were concentrating in Trinco. I am so tired of this. No matter what anyone does, it's just bloody holding a finger in a dyke.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
grey's anatomy
Oh! I have discovered a new reason to live. I have seen the future and it is Grey's Anatomy!. I love this show. I know I sound like a deranged fan and mainly I'm crushing madly on Patrick Dempsey who is actually, like seriously, really, just hot.
And Ellen Pompeo who is a cross between Renee Zellwegger and Joey Lauren Adams from Mallrats and Clerks (?) and the Kevin Smith films. And of course Sandra Oh who actually just rocks. The first season only had 9 episodes filmed and it became a totally amazing hit and now Season 2 is airing on Channel 5 and for the first time ever I wish I lived in Singapore so I could WATCH it. DVD Season 1 here I come.
And Ellen Pompeo who is a cross between Renee Zellwegger and Joey Lauren Adams from Mallrats and Clerks (?) and the Kevin Smith films. And of course Sandra Oh who actually just rocks. The first season only had 9 episodes filmed and it became a totally amazing hit and now Season 2 is airing on Channel 5 and for the first time ever I wish I lived in Singapore so I could WATCH it. DVD Season 1 here I come.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
read
From the "What is a Classic?" lecture by J.M. Coetzee collected in Stranger Shores, a collection of his essays on literature.
"In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation. Yet when the chain of sounds is realized in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units; the units cohere as a higher-order object in a way that I can only describe by analogy as the incarnation of ideas of exposition, conplication, and resolution that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach."
And in counterpoint, I also read "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life". It's not bad or at least not the utter tripe I was expecting. There are even words like 'asphyxiated' and 'aspartame' in it.
"In Bach nothing is obscure, no single step is so miraculous as to surpass imitation. Yet when the chain of sounds is realized in time, the building process ceases at a certain moment to be the mere linking of units; the units cohere as a higher-order object in a way that I can only describe by analogy as the incarnation of ideas of exposition, conplication, and resolution that are more general than music. Bach thinks in music. Music thinks itself in Bach."
And in counterpoint, I also read "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life". It's not bad or at least not the utter tripe I was expecting. There are even words like 'asphyxiated' and 'aspartame' in it.
Friday, April 07, 2006
cambodia
Am back home right now. amazing the enthusiastic reception this time around compared to before when I was barely tolerated. Too late to change some people I guess.
I wanted to post all these photos while I still had them. To commemorate perhaps an increasingly distant past when I felt like I still had energy, optimism, an open mind.
This is angkor wat.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
yarlpanam
Essentially a day-trip up to Jaffna completed for a high-end donor visit (the grand-daughter of an ex-US president and the president of a large charity organization in her own right and really rather sweet if a tad scatty) and a flight out tonight leaves me exhausted. As the plane whirled away from the tarmac, I saw all-too-briefly the shorelines with waters green and blue, deserted as it is in the high-security zone and therefore populated with army bases. It would have been high-end hotels if the land were free. I saw tobacco leaves, plucked and being dried on the eaves of houses, turning into cheroots under the burning sun. Tobacco is a cash crop, but detrimental to long term agricultural cultivation. I saw too for the first time, in those zones, from high up in the sky, houses with their ceilings bombed out of them, gaping helplessly up at the sky, forlorn structures of cement and stone. Somewhere among those houses was the house that my father grew up in, where I should have been born. There is so much political angst to write about, but it would be misinterpreted and it is yet unformed, and all I recognize are the wisps of rage and anger and confusion meshed together.
Cry, beloved country.
Cry, beloved country.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
seafood
So went to a seafood/fine dining restaurant in Mount (no prizes for guessing which one). It was my first time back there since the manager had asked me out (and I had respectfully declined- due to at that time being in a relationship of sorts and also because of a complete lack of interest otherwise). Anyway this time I took my mother as armour and also ostensibly to celebrate more recent news. We feasted on crumbed Brie, lobster neuburg (marinated in champagne I believe) rock lobster stuffed with crab served with bak choy, champagne sorbet, cabernet sauvignon and some exotic fruit pavlova. Sated, and stuffed, we are ready to sleep.
