this used to be my playground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just wanted to go home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now, to the trenches.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes people in Sri Lanka (usually Sinhalese people) ask me, " What do Tamil people have to complain about in Sri Lanka today? Yeah sure in the past we know there were real issues. But what is there today? "

Well, what is there today (prior to these last few months and the "end of the conflict")? There are endless accounts of abuses by Sinhalese police officers (which comes under civilian law - I'm not going to get started on the military yet) of abuse of Tamil prisoners within jails, of racial profiling at checkpoints and others, of looking the other way when Sinhalese mobs descend on Tamil shopkeepers yelling now you've lost, so pay up!, of the small, mundane, undocumented instances of prejudice. There is the oft-touted fact that Buddhism is the national religion. And the fact that although Sri Lanka recognizes Tamil as an 'official' language, government documents are not printed in Tamil, government servants (who administer Tamil areas) cannot speak Tamil, and Tamil constituents are severely inconvenienced not ONLY in terms of practical things, but if you can't even understand your local government servant, let alone what the local politician is saying, how can you possibly feel 'included' or have 'faith in government'?

Add to this the atrocities of the past few months; of the terrible abuses going on in the camps, of rapes and killings and young Tamil men disappearing lest they sign up for a new Tamil militant cause. Of the 20,000 dead due to government shelling (and of course yes, LTTE cadres also used these civilians as hostages, but this government never even considered these people's lives as worth saving; rather it was a moral trade-off that could be easily accepted). Of the current 300,000 Tamil people who live in camps that are refused access to by basic emergency agencies like ICRC and OCHA. 

And then let us go back 30, nay 50 painful years to the complex roots and histories of discrimination and oppression, of nonviolent protests that started in universities in the North, to the desperate resort to arms and violence, to the thousands of young boys and girls who signed up for a cause, who died, apparently for nothing. No one will forget this moment. No one could, even if they wanted to. And I, who started off as a moderate, who did not want this war to continue, who at one point, considered 'peace at any cost', even I am now starting to question whether I can quell that irrational side of me, the side that will never forget, and never forgive. 

We are all a product of history, and we all make our pact with the devil in some way. In reality, as much as we want to be purists, we all have blood on our hands. But that does NOT make it OKAY. That does not mean we cannot point out other injustices, current flaws. That does NOT mean we have to accept things as they are. I have never known Sri Lanka without war. And it seems like I never will. 

life

We neatly define our way out of positions. We are not pro-LTTE, nor pro-Government; we are moderates that believe in peace, justice and democracy. But the moderates have nowhere to go, and no means to make their ideals a reality. So does it matter anyway? What do all these carefully articulated theories with history relegated to the footnotes mean, when there is no way to make them true. Rather, throw your lot in with one devil or the other. This is the world we live in. There is no such thing as truth, or standing up for what you believe in. All it matters is how you die. With your people or across the lagoon from them. This is what all those principles mean ultimately. 

I will tell you a story, an imaginary story. A man lost his brother once to a war that they had not asked for, but had fought in. When the army recruited them; one brother said to another; be careful. fortunes wax and wane. Those who are strong now, may be weak later. This is the world we live in, and all your ideals of justice will have to bend or break against these truths. And the other brother said; here I stand, I can do no other. He died at a moment when the revolution he fought for, was losing. He never lived to see it rise again, as it did. And the other brother watched, and waited, and bled along with everyone else, secretly; and was forever torn between the battle that he should have fought for, and the life he chose. And he never forgave himself for it. Which brother lived better, and which brother died better? I don't know the answers to these questions. 

El Salvador

So I didn’t end up seeing much of El Salvador besides the airport, hotel, UN offices and 2 restaurants, one of which was a stone house built on top of a mountain looking down on San Salvador; Central America’s largest city. Everything was lit up at night and the whole city ran down the mountains like molten lava. Of course everyone in San Salvador thought I was Spanish and one guy told me it was because I look like a Mayan princess. Erm, I don’t really know what Mayan princesses look like but I know that they were sacrificed to the volcanoes so either way their lifespan was limited.

Oh yeah and the other weird-but-normal thing was when we were in front of the UN building buying a sandwich with a couple of colleagues, and an open pick up truck drove up, parked, and two guys wearing bullet proof vests jumped out of the back (from sitting on the rims) with submachine guns with the safeties off, according to my colleague, went into the store next door, came out five minutes later without looking anyone in the face, and roared off. El Salvador has the highest homicide rate in the world, a direct result of the large amount of small arms in the country due to the civil war that ended years ago. Ah, Sri Lanka- this is your fate.

I learnt a lot during the trip about housing the poor in Latin America; the challenges faced in post-conflict Latin American countries like El Salvador and Colombia and Nicaragua where oligarchs rule the regime and the poor are left to the mercy of guerrilla factions that inevitably end up devouring their young. I learnt too about the United Nations and the infighting that goes on with interagency turf wars, budget conflicts and staff egos clashing; national stakeholders (El Salvador just had a historic change in government and the whole Cabinet is going to be thrown out, but our housing deal was inked with them and now it looks like we will have to start at scratch; and what happens when donor-driven initiatives are enforced in a top down fashion onto the poor. Glory for all.

Adventureland

Every now and then, there is a movie that perfectly captures the mood of your moment. Not in a general, zeitgeist, kind of way, but the mood of the moment that your life is in. Adventureland is such a movie; a coming-of-age story of a young man who still believes in love (and not sex), and who still believes that life is an epic adventure waiting to be lived; the large ambitions, and not the small ones, not the minimalist outlook for him. And yet, at this point, he is still a creature of thought, and not one of action. The movie explores this hibernatory phrase, of the things that happen when dreams are broken, and patched back together again, oddly shaped, but somehow stronger than before. And of course, the culmination of the movie happens with the young hero wending his way to New York city, to solve the essential problem of himself. And to start again. 

memory

I remember standing in the middle of a waste field, four years ago. All around me were large hills, pocked with the green of tea bushes and the black of the Nuwara Eliya earth. In front of me were two community heads, two panchayat heads and their coteries, all male, all wearing sarongs that they had untied from their hips, in deference to the sole female present. I was tired, and exhausted after 10 hours of bone jarring driving and walking up and down these hills and dirt roads. Finally, we had found some land, that someone was willing to donate to build our school. The details of who, and why escape me now. All i remember that day was that the sun was setting, and the hills were casting shadows, and I was there, mediating between too panchayat heads for the land fell squarely between two districts, and both were squabbling over whose jurisdiction the school would fall under. Land title, money (from school fees), power. And me, parachuted in from so far away, yet never ever feeling anywhere else, as though I was absolutely finally at home. And then a phone call came, from as far away as New York I believe, and the connection crackled and jumped, but I heard a voice which to me then, was also home. And I spoke about where I was and what I was doing, a million miles away from the starched world of crisp Pink shirts and heels and banking, where my trainer was beginning to sink into a sea of mud, so waste the land was. And everything felt absolutely right at that moment.

tired

Where do we go from here? I attended a talk the other day about peace in Sri Lanka. One of the speakers was a Tamil activist who had lost her sister to the war (a documentary film was made about her called No More Tears Sister). She happens to be related.

The talk was full of passionate voices, from Sinhala Buddhists to rabid Tamil separatists. Many spoke movingly of people they had lost, and tears sprang to many's eyes. 900 bodies buried here and there. Hospitals where female patients were raped. War, more war, endless war. Even with a cessation of hostilities, there will just be more war.