I don't really think I'm prepared for this you know? Like, I mean what if I don't end up saving the world or anything? Does that mean I'm a waste of space/money? what if I don't innovate a solution to end poverty and disease in the Third World? Does that mean my education was wasted? What if I choose to be a taitai? (Can sri lankan women be taitais?)
I also found out I was related to the activist below. Most of the time I am sick of all of my relatives, but this time, I'm a little awed.
I don't really think I'm prepared for this you know? Like, I mean what if I don't end up saving the world or anything? Does that mean I'm a waste of space/money? what if I don't innovate a solution to end poverty and disease in the Third World? Does that mean my education was wasted? What if I choose to be a taitai? (Can sri lankan women be taitais?)
I also found out I was related to the activist below. Most of the time I am sick of all of my relatives, but this time, I'm a little awed.
no more tears sister
There is a rather new documentary film about the family-tragedy of Tamils in Sri Lanka during the 1980s and is specifically about the life and times of a Tamil human rights activist, called Rajani Thiranagama who was assassinated allegedly about the Tigers. It is one of few artpieces that do not needlessly romanticize the conflict or the Tigers as pure freedom fighters, but instead depicts them as intolerant of political dissent or alternative voice as the Sinhalese government. Oh, what a world Sri Lanka? The narration is done by Michael Ondaatje.
dev industry
Seamus Heaney has a new collection out: District and Circle which I must beg borrow or steal for I can't find it here in Sri Lanka. The itch to write again is overtaking me. I watched Sheltering Sky yesterday: I don't know why Bertolucci is so obsessed with that shifting space of sexual relationships. A friend is getting married and I am to be the bridesmaid (good god). Must define research interests soon enough. Oh yes, I remember now what I wanted to say: i discovered a true intellectual and how often can you say that. The only wonder is that it took me this long. The below are full excerpts from pieces of her work. She is a leading intellectual in Sri Lanka, focusing on the development-conflict-peace nexus.
"In this context, the question may be raised as to why the GoSL and the LTTE have chosen or been impelled to chose the World Bank to be the custodian of the post/conflict fund? And on what basis? Historically, the United Nations is the international organization charged with and experienced in dealing with post/conflict reconstruction (East Timor being a recent example). Moreover the UN agencies despite numerous critics have a relatively open attitude to human security, local voices, priorities and knowledge systems, than has the World Bank since it is not so closely allied to international finance and corporate interests, and in the grip of what Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist and ex-Vice President of the World Bank, terms ‘market fundamentalism’ in his book Globalization and its Discontents. Is the World Bank then a more or less neutral actor or will it ensure that the peace is structured to suit the agendas of international finance and corporate capital while making Sri Lanka vulnerable to fluctuating global financial markets as the world economy goes into recession (as occurred in Argentina)? As conflict, security and development are increasingly linked will it disburse funds to projects that have a less capital friendly and more social justice focus?"
"The information lacuna in turn perpetuated a number of myths that sustained the conflict, both at the level of policy as well as in popular discourse. As the conflict escalated in the nineties, the notion that ‘growth with war’ is possible appeared to be the operative fiction in policy circles. Meanwhile the conflict generated a war economy with military service becoming the leading income generation project for young men from rural areas even as it generated new forms of social and economic inequality and marginalization (eg. Muslim-Tamil conflicts in the east coast). That Sri Lanka, the South Asian leader in social indicators may be slipping in health and education, and mortgaging its future as the numbers of disabled increased, and the economy structured into a war economy, with the rural sector increasingly dependent on soldiers wages was not mentioned."