For the first time however, I was tired. Normally I would have felt full of energy, passion, wanting to do something about it; talking, meeting people. Now, I was simply tired. Exhausted again, the way I was with Sri Lanka. Spent, unsure, uncertain again with nowhere to go. And again, and again that quote came back to me, from someone who was born in my family. and who died in this country and this war that will not stop.

"Some times tears flow uncontrollably and I cannot work anymore. I know I want to be strong, I want to call my historical strength as a woman. I want to remember and hold on to memories of women who conquered the inability and pain. [...] I cannot leave this small country, its belly constricted by hunger and mind blurred by pain. My head tells my emotions — hold on, hold on for one month maybe two — the routine will engulf you — the need of others — disturbs the silence of the tomb. One day some gun will silence me. And it will not be held by an outsider — but by a son — born in the womb of this very society — from a woman with whom my history is shared."

back then

back then, knowing myself beloved, exuberant in your presence, i was the flowering tree: daily transforming, girl-child to tree, careless of blossoms, daily unleafed, daily budding, lavish with words, immoderate in joy, a willing daphne, the bride of the king's son.
- transparent hummingbird.

Cry, Beloved Country

"Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much."- Alan Patton

a night devoid of stars

As the official war in Sri Lanka between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) draws to an end; the question percolating now in Colombo and donor capitals is what next? Will the government use the considerable political capital it has gained through a successful war to embark upon a project of pluralistic nation-building? Or has the eradication of the LTTE as an immediate threat also eradicated the need for a political solution?

Without a political solution, many fear that the LTTE will find increased support both inside Sri Lanka and externally among the diaspora to mount an offensive further down the line. After all, that is the nature of a guerrilla war, to recede, regroup and resurge. Some say that the government's proposal to develop the North, provide jobs and kickstart the economy will reduce deprivation and erode support for the Tigers in their heartland. But the same program has been attempted in the East, and increased lawlessness and militarization prevail.

Unfortunately, a meaningful political solution with autonomy is unlikely given this government's nationalist allies. The prospects for successful post conflict reconstruction in Sri Lanka are grim. The lack of depth and breadth in horizontal ties between groups, the high political fragmentation, the absence of leadership in the Tamil community, the scrabbling over resources and power-sharing that is likely to ensue between all political parties, the uneasy shadow of Sri Lanka's large northern neighbor, the massive internationalization of the conflict with multiple donors and agendas, the muzzled press, the worrying ability of the Rajapakse regime to operate outside the law and the lack of true bottom-up representation likely point to a failed reconstruction process.

And sadly, amongst all of these competing narratives, it is those without a voice that suffer the most, the starving, the injured, the displaced, the forgotten. The mere absence of war, as has been oft-quoted, and in Sri Lanka, oft-proven, is not peace.

the arc of the moral universe

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square hole. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do." — Apple Computer Inc.

And then they came for me

The war is nearly over. Jaffna has been completely captured, the highway has been taken control of, and now the Tigers are confined to one tiny pocket. This is the beginning of a long slow descent into hell. As Martin Luther King said, “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Last month, a leading editor of one of the few independent newspapers in Sri Lanka was assassinated. Assassinated and not murdered, because it was a political act, widely believed to be the long arm of the government, reaching out to punish those who had spoken against it. This editorial (excerpts of which are pasted below, link also below) is a poignant reminder of how journalism can change the world, of how truth is the only thing that can save us all, of how principles matter, even if, and especially if, lives are laid down for it. And I have to say, that in these days of cynicism, working from the vaunted halls of an international organization that is supposed to keep the peace, I am reminded that all it takes, is one human being, to make me believe that the right thing should be done.

The Sunday Leader
(http://www.thesundayleader.lk/20090111/editorial-.htm)

“No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honor to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

I have been in the business of journalism a good long time. Indeed, 2009 will be The Sunday Leader’s 15th year. Many things have changed in Sri Lanka during that time, and it does not need me to tell you that the greater part of that change has been for the worse. We find ourselves in the midst of a civil war ruthlessly prosecuted by protagonists whose bloodlust knows no bounds. Terror, whether perpetrated by terrorists or the state, has become the order of the day. Indeed, murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges. For neither group have the risks ever been higher or the stakes lower.

Why then do we do it? I often wonder that. After all, I too am a husband, and the father of three wonderful children. I too have responsibilities and obligations that transcend my profession, be it the law or journalism. Is it worth the risk? Many people tell me it is not. Friends tell me to revert to the bar, and goodness knows it offers a better and safer livelihood. Others, including political leaders on both sides, have at various times sought to induce me to take to politics, going so far as to offer me ministries of my choice. Diplomats, recognizing the risk journalists face in Sri Lanka, have offered me safe passage and the right of residence in their countries. Whatever else I may have been stuck for, I have not been stuck for choice.

But there is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience.”

….
An example that has inspired me throughout my career in journalism has been that of the German theologian, Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Jews

and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists

and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me

and there was no one left to speak out for me.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: The Leader is there for you, be you Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, low-caste, homosexual, dissident or disabled. Its staff will fight on, unbowed and unafraid, with the courage to which you have become accustomed. Do not take that commitment for granted. Let there be no doubt that whatever sacrifices we journalists make, they are not made for our own glory or enrichment: they are made for you. Whether you deserve their sacrifice is another matter. As for me, God knows I tried.

A.D.

Hearts will never be made practical until they are made unbreakable.
The Wizard of Oz

nov 4th

In retrospect, at least for the Democratic primary candidates, it seems inevitable that the political juggernaut of the Obama campaign, of the man, and the machine that brought him in unprecedented ways, to the attention of voters and those who had never voted before, would rise to the top. No candidate, including McCain, has run a better campaign. And no candidate was more unexpected, in every which way. For those who had planned Clinton’s campaign starting on the Wednesday after the election in 2004, - this was in every way, an eventuality that was totally unplanned for. And the weight of the expectations are massive, should Obama become President. (And survives in office.)

But more than that, I think that the past two years, which has led up to this moment, has shown even the most hardened cynic that politics matter, that government can make a difference, for better or for worse, that people can change, and are looking for hope, that the best in us can be brought out, rather than the worst in us. Whatever happens tonight, whether this is confirmed or not, the journey of the past two years, in this country, from small steel towns in Pennsylvania, to the carworkers in Detroit, to the mansions of Orange County, has given everyone pause, and a moment in which they have realized their commonality. And the mantra of hope amidst despair?

It reminds me of a quote from Camus: In the depths of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.

proof

Proof

That I did always love,
I bring thee proof:
That till I loved
I did not love enough.\

That I shall love
always,
offer thee
That love is life,
And life hath
immortality.

This, dost thou doubt,
sweet?
Then have I
Nothing to show
But Calvary.

-Emily Dickinson

From: Poems by Emily Dickinson Series One
Edited by two of her friends
Mabel Loomis Todd and T.W. Higginson

today

Sometimes as I sit here, typing away at these offices in New York as an anonymous cubicle rat, looking for example, at the implications of the subprime crisis on microfinance markets, I can’t believe I used to have another life, as short as just 3 months ago, and then another life 2 years before that, and then another life 2 years before that. From the days of London where everything seemed touched in gold, with not a worry in the world, to Sri Lanka and feeling alive in a way that has never been matched, to school and the luxury of ivory towers to New York and a sense of transition, everything seems as though it has happened to someone else, and I feel as though I am suspended outside myself, waiting in chrysalis for the next, and hopefully final, transformation.

news

What a terrible news day. I am seriously considering adding chocolate as a major food group. First, the news from Sri Lanka is awful, and it seems as though there is finally going to be a conquering, with the Tamil Tigers about to be decisively wiped out. What will happen to Tamil civilians, Tamil IDPs is yet to be known. Only the vanquished remember history, someone said. Then news that the bailout was rejected and the Dow fell 5% in a day, in A DAY! If the bailout doesn’t succeed (and the problem does not seem to be the version of the bailout, but the principle of it, as many members of Congress seem ideologically opposed to it on both sides of the aisle), then the country, and the world is in for a serious, serious recession, approaching Depression-like proportions. And I don’t use the D word lightly. And what else? McCain seems to be up in the polls post-debate, and my personal life is also blowing up.

autun

It's been a busy few weeks in New York. The weather is changing too, with surprising rainstorms that bring the hint of autumn in the air. The city is waiting for the first nip in the air that signals fall, and certain trees in Central Park are already changing colour, heralding fall. Autumn is my favourite season of all, the kiss before dying (I am currently enamoured of that phrase).

Today I saw a trailer for Revolutionary Road, by Sam Mendes, with DiCaprio and Winslet, and it was set to my all-time favourite song, a spooky, ghostful rendition of Wild is The Wind by Nina Simone and it was the first time i've ever seen that song featured in any commercial movie, ad, tv serial whatever. I'm sad, because I thought it was all mine and now everyone is going to be downloading it off iTunes.

eat, pray, love

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. His purpose was to shake you up, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life.”

Eat, Pray, Love.

Again and Again

Again and Again

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall; again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Mr. and Mrs. Iyer

I watched Mr. and Mrs. Iyer last night, a Hindi-Tamil-Bengali movie directed by Aparna Sen, about a young Tamil Brahmin girl who falls in love with a young Muslim man during a bus ride through communal riots between Hindus and Muslims. Although it was slow at parts and the cinematography absolutely abysmal, it was absolutely moving, poignant and sad. Rahul Bose, where have you been all my life? This is the kind of movie I want to make, with actors that know how to act, and with a subject matter that deserves wide exposure, and that needs to be treated sensitively and analytically. More than the issue of religious intolerance, the poignancy arose from the forbidden affair between a married Tamil woman and a Muslim man, who shows her how beautiful life can be.

election

I vowed that I wouldn't blog about politics in Election 2008, as opposed to 2004, as faithful readers of my blog will no doubt remember (in fact I remember persuading one faithful reader to hold a sign in an election rally in Paris for Kerry-Edward). Because it's just futile and emotional and utterly useless.

But. The entry of Sarah Palin in the race is just so bloody infuriating, especially now that the Democrats have a real chance of losing. As Tom Friedman says in today's article: If John McCain can win after 8 years of Bush, and a terrible economy; then the Democrats deserve to lose. But I'm also tired of this logic: that somehow the election was Gore's to lose in 2000, Kerry's to lose in 2004 and Hillary's to lose in 2008. Guess what? THEY ALL FUCKING LOST. And what chance does a black man have against a redneck crowd?

I cannot imagine, but am terribly fearful, that it's real, that the Republicans are going to win for another 8 years. Another 8 years of the same kind of policies. (And for anyone who thinks that McCain is different from Bush, I have got an earful for you.). Jesus.


We're holding an Election Night party up here in Harlem. Time will tell if there're going to be tears of joy or sorrow, but there're definitely going to be tears.

random

I enrolled at the Digital Film Academy yesterday, for a sixteen week evening film making program, including some basic lessons in sound, lighting, cinematography and camera work, as well as working with some real actors (albeit struggling waiters). I have to conceptualize a ten minute work, so am looking for ideas, and if you have any, send them over! Am thinking about a five minute music video (set to Bollywood music of course), and a five minute public service announcement type of thing.... but we shall see.

Am also thinking of joining a writer's room, but it occurs to me, that I only have a finite amount of time in the next four months, and there is a limit to its elasticity. Other than that, have been traipsing about, discovering the new neighbourhood of Hell's Kitchen, (very nice), and of the Upper West Side. Very soon, I shall be reduced to blogging solely about my consumer experiences and nothing else.

Last night was a rousing night spent throwing popcorn at the television with my room mate, as we watched John McCain deliver his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Everytime we saw a black man or woman, or an Indian man or woman cheering, we'd say "Traitor!! Shut up and sit down!". But I have to say that Obama is soon going to have to face a decision over whether he is going to go into the gutter with them, or if he can win without it.

back

Back from London, where the rain and the wind blew into my hair, sent leaves scattering through the side streets of Notting Hill, and into the pews of empty churches. Flew into New York with a terrible cold chasing me, put myself promptly into bed, trying not to obsess about the events of the past week. And now there is no escape from the real world, from this future that awaits.

My new roommate is a journo, who's had a book out, and got into a furious discussion on Judith Miller (of Valerie Plame fame), who she termed as a "Thin Chick with a Serious Wardrobe" (room mate is also a Thin Chick, but without a Serious Wardrobe) and other discussions on what is age-appropriate dating. She's also dating a guy who's having an affair with someone in his office, and who's getting a divorce that's going to trial because his wife is having an affair with her Brazilian personal trainer. Welcome to New York.

festina lente

(hurry slowly)

Well, I have now moved to New York, and the city has swallowed me whole in the past four days, which were an uncharacteristic whirlwind of activity. How I long for the peaceful days of Cambridge, for red brick, spires and earnestness.

Freed

Today was marked by a lot of writing on Sri Lanka. It was exhausting. And I read How Reading Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, a hilarious account of Proust's life, in a parody of a self-help version. I was laughing out loud, which I think to date, only Bill Bryson has made me do. (Then again, it doesn't take much to make me bark.)

Had a random lunch with a group of philosophy doctoral students, which of course, over lunch turned into an argument over free will and determinism, and the philosophy of action. It recalled the many discussions of political philosophy we used to have in the LSE corridors. My own view is one that more or less hews to St. Augustine's Christian platonic vision, although it does fudge the debate somewhat in that, individuals, who are fallen, do not possess true knowledge. Therefore, as far as they are concerned, they act with agency, freedom and direct their own life. Crucially, this gives them the capacity to choose between good and evil. God, on the other hand, is all-knowing, omniscient and has full knowledge of the entire life of every individual. He however, is not directive.

The philosophy of action though, which looks at what gives individuals the motive and intent to act, (or particularly, to act in causing harm to others.). This however is where I draw the line at philosophy.

play-ing

We watched the Importance of Being Earnest today by the Harvard Radcliffe Repertory Theatre, and I must admit, for an entirely student-run production, it was startlingly good, with a diverse cast, (except for some rather affected British accents; why is it that putting on an English accent represents the height of thespian power for American actors?!). It reminded me of the sheer hard work that goes into any production, of the technical aspects of lighting, story telling, directing etc. I have a friend who graduated from the Yale School of Drama who's premiering his play this weekend off-off-off Broadway (and it's called Finding Ways To Prove You're Not an al-Qaeda Terrorist When You're Brown), a one man brown act , which I think is going to be hilarious! After all, graduating from the school that bore such actors as Meryl Streep can hardly be a disadvantage. This young man also has the singular acquisition of the playrights to Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, the story of a young, gay Sri Lankan Tamil boy growing up in a society that is fracturing. Oh, art and all its possibilities.

a true story

In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become "better citizens." He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo's beautiful novella Pedro Paramo, Octavio Paz' essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude, Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude,and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Agatha Christie and Edgar Allen Poe.