"Finally, the question remains: will humanitarian and post/conflict aid effectively subsidize SAPs and country's adjustment to Global Capital (ism)? As the various MPs tour Switzerland, Canada etc for constitutional models they may as well read Stiglitz and visit Third World Latin American countries in conflict and post/conflict situations that have a far closer profile and learn from economic debate and debacles in that region not to mention Africa. What informed critical debate in those countries may suggest is that After almost two decades of armed violence in Sri Lanka building a sustainable peace would entail political and economic reform aimed at achieving substantive rather than ritual or procedural democracy and the need for re-distributive justice. By substantive democracy is meant here, economic and social as well as civil and political aspects of democratic practice. "
"In this context, the question may be raised as to why the GoSL and the LTTE have chosen or been impelled to chose the World Bank to be the custodian of the post/conflict fund? And on what basis? Historically, the United Nations is the international organization charged with and experienced in dealing with post/conflict reconstruction (East Timor being a recent example). Moreover the UN agencies despite numerous critics have a relatively open attitude to human security, local voices, priorities and knowledge systems, than has the World Bank since it is not so closely allied to international finance and corporate interests, and in the grip of what Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize winning economist and ex-Vice President of the World Bank, terms ‘market fundamentalism’ in his book Globalization and its Discontents. Is the World Bank then a more or less neutral actor or will it ensure that the peace is structured to suit the agendas of international finance and corporate capital while making Sri Lanka vulnerable to fluctuating global financial markets as the world economy goes into recession (as occurred in Argentina)? As conflict, security and development are increasingly linked will it disburse funds to projects that have a less capital friendly and more social justice focus?"
"The information lacuna in turn perpetuated a number of myths that sustained the conflict, both at the level of policy as well as in popular discourse. As the conflict escalated in the nineties, the notion that ‘growth with war’ is possible appeared to be the operative fiction in policy circles. Meanwhile the conflict generated a war economy with military service becoming the leading income generation project for young men from rural areas even as it generated new forms of social and economic inequality and marginalization (eg. Muslim-Tamil conflicts in the east coast). That Sri Lanka, the South Asian leader in social indicators may be slipping in health and education, and mortgaging its future as the numbers of disabled increased, and the economy structured into a war economy, with the rural sector increasingly dependent on soldiers wages was not mentioned."
"Finally, the question remains: will humanitarian and post/conflict aid effectively subsidize SAPs and country's adjustment to Global Capital (ism)? As the various MPs tour Switzerland, Canada etc for constitutional models they may as well read Stiglitz and visit Third World Latin American countries in conflict and post/conflict situations that have a far closer profile and learn from economic debate and debacles in that region not to mention Africa. What informed critical debate in those countries may suggest is that After almost two decades of armed violence in Sri Lanka building a sustainable peace would entail political and economic reform aimed at achieving substantive rather than ritual or procedural democracy and the need for re-distributive justice. By substantive democracy is meant here, economic and social as well as civil and political aspects of democratic practice. "
Thursday, March 30, 2006
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".
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".
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
spore
So another classic from Woody Allen whom I normally don't like but said 80% of life is just showing up which I reckon is quite true.
This is an ode to Singapore (since someone reminded me of old childhood days of being in RGS etc.). I have to say that my friends from Singapore are true-blue kick-ass, salt-of-the-earth, liberal-conservative rockstars. Which sort of really reflects on me. I mean, you know, they're like... caring and shit! and who the hell is caring in the modern world? Of course they're also deeply conflicted with lots of thwarted, burning ambition, but that just adds to their sex-appeal really. And they're really funny, in this weird, localized way, in a cola-snorting (not coke please) way and of course they're as wholesome as motherhood and apple pie too which makes me feel safe and secure that they're not going to leave me once they become like Ministers and shit.
Okay this was a really weird post. i'll stop now.