Neza's Chief of Police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways. First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary. Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. "A police officer must be worldy, and books enrich people's experience, indirectly." Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. "Risking your life to save other people's lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.

"Words on The Street" by Angel Gurria-Quintana, in Financial Times, March 3, 2006, as quoted in How Fiction Works.

How Fiction Works

After a rough couple of days in which it was spectacularly apparent to me again that I have completely no clue what to do with my life, a small shining light was revealed in this fabric of night, and I received an email from the local bookstore, saying that the book that I had ordered had arrived.

I doubletimed it to the bookstore, handed in my order number and waited expectantly. The assistant came over to me, his eyes shining. Look at this, he said. it's so well done. The cover is straight out of the 20s, the font of the prose with its myriad footnoting is done in early nineteenth-century style, like Flaubert. I was holding a first edition, hardcover, in hot pink of How Fiction Works by James Wood, a Harvard professor of literature.

I'm halfway through, and I can't stop reading and at the same time I am pacing the reading, not too much at any one time, because I can't remember the last time I encountered such a dry, engaging, contemplative, passionate-about-good-literature, voice. And anyone who can reference Madame Bovary, Mr. Biswas and Robert Fisk at the same time has got my allegiance.

In reading it, I was also reminded of the fact that literary theory is often hijacked by dry academics who seek to impose rather developed discussions of philosophy, historicism and the old saws of culture and identity on a tract about human interaction. Wood's form of literary theory, is more basic, and truly exploratory, focusing on questions like What is a character? and acknowledging his own limitations on interpretativeness. While he is afflicted with a rather quaint adoration for Stendhal, James and Flaubert, and a well-appointed distaste for the postmodern (yay! another person who thinks Updike is a toolshed!), his observations are insightful, erudite and truly eye-opening.

It is an excellent, well-reviewed book (from The Economist no less, as well as the New York Times and I can't wait to continue reading it.

the dark knight.

So after having waited FOREVER to watch The Dark Knight, I have to say that it was a trifle incoherent, and though Bale was quite serviceable in the role, he spent most of the movie in that suit, with an obscured voice. It would take a magician to be able to overcome the stultifying effects of that suit. While the movie was chock-a-block with plot developments, action sequences, and a lot of expensive skulduggery, it lacked some grace, a melody, a duality really. I hate to say this because I am indifferent to Michael Keaton, but Tim Burton's Batman and especially Batman Returns with the unforgettable Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, had a crazy camp horror to it which this rather serious-minded, supposedly 'dark' version lacks. The one redeeming part though was the end, when Batman is being chased, forever on the run. Maggie Gyllenhaal however, lightened and smartened what was otherwise, a rather clunky movie. Sigh. And now one has to wait for the abomination of Terminator. Oh Christian Bale of the Art Film, wherefore art thou?

samantha power

OMG! Drama alert!

Samantha Power (Pulitzer award winning journalist and Harvard Kennedy School professor, and former foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama), got married to Cass Sunstein on July 4th who she met on Obama's campaign in January! (Yes, that's seven months of dating and subsequent marriage). Power is 39. Sunstein is 54. And the real goss; he used to be the partner of Martha Nussbaum!!!!

Okay, I gotta figure out what this (pretty unimposing) guy (- check out the Wikipedia mugshot) had that he seduced two of my all time favourite journalists and nonfiction writers. Man. I gotta get some of that.

wow

Wow. Saying goodbye to 2 best friends in 2 weeks, with a few tears at the airport for both of them really blows.

On other news, I have become a day trader!!! MUAHAHAHAHAHA. The plan is to invest my meagre savings in the next penny stock that's going to make 300% in six months, and then I might never have to work a job again (at least for 2 months. so do the math).

I am going to watch The Dark Knight tonight, so get prepared for the usual Bale-ful drooling.

a party

There is a party going down below me, on the grass lawn of a large Georgian mansion. The lawn is about half the size of a football field. It is midnight now, and I am peering into the party below, feeling quite like Sabrina, perched at the level of tree-tops, waiting for Bogart (originally Holden) to waltz out, impeccably attired in a white tuxedo blazer and bowtie, bearing champagne and a bon mot. It is that kind of party, with its patrons attired in backless evening dress, with a jazz quartet playing old Sinatra songs, with laughter spiralling up into my apartment, tinged with alcohol and unaccountably gay. Don't they know there is a war going on? We are, after all, in war time. I imagine these are what parties looked like in the late 20s, when the war was going on somewhere else, when it hadn't yet arrived on these shores. And Cambridge with the bluest of pedigrees harking back to the Revolution, reeking of old-money, and Gatsby-like parties filled with drunken intellectuals, the silliest drunks of them all. The last place where the war would ever come, but come it did, as the monument of the dead in the commons next to us attests. There will be newer monuments, soon enough.

Bone Dreams

I spent two years searching for this poem on the internet, and now finally, some English department, misguided student (by definition) has posted it up!

Bone Dreams

I

White bone found
on the grazing:
the rough, porous
language of touch

and its yellowing, ribbed
impression in the grass —
­a small ship-burial.
As dead as stone,
flint-find, nugget
of chalk,
I touch it again,
I wind it in

the sling of mind
to pitch it at England
and follow its drop
to strange fields.

II

Bone-house:
a skeleton
in the tongue's
old dungeons.

I push back
through dictions,
Elizabethan canopies,
Norman devices,

the erotic mayflowers
of Provence
and the ivied Latins
of churchmen

to the scop's
twang, the iron
flash of consonants
cleaving the line.

In the coffered
riches of grammar
and declensions
I found bān-hūs,

its fire, benches,
wattle and rafters,
where the soul
fluttered a while

in the roofspace.
There was a small crock
for the brain,
and a cauldron

of generation
swung ar the centre:
love-den, blood-holt,
dream-bower.

IV

Come back past
philology and kennings,
re-enter memory
where the bone's lair

is a love-nest
in the grass.
I hold my lady's head
like a crystal

and ossify myself
by gazing: I am screes
on her escarpments,
a chalk giant

carved upon her downs.
Soon my hands, on the sunken
fosse of her spine,
move towards the passes.

V

And we end up
cradling each other
between the lips
of an earthwork.


As I estimate
for pleasure
her knuckles' paving,
the turning stiles

of the elbows,
the vallum of her brow
and the long wicket
of collar-bone,

I have begun to pace
the Hadrian's Wall
of her shoulder,
dreaming of Maiden Castle.

VI

One morning in Devon
I found a dead mole
with the dew still beading it.
I had thought the mole

a big-boned coulter
but there it was,
small and cold
as the thick of a chisel.

I was told, ‘Blow,
blow back the fur on his head.
Those little points
were the eyes.

And feel the shoulders.’
touched small distant: Pennines,
a pelt of grass and grain
running south.

By Seamus Heaney

a sadhu in the river ganges

Oh yeah baby, let it fly

(from BBC News In Pictures)

cooking

Another successful cooking day! Made garlic-rosemary lamb with cucumber yogurt puree in whole wheat pita, and roasted nectarines to finish off. Next, I think I would like to master a complicated dish- not along the lines of molecular gastronomy, but something with a little more finesse...

Met a Sri Lankan friend who'd spent the year in Sri Lanka, and he talked about having to defend Eastern council elections (when he was against it on principle), on having to defend a rape case of an 11 year child by her uncle, who ended up with a miscarriage, on traffic violations with racist cops and how he was so incensed that he was determined to take it to court: the slow, and steady unravelling of any sanity and calmness.

there used to be a playground

Found myself quite unexpectedly at school again after being unable to get an internet connection or phone signal where I am currently living (in the boondocks known as Harvard Square), and it was quite disorientating to wander these empty corridors, after lunch with a good friend and reminisce about all the times we would be rushing around late for class, talking smack about professors and fellow class mates, furiously working on an (inevitably) last minute assignment, having to work in one of those mandatory group assignments (a favorite of the Kennedy School) and silently grinding a pencil into my thigh as a self-important gasbag drones on about Iran's nuclear policy (a nother favorite at the Kennedy School). Eating from the world's worst canteen known as Sodexho where food comes to die. Trying to print yet another draft of a paper on school printers that ran out of toner and the will to live sometime back in 1975. Reading the NY times coverage of our school and a professor who quite inexplicably was named the "Prince of Darkness" in said coverage. Bumping into the various hookups and breakups on campus fulled by politics and desire. Talking to Pulitzer-winning professors who inexplicably burst into tears when asked about their personal life (or lack thereof). Obamamania on every corner and corridor. Damn, I miss this place.

bale-fully yours,

Managed to haul my (rather large) ass to the gym today, thereby dispelling the contentedness I have been feeling for the last 2 weeks. Man, it still hurts.

I am starting on an intensive French and gym regime. Rented Indochine, an old Cesar winning movie with Catherine Deneuve. This had all better come back to me rather quickly OR ELSE. As for the gym I plan to spend at least 2 hours a day (HAHAHAHAHA) for 22 days (the time it takes to form a habit) this month. It's going to be brutal but I am inspired by Christian Bale who a) lost 63 pounds in 12 weeks by eating an apple and a can of tuna a day (don't worry that is (sadly) not going to be me) and b)got fit for American Psycho and Batman by working out 3 hours a day for 6 weeks. My goals are a bit more modest, but then again, I don't have the body of Bale, who let's face it, is a Greek God with a Welsh accent.

On other news, it is amazing how difficult writing is. Particularly, the architecture of a story with plot, meta themes, character development, denoument, finale. And how the language should not serve itself, but should be in service of the story. Some writers (y'all know who I am talking about), make it seem effortless, like magic. Ahhh. Another aspiration, filed away in Things To Do When I Return As a Grasshopper.

And how could I post today without writing about tennis? I remember when I first saw Nadal play against Federer. It was with my mum, and it was back in 2003, in a hotel room in Cambodia. The sum total of what she knows about tennis can be described as Every *Bleep* Thing Shouted By John McEnroe, but she was quite enamoured of Nadal. (She has a thing for Latinos- cf Desperado, which I think we watched 3 times because of Antonio Banderas.). In any case, what a match.

american psycho

"Do you think Soho is becoming too... commercial ?"
" Yes. I read that."
" Oh, who gives a rat's ass ?"
" Hey, that affects us."
"Well, what about the massacres in Sri Lanka, honey ? Doesn't that affect us too ? Do you know anything about Sri Lanka ? How, like, the Sikhs are killing tons of Israelis over there ?
"Come on, Bryce. There are a lot more important problems than Sri Lanka to worry about."
American Psycho

random

So... by all accounts... its' been a month since I last posted during which I have a) graduated , b) survived 2 weeks with the family at the Cape, c) moved house and packed up 2 years worth of stuff, and d) continued working.

I have July off so I shall be posting thoughts such as I wish I had tartes framboises and Why are there endless storms in Cambridge and How many movies can I watch per day (record of 5 so far.)

But quite seriously, I have been on a massive Christian Bale streak, he of the cheekbones-so-sharp-it-could-slice-sexual-tension fame. Watched Equilibrium yesterday, a Matrix-type movie in which Bale was quite extraordinary as a robot who learns what emotion is. I had seen him first in Empire of the Sun, a rather prosaic Spielberg tearjerker, in which Bale was so astonishing that they had to create an awards category for him (Best Juvenile something or other). And then of course had seen Laurel Canyon, and American Psycho, and of course the Batman movies. I like actors who do not impose their personality over the role, but rather are in total service to the role and do not try to be likable. Another fine performance seen recently was Casey Affleck in Gone Baby Gone.

Am also reading Dreams From My Father, a poignant, searching memoir written by Barack Obama which was started right after he graduated from Harvard Law and way before he acquired Bono-like fame. Next is A Writer's People by Naipaul, whose nonfiction writing I adore for its simplicity, elegance and insight. He is such an un-showy writer, unlike Rushdie.

Which brings me to my recent Rushdie sighting at the New York Public Library attended with JP. Suffice it to say, that the man was utterly repellent, and for, I might add, not very good reason either. The truly great are truly humble, and those who fall just short of greatness in their work, especially as writers, also lack that humility which allows openness to perspectives and the ability to continue plumbing the depths of the human heart.

It's a Beautiful Day (U2)

A new day, a new nominee, a new graduation, a new life. If this country can change, then by god, so can I.

food!

C and I made dinner yesterday, to wit, the following: watermelon, basil, mint, watercress and feta cheese salad, followed by cava beans, spinach and pasta salad, followed by roast nectarines with a vanilla bean sauce, with of course, copious amounts of zinfandel (and when that ran out), pinot grigio and shandies. The menu tonight, spinach and red onion salad with maple-dijon vinaigrette, roast salmon with fig and onion jam, and sour cream and cinnamon cake.

Gardening

On the return from Quebec City, we drove through the rolling hills of Vermont, the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where we stopped off at a true-blue diner), and back into Cambridge. Opened the post to see that my package of Jo Malone samples had arrived and now, having sprayed White Jasmine, Amber & Lavender, Orange Blossom, Nectarine and Honey, and French Lime Blossom on me, I am happily content, smelling like an English Garden, writing my very last paper.

Vive La Quebec

Am in Vieux Quebec City now. Who had a clue that this existed in North America, this old town, that looks like it was plucked out of fairy-tale Berlin, Prague and Paris, where everything is in French (as the proud Quebecois and their independence movement will attest to), and where above all, the food is in French. Although it has been busy with work, being holed up in cafes in Montreal and Quebec on cobblestoned streets with horse carriages passing by, with endless chocolat chaud, cafe au lait and croissants, with rain pattering off the grey stones, with the sun bursting out of clouds, ricocheting off an ancient chateau, and every arrowing spire in the city, with tiny art galleries and Catholic churches around every corner, with Nina Simone singing in every cafe, it feels like I have walked into an alternate universe, and the past and the future both seem very far away.

negating my ass

I am valiantly trying to write my hardest paper yet: a paper for which I receive no credit, which topic I have to conjure out of thin air, which will be read by one of the few people whose intellectual opinion I consider relevant, and which is daunting because it is about literature, which I have enjoyed as a reader, but never as a critical theorist (and thank god for that).