DVDs I bought yesterday: Sheltering Sky (the old one of the Paul Bowles novel with Debra Winger and John Malkovich! I can't believe that someone would pirate this and that there is Sri Lankan demand for this! Rock on Sri Lanka!), Nine Lives, Amores Perros (because I'm the loser who still hasn't seen it yet), Bunty aur Babli (because Abhishek Bachchan is hot), Just Friends, Duplex, Munich, Water (with John Abraham, the last in the Deepa Mehta trilogy must still see Earth with Aamir Khan and Nandita Das who I adore), Memoirs of a Geisha, and some more...
This is an ode to Singapore (since someone reminded me of old childhood days of being in RGS etc.). I have to say that my friends from Singapore are true-blue kick-ass, salt-of-the-earth, liberal-conservative rockstars. Which sort of really reflects on me. I mean, you know, they're like... caring and shit! and who the hell is caring in the modern world? Of course they're also deeply conflicted with lots of thwarted, burning ambition, but that just adds to their sex-appeal really. And they're really funny, in this weird, localized way, in a cola-snorting (not coke please) way and of course they're as wholesome as motherhood and apple pie too which makes me feel safe and secure that they're not going to leave me once they become like Ministers and shit.
Okay this was a really weird post. i'll stop now.
DVDs I bought yesterday: Sheltering Sky (the old one of the Paul Bowles novel with Debra Winger and John Malkovich! I can't believe that someone would pirate this and that there is Sri Lankan demand for this! Rock on Sri Lanka!), Nine Lives, Amores Perros (because I'm the loser who still hasn't seen it yet), Bunty aur Babli (because Abhishek Bachchan is hot), Just Friends, Duplex, Munich, Water (with John Abraham, the last in the Deepa Mehta trilogy must still see Earth with Aamir Khan and Nandita Das who I adore), Memoirs of a Geisha, and some more...
marr-ed
Got a really a rather lovely email from an old old friend. Old IS gold. Although that makes us sound rather ancient and maybe at the ripe old age of 25 we are on our way to the grave... sigh. Those memories of RGS. I remember once when we were in tuition class, and then the tuition teacher gave us some coke (at precisely 4pm he would wheel out the coke which predictably was the only thing we had been looking forward to in the whole class and of course there was never more than one glass precisely per person) and then she told us a joke and I started laughing and then coke snorted out of my nose and she cupped her hands to receive it! (So it wouldn't flow out and make a gigantic mess and earn the wrath of the tuition master) My sister was also in the same class and she was aghast at my antics, and said that Blood is NOT thicker than water and she would never do that to save my ass! That is true friendship peeps. A defining moment in my early childhood. Anyway it was awesome to hear she's doing really well!
So had an interesting conversation with my father last night which started out innocently enough discussing graduate school and whether I had filed acceptances or not (there's this old chestnut in my family of how once my sister accepted a University of Michigan offer a day late and the University refused her admission and therefore changed her whole life, which in retrospect it really didnt) ... and then came the rather forced casual stunner: So what am I to say when i get marriage proposals for you?
(WHATTT!!! I screeched. I am NOT interested in getting married. blah blah blah)
"There are people here who are more educated than you and know more than you and can see further down the line. Don't think you know everything. Marriage is important etc."/
" Just tell them I am not interested in getting married"
"You're not young anymore. You're an adult and you have certain responsibilities. It's time to fulfil them. I'm going to tell them that you are studying right now, but after you graduate this will NO longer be a joke"
I put the phone down, grumpily and suddenly feeling rather frightened.
So had an interesting conversation with my father last night which started out innocently enough discussing graduate school and whether I had filed acceptances or not (there's this old chestnut in my family of how once my sister accepted a University of Michigan offer a day late and the University refused her admission and therefore changed her whole life, which in retrospect it really didnt) ... and then came the rather forced casual stunner: So what am I to say when i get marriage proposals for you?