For example, consider the sentence below:
"What Hegel established is, then, that violence is a necessary moment in the history of the recognition of human freedom. This history initiates a contradictory outcome: it asserts freedom through the negation of freedom. However slavery, generates the conditions of its own emancipation so that the process moves toward the mutual cancellation of servitude and domination. It is a negation of the negation: The negation that instituted bondage is negated in its turn."

I have read this paragraph 3 times and I still don't understand it. ARRGHHGHGHGHGH.

2 more papers before the conferral of a degree- so close and yet so far.

An Application For Credit For PostColonial Literature

The course is a rigorous examination of political and social identity as seen through the prism of personal experience, and taught by the leading postcolonial theorist in the world. We examine the works of Frantz Fanon for example, a Algerian revolutionary who wrote the discourse on Algerian independence and use him to understand the role of violence in transitioning societies such as India, South Africa and Sri Lanka. We examine the results of Empire, as seen through the works of Conrad and Bronte and analyze how they create a dependent society which, when given freedom, fractures into internecine strife due to an inability to self-govern. We examine black history, through the works of Jean Rhys and Toni Morrison, and analyze what happens post-independence for oppressed communities, and the struggle to rebuild themselves, their society and their identity. These are broad topics and we examine how they interlock, create cleavages and result in how identity is formed, and how personal identity translates into a political consciousness.As to how they are relevant to an MPP degree, I find here at Harvard that many think of policy as a series of economic and theoretic prescriptions. Understanding how individuals and communities are shaped by policy is, I believe, integral to crafting humane and sustainable policies. Coming from Sri Lanka, a country to which I intend to return, and which has been shaped by war and by a colonial experience, I find it essential to take ONE course here at Harvard, which allows me to explore all these themes above and reflect on how they may shape a country.

Cry, beloved country

The City

You said: "I'll go to another city, go to another shore
find another city better than this one
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them
totally."
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighbourhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things
elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Constantine P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley & Phillip Sherrard

A Bus Named Desire

What a night! North Carolina called for Barack, and Indiana with only a sliver of a margin of victory for Hillary. It has been the most astonishing of campaigns, and of primaries to date. While at many moments I have been numbed by the sheer drudgery of it all, at many other moments too I have been excited and thrilled by the prospects of change in government, of youth turning out in droves, of contests between a black man and a white woman, and most possibly of all, of hope. I started the campaign a fervent Hillary supporter, but the dial has now swung to Obama, especially after his speech on race. If he could grow up in this country, run in politics, and still give a speech like that- then that's it. And Hillary with her ridiculous proposals on a gas tax holiday, and her attempts at populism amongst working-class white voters is just alienating now. I relished the prospect of a fight for the nomination, but now I join the clamouring for her to step down, for the party to rally around Obama, for the national mood to turn towards the general election. And to many friends who have literally taken the semester off school in all but name, campaigning in rural North Carolina, in Pittsburgh, in New Hampshire, running call shops out of their garages and mobilizing the campaign; a massive congratulations for the ardour, the commitment and the belief in public service.

xobni

So I have just downloaded this app called Xobni, for those of you who are Outlook users and have clunky interfaces, (read the NY Times article on it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/05/technology/05xobni.html?em&ex=1210305600&en=ec7ba19942188f37&ei=5087%0A)

It tells me that my number 1 ranked most frequently emailed person is my co-chair of the Conference. The total tally? 1739 emails sent over six months over 1244 different conversations.

And you ask me why I needed a Blackberry.

let a thousand flowers bloom

Took the afternoon off with C, and we hiked through Boston, including the never-before-ventured-into Jamaica Plain. C's plan was to go to the arboretum, (a place like a topiary, aviary but focused of course on trees), and set on sprawling acreage in JP, at the heart of beautiful parkland. So in no short order, the following specimens were noted and surreptiously smelt, ; rosehips that were not yet in bloom, wisteria, seven different specimens of lilacs, elms, sassafras (which apparently goes into root beer until they discovered it could give you cancer), some japanese cherry trees, willows, violets, grape hyacinths, and of course tulips which are everywhere in bloom. C, the budding horticulturist, could identify at sight all of the above, whereas I of course, vainly ran to the copper tags and feigned knowledge.

my girl

"We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience"- The English Patient

The reading by Michael Ondaatje under the quiet cavernous New York Public Library and the discussion that followed represented a four year break in the time that I had seen him. There was an astonishing passage, hallucinatory according to one reviewer, of a boy on a horse riding through an eclipse. Though I have only read the book Divisadero once, the reading of it was like opening a wound again, the scar the memory of it.

There are many flaws with Ondaatje's style of writing, which I am not oblivious to; the inability to pitch dialogue, the inadequacy of the political and moral vision, which is found in the best of Naipaul, the perfection of every character; that is to say, a lack of mundane, annoying characteristics (no one is a habitual nose-picker in his novels) which epicizes the characters. All of that is true. But there is an unbearable compassion in his writing, a true recognition of pain, loss and betrayal, a haunting that is there in every story, and is left like the memory of lingering smoke in every reader. For the sheer humanity and understanding in his novels, for his homage to the complexity of how the past links up with the future, and the present, there is no one quite like him. And all of that is leaving aside his much feted language; quiet sentences precede quiet sentences of clarity and beauty, until in the middle of a paragraph, at the end of a sentence, there is a sudden starburst of beauty that verges on pain; because the revelation on the page is so true, so unexpected, and now, having read it, changes life so imperceptibly.

And with all of that, I am plunging into Divisadero again.

the postcolonial wretched

"Each age has its peculiar opacities and its urgent missions. The parts we play in the design and direction of historical transformations are shadowed by the contingency of events and the quality of our characters. Sometimes we break the mold; at others, our will is broken. What enables us to aspire to the fraught and fervent desire for freedom is the belief that human beings are capable of imagining what Fanon once described as a "time [that] must no longer e that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world",
Homi Bhabha, in his introduction to the Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

H and K

Having just watched Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, I can safely concur with the review of an institution as august as the New York Times in saying that this, pardon the oxymoron, is an intelligent stoner raunch comedy. Kal Penn as an actor has never appealed to me: even in comic roles he seems to be constantly overacting with his timing just that little bit off, and as for well serious acting, the Namesake: enough said. John Cho is the real gem in this comedy, and I much prefer this to the Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle.

I have been putting the P-R-O back into procrastinating and need to really plow through some serious work OR ELSE- all will be doom and gloom. In a way, and I am going to regret this the moment I say it, being at a desk 24/7 does mean that one tends to get things done; especially things that one is interested in.

ice cream

long conversations with father, and things are progressing slowly but surely.

I have discovered a new, favourite ice cream: goodbye strawberry cheesecake (Haagen-Dazs), hello caramelized pear and pecan. Needless to say the corporate drones at Haagen Dazs did not come up with this winner by themselves; it was the result of a nationwide competition on flavours, and its out on limited edition.

Now if someone, why not, can make rose and almond ice-cream, and other floral/nutty combinations, my heart is theirs.

poverty

Wading through fifty United Nations cases on successful business strategies to reach the poor, from cement factories in Indonesia to pharmaceuticals in Africa, and trying very hard to suppress the faint glimmer of hope that again, letting a thousand flowers bloom might be the only way to muddle along in the process to alleviate, and END poverty. What am I going to do when I can no longer do this stuff either?

irises

Bought deep-purple irises and white stargazer lilies, the scent dense and rich and flooding my tiny room. I do so love flowers, but only very certain kinds. No daisies and gerberas, baby's breath or hyacinths or any of those bright and pretty flowers. Lilies (always stargazer, never calla and never any other colour than the funereal white) above all, bright yellow daffodils, deep red-black roses, irises always and endless lavender, and dying tulips which I think are so much more extravagant than tulips in their prime, in their overblown state, pneumatic, like Dolly Parton now and not before.