(WHATTT!!! I screeched. I am NOT interested in getting married. blah blah blah)
"There are people here who are more educated than you and know more than you and can see further down the line. Don't think you know everything. Marriage is important etc."/
" Just tell them I am not interested in getting married"
"You're not young anymore. You're an adult and you have certain responsibilities. It's time to fulfil them. I'm going to tell them that you are studying right now, but after you graduate this will NO longer be a joke"
I put the phone down, grumpily and suddenly feeling rather frightened.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
mfh
talking to a colleague about Milosevic and how he had a horribly abusive childhood which led to some pathology and the inability to realize the import of his crimes against humanity. About how in one telling incident, he organized a specially blackened helicopter to fly him to some opening ceremony (because in Serb mythology from two thousand years ago, the gods descended from out of the sky in a black chariot). Then moved onto various leaders' divine mandates from heaven and the cult of personality that they actively fostered.
talked also about opening a film studio which more and more is my dream. I now only have to find financing, learn how to handle sound and lighting (i can operate DV fine and edit too), get some grips and oh yeah some actors too and a worthwhile script and then I'll be on my way. In the meantime, I might go to school though and stick to the day job.
am pushing paper at the moment during an unusual hiatus in Colombo. I want to get out in the field again.
talked also about opening a film studio which more and more is my dream. I now only have to find financing, learn how to handle sound and lighting (i can operate DV fine and edit too), get some grips and oh yeah some actors too and a worthwhile script and then I'll be on my way. In the meantime, I might go to school though and stick to the day job.
am pushing paper at the moment during an unusual hiatus in Colombo. I want to get out in the field again.
Monday, March 27, 2006
arrrr
Been obsessively googling rang de basanti. What would it take I wonder, to break into Bollywood big-time? I remember when I was in high school, making a bet with my best friend that I would pay her five dollars (or vice versa) if by the time I was 28, I didn't get married to my favourite actor, who was incidentally called Arjun (but in reality had some brahmin-assed name like Seenu or something pattikadu like that!).
Feeling lost in life. What would I like to do with my life? And do I have to keep walking a via dolorosa to get there? And what would make me happy? And would that be transient? arrgh. Must. Stop. Blathering. Like. A. Emotional. Junkie who's on a plateau right now because the latest fix of drama is still lagging. SIGH.
I want to meet Captain Jack Sparrow. Or Michael Corleone. Or Robert Redford in Spy Game. Or Ralph Fiennes in the English Patient. Or. Randolph Ash from Possession. Or the butler from Remains of the Day. Or Velu Nayakar. Or Arvind Samy from Thalapathy. Or Tony Leung from In the Mood for Love. Or Kevin Kline from French Kiss. Or of course.... Aamir Khan from Rang de Basanti.
Feeling lost in life. What would I like to do with my life? And do I have to keep walking a via dolorosa to get there? And what would make me happy? And would that be transient? arrgh. Must. Stop. Blathering. Like. A. Emotional. Junkie who's on a plateau right now because the latest fix of drama is still lagging. SIGH.
I want to meet Captain Jack Sparrow. Or Michael Corleone. Or Robert Redford in Spy Game. Or Ralph Fiennes in the English Patient. Or. Randolph Ash from Possession. Or the butler from Remains of the Day. Or Velu Nayakar. Or Arvind Samy from Thalapathy. Or Tony Leung from In the Mood for Love. Or Kevin Kline from French Kiss. Or of course.... Aamir Khan from Rang de Basanti.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
rang de basanti
Just watched a really different Hindi film with an ensemble cast (which in itself is anathema to most Bollywood veterans), called Rang de Basanti, starring Aamir Khan, Alice Patten (daughter of Chris Patten), Siddharth, Soha Ali Khan (sister of Saif Ali Khan, graduate of Balliol and the venerable London School of Economics (M.Sc. in International Relations, natch) and really rather lovely), Atul Kulkarni, and Madhavan in a lovely cameo role. The film explores college boys encountering the darker side of Indian politics and the events that transpire after a certain precipitous moment. Filmmaking is lovely too, with real, washed colours coming onto the screen (and not the fake-o airbrushed usual Bollywood effect) and some lovely sepia flashes of the past. And it's the first Indian film I've seen with a British actress who seems even remotely plausible in her role (not even in Lagaan did that lady manage to pull it off). A genuinely emotional, provocative, deep meaning, good hearted film with an excellent, modern soundtrack. Love it!
Friday, March 24, 2006
monk-eying
An anecdote from the Anuradhapura monk who's a bit of a rockstar amongst people here. All sorts of politicians and leaders visit him, ostensibly to get his blessings but really for the positive media, fawning coverage that accompanies them on such visits as they prostrate themselves before the monk. Anyway he was telling our team about drug use in the area and the various locally-mixed chemical confections that produce certain hallucinations, sharpness of mind etc. all for a fraction of the price of Western drugs.
And then he was telling our team how a Minister (Boghalande who attended the Geneva peace talks) came to visit him and he was telling the Minister about Room to Read, who turn up in a broken down van (when we went to visit him, our van had sprung a leak, and our seat was broken: what can I say; cost efficiency) but do really good work unlike other NGOs who turn up in Pajeros that are fresh off the boat (literally) and hem and haw and don't do adequate needs assessments and the like... haha). Then he spoke about women and dieting and how he was counselling a woman over the phone and she collapsed and he rushed over and she told him the doctor had told her to lose one inch and so she had started not eating and then had collapsed and the monk had told her: at the point of collapse, what is the point of being one inch more or less thin or fat?? And then he was talking about being in London, on a bus, in front of a couple that was busy engaging in the 'industry of love' and that no one else was concerned, but he, being Sri Lankan and therefore possessed of an innate desire to interfere in other people's business kept turning back and then surreptitiously viewing the couple through the bus' rearview mirror! Hilarious! LOVE IT. Buddhist monks rock.
And then he was telling our team how a Minister (Boghalande who attended the Geneva peace talks) came to visit him and he was telling the Minister about Room to Read, who turn up in a broken down van (when we went to visit him, our van had sprung a leak, and our seat was broken: what can I say; cost efficiency) but do really good work unlike other NGOs who turn up in Pajeros that are fresh off the boat (literally) and hem and haw and don't do adequate needs assessments and the like... haha). Then he spoke about women and dieting and how he was counselling a woman over the phone and she collapsed and he rushed over and she told him the doctor had told her to lose one inch and so she had started not eating and then had collapsed and the monk had told her: at the point of collapse, what is the point of being one inch more or less thin or fat?? And then he was talking about being in London, on a bus, in front of a couple that was busy engaging in the 'industry of love' and that no one else was concerned, but he, being Sri Lankan and therefore possessed of an innate desire to interfere in other people's business kept turning back and then surreptitiously viewing the couple through the bus' rearview mirror! Hilarious! LOVE IT. Buddhist monks rock.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The manifesto of 12
THE MANIFESTO OF 12:
Together facing the new totalitarianism
After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.
We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism.
Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide.
The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats.
Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The preachers of hate bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a world of inequality. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred.
Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of greater power imbalances: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all others.
To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed people. For that reason, we reject “cultural relativism,” which consists of accepting that Muslim men and women should be deprived of their right to equality and freedom in the name of their cultural traditions.
We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” an unfortunate concept that confuses criticism of Islamic practices with the stigmatization of Muslims themselves.
We plead for the universality of free expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on every continent, against every abuse and dogma.
We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.
Signed,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq , Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji , Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq
Together facing the new totalitarianism
After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.
We -- writers, journalists and public intellectuals -- call for resistance to religious totalitarianism.
Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide.
The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats.
Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The preachers of hate bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a world of inequality. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred.
Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of greater power imbalances: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all others.
To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed people. For that reason, we reject “cultural relativism,” which consists of accepting that Muslim men and women should be deprived of their right to equality and freedom in the name of their cultural traditions.
We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” an unfortunate concept that confuses criticism of Islamic practices with the stigmatization of Muslims themselves.
We plead for the universality of free expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on every continent, against every abuse and dogma.
We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.