Spent last night reading from an old compilation of the New Yorker, Slight Rebellion off Madison (Salinger) and Autobiography by Fitzgerald (F. Scott). Written way back in the sixtie, I still think that Salinger is the standard to which all coming-of-age novels aspire. And my favourite of all of his work (notwithstanding the unread Hapworth 16, 1924 to be dug up from the bowels of Widener before I leave), is definitely For Esme with Love and Squalor.

It is time to look unflinchingly into the future and march forward. First, the taxes.

growing

this is how I feel today: like a grumpy polar bear ready to rumble.

The funniest thing i heard in two days was courtesy of a certain editor of an indian daily who asked me in all seriousness, "Am I a dwarf or am I a child"? I am still pondering this question now. Is there anything left to grow into?

homie is my homie

am feeling thoroughly beaten up and nauseous. I can't quite pinpoint why, but the overload of work to do seems rather monstrous, and procrastination the only way to seriously deal with it.
Hopefully the yoga class today won't turn into some crazed trampolining class with projectile missiles and I can be at peace.

Thanks to JP, I now have tickets to see... drumroll please... MICHAEL ONDAATJE AT THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY!!!!! Thank you thank you.

What else? In class with the homie today, and it came quite unbidden to me, that Christabel Lamotte in Possession must be modelled off Dorothy Sayer's letters, in the use of the witch in the turret and the madwoman in the attic and the words that burn the paper they are written on. And both, highbrow literary detective fiction stories, are not grounded in any sort of reality about love and life; instead they are fantasies, cleverly disguised as stiff-upper-lip romances. I can't quite explain it more than that. I fell in love with these books, of Ash and Christabel, of Peter and Harriet. But the real writing lies with the Virgin in the Garden, and in the letters, and they are bitter, thwarted and full of pain.

Never mind. The weekend was full of alcohol-induced reality, and I am still feeling exhausted by it all. I wish I could go somewhere, to a house by the sea, with the wind on the sand, and great grey gloomy skies, and the call of an albatross, with just my books, endless tea, and gazing through hazy windowpanes.

letters to john cournos

I am waiting in the eaves of Houghton Library, Harvard’s rare manuscript collection, to uncover eleven original letters written by Dorothy Sayers to her Russian lover, John Cournos, with whom she had a brief, intense and bitter love affair in the early 20s, just after the first war. I passed through maximum security procedures before I was allowed to enter the hallowed halls where these letters, now about a hundred years old, are housed. There is one lone scholar here, working laboriously away. We are only allowed pencils and paper, and absolutely nothing else. I feel like a scholar, and the brief honor it entails. What it would mean to be cloistered away, working quietly as though in a dream, living between worlds, and between lives, bridging histories.

The papers arrive, carefully folded into sheaves of tissue. Among them are some original photographs. The Library tells us that the records of those who view its collections are kept for a hundred years. I would like to know who else has requested these, taken it out of the quivering tissue, viewed it wonderingly. Written by quill, on plain white lined paper, now faded except for the ink which has lasted, with the dates carefully cut out.

The first letter begins like this.

“Dear John,
I’ve heard you’re married. I hope you are very very happy, with someone you can really love. I went over the rocks. As you know, I was going there rapidly, but I preferred it shouldn’t be with you, but with somebody I didn’t really care twopence for. I couldn’t have stood a catastrophe with you. It was a worse catastrophe than I intended because I went and had a young son (thank god it wasn’t a daughter) and the man’s affection couldn’t stand that strain and he chucked me and went off with someone else!”

And then later

“.. Now why in the world should you want to meet me? Last time we met, you told me with brutal frankness that you had no use for my conversation. Do you think my misfortunes will have added new lustre to my wit? If I saw you, I should probably cry, and I’ve been crying for about three years now and am heartily weary of the exercise.

And then
“I wanted to have children quite normally and ordinarily. I wanted yours, and as you repeatedly refused, I chucked the whole business. I didn’t want the Beast’s, but having got it, I felt perfectly affectionate to the Beast and would have stuck to him faithfully if he hadn’t so to speak, turned around and stamped on me”.
“I’m sorry you found our last conversation dull. It was rather too desperately exciting for me- the last whack that chucked me over the cliff. ….
“ Final problem: Tea or no tea? It’s going to hurt like hell to see you, because Judah, with all thy faults I love thee still.
So you see the lover has to be companionable, only then again, if he was too nice one would fall in love with him and that would be vile. One can’t be ecstatic about something which involves telling lies to one’s charwoman.
“It’s odd that I get on so much better with you when you aren’t there. I suppose what I had for you was one of those sorts of object hero worships and that was why all the backstairs part of the business was so completely unthinkable.”

A Postscript
“I reopen this on returning from the film of “peter Pan’ to submit to you a very serious difficulty. Supposing one is ever able to give Anthony a home or a parent or two- will it become necessary to his peace of mind to see “Peter Pan”? Will he feel a pariah if he is the only child who has never seen “Peter Pan”? Because I absolutely refuse to take him. I am quite unable to sit through a Barrie play without grinding my teeth. There is a kind of leering unwholesomeness about the Barrie mentality which makes me heave. Has any child ever been heard of that does not like Peter Pan? But- is a child who does not like “Peter Pan” a monster? I should not like to be mother to a monster. Please give me your opinion on this agitating question. “

“You broke you own image in my heart you see. You stood to me for beauty and truth, and you demanded ugliness and barrenness and it seemed now that even in doing so, you were just being. You told me over and over again “I cannot marry anyone”, “I will not be responsible for anybody’s life”, and “I will not be responsible for bringing any lives into the world”, “I do not love you”. My dear, you stripped love down to the barest and most brutal physical contact- it is nothing- any man would do for that. I said to myself: “There is nothing I can give him beyond what the finest harlot in the street could provide. Our life would be one dirty shift after the other, with nothing in it but an agony of emptiness for both of us”.
“To be just, I never meant him to be more than what he wanted to be- an episode. If it had not been for the accident of Anthony, I couldn’t have blamed him for leaving me. He is not a good man, but he never deceived me. I understood from you that you, also, only wanted to be an episode and I didn’t want you to be that. I am sorry if I mistook the things you said, they didn’t seem capable of any other interpretation but as I have been so bitterly punished by God already, need you really dance on the body?”

“It frightens me to be so unhappy. I thought it would get better, but I think every day is worse than the last, and I’m always afraid that they’ll chuck me out of the office because I’m working so badly. And I haven’t even the last resort of doing away with myself because what would poor Anthony do then, poor thing?”

“But then, I still had some hope and some faith and desire for better things. But I swear that if you had offered me love, or even asked for love, you should have had everything. Not easily, because I did not want to commit so bitter a sin, but you never asked me to love you, never said a word to me of anything but bodily desire. ..If you remember, I offered to marry you by English law only, so that you could be free in your own country. “

“I am so terrified of emotion now, and it makes me feel so ill and work so badly that a quite business like beginning would be easiest for me.”

“Well, well, the prizes all go to the women who “play their cards well” but if they can only be won in that way, I would rather lose the game. “

reading

It was widely noted, upon the passing of Arthur C. Clarke that he was a renowned science fiction writer. The Times wrote adulatory articles amongst others, but not a single mention of the pedophilia was to be found in any respectable journal. I have many problems with Clarke as a man, but I also believe, unfortunately, that a distinction should be made between one's private life and one's public life.

Have been submerged in reading, watching, writing, and breathing in the silence. It has expanded my heart right now, like nothing else could. I live in many worlds now, in Old pre-war Britain, amongst the cobblestones of Merton and Magdalen, watching two lovers embrace,
Placetne magistra?
Placet.

And then into Trinidadian Port of Spain, watching a young boy married on the proof of a letter, at 13 to a young girl who lives with a large family, and his quest for his own identity, making signs, that say Trespassers Forbidden and watching his clumsy grabs at significance, watching what Naipaul has said, that in postcolonial societies, empire has denied humans the chance to make a real life, a significant life.

And then most favourite of all, into the early seventies, into northern California, into ranch country and seeing three people who grew up together split up after a single act of violence, watching one boy going into the gambling dens of the time, another fleeing into France to piece together another's life, and always the silence between the words.

All done listening to Tamil music from the 80s, sung by the irrepressible S.P. Balasubramaniam.

If I could preserve this moment, and more, this feeling, I really do believe that this is all I need. And that this may be all that I come to have, at least, that which is in my control.

We'll have the life we knew we would.

Spring!

The housemates are gone, the friend who came to stay is gone, and I spent the last three hours on hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor the old fashioned way after decades of band-aid swiffer use. Then the bathroom, every surface bleached and sanitized, the bathtub scrubbed with heavy-duty cleaner. Every dish in the overflowing sink washed, chucked into the dishwasher and put away; kitchen tops and stoves cleaned after two months of neglect. Then the living room, hoovering every last stray crumb, sweeping stubborn dust swirls from corners and arranging cushions. Corridors, swept, mopped and Pledge-ed. Then my room, the worst for the last. Two loads of laundry. Every book taken off the floor, recovered from under the bed, recovered from cracks between bed and wall, and bed and window, (27 in total), arranged in piles of what-to-return (read-horrendously overdue), what to (ambitiously) read, what I MUST read RIGHT NOW. After I could see the floor again, it was swept, mopped and sanitized. In a burst of overdrive, I even sanitized my chair (leave antibacterial disinfectant on leather for 3 minutes and then wipe off) and my computer screen with special cleaner. Threw away three months worth of paper and met my desk surface again. Took out the trash. Superglue-ed (which I had the foresight to buy at CVS today) a piece of my shoe that was falling off). Put the flowers in new water. Watered the long-suffering Edith (my cactus). And put my aroma therapy burner to work.

And now I am at my desk, a little bewildered at this springcleaning fit, which came and shook me like a rag, and has left me now spent, with of course, the task du jour, my dissertation to hand in a draft before the final, before the morning. Procrastination, your name is woman. To think that just last week, at precisely this time, I was at the picture above, at the Cape of Good Hope.

confusion

Epistemology and Ontology are the most basic levels at which theories can be compared, and I still, at this ripe old age, have no idea what it means. (I get teleology, ontology, and semantics all confused in my head). So I decided to write it down.

a) Epistemology: the branch of philosophy that investigates the possibility, origins, nature and extent of human knowledge.

b) Ontology: a branch of metaphysics that deals with what is being?

c) Teleology: The study of final causes, particularly in relation to design or purpose in nature

kim

When I am here, at the heart of this great college, listening to this lecture from a Parsi intellectual, about Kipling’s Kim, and he highlights a passage, that begins, “And the great fields of the Punjab rolled by”; it should smack of colonialism, written by a defender of Empire, a postulate of the white man’s burden, but here, shadowed as we are by snow, and denuded trees, with only the barest hint of Asia, carried by reminiscent travelers that wash up on our shores, it is a remnant of a future that might not yet come to pass. “I am Kim, I am Kim, I am Kim, and what is Kim?”

A Tale Of God's Will (Requiem for Katrina)

Dear Terence,

I wanted to say thank you again for taking the time out of your busy schedule, coming to Harvard and playing for a bunch of people who don’t know much about jazz, but who know a lot about work in homelessness, education, health, policy and government. We have been receiving emails all day from the proud few who stayed on to listen to your talk, about how that part of the Conference, was enough to make the whole day worthwhile. Did you know we had a team from Japan that flew in to hear you? That was the Japanese guy in the front row who asked you the first question: “How do you make jazz?”.

What you said when you talked to us was true. All you gotta do is to get one person. That’s all you have to do. Well you got more than one person buddy. You got some of the ‘right’ people, if I may say such a thing. There are requests already to know more about the Thelonius Monk Institute, from people who WORK at Harvard Business School and questions about collaboration with the institute, and even questions about Herbie Hancock!! I will pass them on in a more formal fashion, but I just wanted you to know first. (My favourite comment was from someone who said she cried during your performance, and another who said you brought a raw dose of humanity to the conference).

I can only apologize for what must have seemed like something rather unplanned, given that you’re used to high-profile events and, you came to a student run event which was just being held together at the seams. Well, even though it was student-run, it was 40% attended by professionals, and the rest were Harvard students, so at the risk of sounding arrogant, they’re people who’re going to find life a little easier, and will have a strong sense of service especially when they see people like you, playing their heart out, spreading the word about New Orleans, and talking and talking and never giving up, despite how tired or discouraged you may be. So you have made one more small step, in changing the world.

When I first saw you talk with Mitch in New Orleans way back in November, I thought to myself, this is a guy who’s got the Bill Clinton touch! He makes it seem like he’s only speaking to you, but in fact he’s speaking to a whole room. It made you suspect!! It was the first time that I formally heard of you, but then I went back and watched Spike Lee’s stuff, and there you were, at every moment, when the heart needed words that the mind could not express. And then I heard your music and I thought, whatever anyone can fake, there’s no way you can fake that.

I am from Sri Lanka. You may not have heard of it, but in Dec 2006, a tsunami came and washed away 60,000 people. And I was there right afterwards, and I stayed for 2 years, and I saw the things that I saw again this past November in New Orleans, and I was so surprised because I thought, this is the United States! There’s no way that this could happen in the United States? I thought it only happened in countries like mine, where the rich were so rich and everyone else was so poor, and when all their uninsured homes got flooded away, the government let five star hotels buy beachfront properties, instead of giving it to fishermen who’d lived there, right next to the sea, for generations. And no amount of money from abroad was enough to compensate for the failures of the government and the sense of abandonment.


But it happens everywhere. I’m still trying to record it down, to remember it as honestly as it happened. Which brings me to my last point. I have always wanted to be a writer. Whether I will have the courage to pursue the truth of that journey is another story. But listening to your music, which so exactly charted the journey of my heart and soul those two years, I was silent. Because you are a true artist, and I can’t even imagine how difficult it must have been to compose something that you can only see with your eyes closed. I don’t have the words to really say what I want to express, but I found a truth in your music that I rarely find in art. And I can only imagine how exhausting and difficult it must be to relive that every time you perform. So finally, for the dedication and perseverance that you give to your art and your music, I commend you, as someone who dares to hope to follow in your footsteps. What you are able to do with your music, and the commitment to New Orleans that you have which is evident in what you speak, is true example to me, when I get discouraged about my own country, and about my lack of courage to follow my heart.