Signed,
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Chahla Chafiq , Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji , Mehdi Mozaffari, Maryam Namazie, Taslima Nasreen, Salman Rushdie, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val, Ibn Warraq
beyond here there be dragons.
Centuries ago men made maps of the oceans and whenever the sea extended beyond the reach of their knowledge they would draw a dragon and write here: beyond here there be dragons.
Well I feel like that now. The line segregating the known world and the unknown world must be crossed and I am screwing my courage to the sticking place to cross it, but still, there is this faint foreboding of apprehension, that beyond here, quite simply, there be dragons.
Well I feel like that now. The line segregating the known world and the unknown world must be crossed and I am screwing my courage to the sticking place to cross it, but still, there is this faint foreboding of apprehension, that beyond here, quite simply, there be dragons.
prolongue
Some very interesting news articles of late that I can't help but talk about. Normally I think that the state of newsprint globally is a dire one, but there are some exceptional articles of reporting that redeem the reporter and give credence and honour to the term 'newspaperman'. Unfortunately recently, it has been the English and American newspapers. I still think that the Economist, the FT, the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post stand at the very vanguard of publishing. Some examples are today's article on UN reform by an ex-British Ambassador to the UN in the FT (on expanding the scope of secretary-general selection with a list of particularly commonsense reform action points), an article on Chief Justice Roberts' first dissenting opinion (and the remarkably candid antagonistic opinions from the majority), an article in yesterday's FT on the rise of China (titled Shock and Ore), talking about the very real consequences of Chinese outsourcing and growth in demand, and some articles on wine and food in the New York Times and the headlining article on Salon on the Hillary Juggernaut (with a very clever and intelligent advice letter to potential Democratic challengers) And also the astrologer's column in the Washington Post although I suspect I would get far more accurate readings from the Hindu newspapers locally).
There seems to be such a surfeit of things to do and possibilities. Wherever I go, I can't help but feel that I am never doing enough, never taking full advantage of the vast resources afforded to me, never reading as much as I should or writing as much as I should, never learning new languages, or keeping up with the old enough, never learning new musical talents (like carnatic music) or old dance traditions (bharatha natyam, roadkill when moving to Singapore), never learning how to cook wonderful, exotic dishes in keeping with sri lankan culinary traditions, never in touch enough with old friends and old passions, never being active in politics etc.etc.etc. The list is endless and very dispiriting if pondered upon long enough.
On watching a movie, as I had written to a friend and which brought back long ago memories...
My favourite form of escapism. That moment sitting in the darkness in the old Cathay cinemas having bunked school and wearing a t-shirt over the RGS pinafore, that moment just before the curtains opened and the screen glowed, seemed to me the moment most pregnant with possibilities, a moment where the best of life was about to happen, where expectations and reality coincided, where the past was forgotten and only new marvels languished in the wings, waiting to fly onto screen and become discovered, become corporeal.
There seems to be such a surfeit of things to do and possibilities. Wherever I go, I can't help but feel that I am never doing enough, never taking full advantage of the vast resources afforded to me, never reading as much as I should or writing as much as I should, never learning new languages, or keeping up with the old enough, never learning new musical talents (like carnatic music) or old dance traditions (bharatha natyam, roadkill when moving to Singapore), never learning how to cook wonderful, exotic dishes in keeping with sri lankan culinary traditions, never in touch enough with old friends and old passions, never being active in politics etc.etc.etc. The list is endless and very dispiriting if pondered upon long enough.
On watching a movie, as I had written to a friend and which brought back long ago memories...
My favourite form of escapism. That moment sitting in the darkness in the old Cathay cinemas having bunked school and wearing a t-shirt over the RGS pinafore, that moment just before the curtains opened and the screen glowed, seemed to me the moment most pregnant with possibilities, a moment where the best of life was about to happen, where expectations and reality coincided, where the past was forgotten and only new marvels languished in the wings, waiting to fly onto screen and become discovered, become corporeal.
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