perhaps all true desire is illicit

back in beantown

Back in Boston and oh so blue! The only thing that redeems it is J coming to town and R potentially getting her act together to come to town too... Otherwise it looks like a long dreary fall ahead weather wise. Class wise, I am determined to learn something, against the odds this semester so am going to focus on infrastructure, trade and the Middle East as well as a Start a Biz in a Developing Country. Its 30 celsius here so at least the weather is holding up. Feeling decidedly antisocial and not going to the usual round of parties celebrating the return of school. Oh, I'm decidedly getting older... SIGH!

enthee-yah.

So. One more day left and what are the things I am going to miss about India and not miss? Here are the moments.

Missing (terribly)
a) I never thought I would say this of all things, but I will miss the heat that sticks to you like silk, that smothers and frees.

b) The autorickshaw wallahs and the conversation about life, the movies and politics (in that order).

c) The television channels full of random masala songs of half naked women and men with brains the size of their pecs all in high-gloss high-blare fashion

d) The people, hospitality, kindness, graciousness, everything that is South Asian and Indian.

e) The food. Searing curries, larger than life organically grown vegetables (a tomato that tastes like a tomato, chicken that's been reared on whatever chickens eat in the wild)

f) Last, but not least, the head wiggle. Enough said.

Things I will safely un-miss until the next time

a) The pollution. Thought Colombo was bad but India takes it to another level.

b) Idlies. I hate the damn things and will not miss them for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

c) The redefinition of customer service. You know what I mean.

d) The revolution that the human body is capable of staging in India (i.e. the various things I have fallen ill with in such an impossibly short space of time). It is amazing biologically what can happen when things go wrong with the body. Emotional angst is no comparison to physical pain.

e) the total lack of privacy.

tamil cinema

Iconic moments in tamil cinema

« I’ve been thinking about number one most iconic moment for a long time. In my mind, it has to go to Nayakan, and the last scene, when he dies, shot, in a Godse-like moment, by his disciple, a child he had brought up himself. He dies, falling face forward, with his hands up, asking for forgiveness, that a court of justice has already given him, but God may deny him. And in that moment, his life is narrated in flashback, the compromises he has made, the soul he has sold in order to gain power and dispense his moral version of justice to those who are unprotected. Was it worth it? Was he right? Do the wheels of justice grind slow but exceedingly small?
« Number Two. Another Kamal Haasan moment. In Salangai Oli, when the woman he has loved has had her deserted husband come back, and his love is never spoken. And he turns to drink and his extraordinary talent is driven to waste. And on the plank of wood, above the well, he dances in the rain to one of cinema’s most evocative songs, and says, never expecting to see her again, naan vallkaiodu kovarm ellai, annal kaathal ennai kaathalikavillai. (I am not bitter with life, but love did not love me back). And she comes out in the rain, bereft and she extends her hand, and there is a flash of lightning and he sees her.
« Number Three: When Devaraj, the minor don asks Rajnikant (in the single best role in his life followed, perhaps by Baasha), why? Why did you give up your brother, your mother for me? Why? And he says, because you are my friend. And chills go down the spine. It is a very Lutheran stand: Here I stand, I can do no other. And it is both obvious and astonishing at the same time.
« (In the same film, is another moment, when Shobana tells him that her father wants to marry her off to someone else. And he asks, angry, was I the one who came and said I liked you? And he’s shouting at her, and she’s crying and she leaves him, walking through the cavern of two rocks, and she doesn’t turn back, and all his anger is a mask for how utterly bereft he is, sitting there as she walks away from him. )
« Great dramatic comic moment: In Agni Natchathiram, when Karthik is loafing, sitting smoking, one leg up on the parapet, arm lazily over an upraised knee, a leg dangling downwards, just loafing basically and Nirosha pulls up in her car, dressed in a tribute to Marilyn Monroe, and she leans over her steering wheel, with her dark skin setting off the white dress and hair cascading and mouths I love you. And he is so shocked, he nearly falls off the parapet and is like telling his friends and then she zooms off in her car and he gets on his motorbike and follows her (which is a funny twist on the typical guy going: I love you for no rhyme or reason).

Others?

seamus heaney

from his Nobel Prize lecture

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here". As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
*
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power. I remember, for example, shocking myself with a thought I had about that friend who was imprisoned in the seventies upon suspicion of having been involved with a political murder: I shocked myself by thinking that even if he were guilty, he might still perhaps be helping the future to be born, breaking the repressive forms and liberating new potential in the only way that worked, that is to say the violent way - which therefore became, by extension, the right way. It was like a moment of exposure to interstellar cold, a reminder of the scary element, both inner and outer, in which human beings must envisage and conduct their lives. But it was only a moment. The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

lage raho munnabhai

Absolutely astounding. Sweet, sentimental, hilarious, true, inspirational, lovely and utterly Indian in all its sensibilities. Watched it last night, seamless blending between humour and poignancy, between love, devotion and of course Gandhianism. And Sanjay Dutt, truly exceptional and sweet in a comic/villain type role. Welled up at quite a few moments, for a comedy that I thought was going to be totally disastrous. Particularly touching was the sidekick, proving that old tales can be continually rejuvenated if done right. And so sad too, this man, condemned to six years in Arthur Road Jail, Mumbai, for illegal arms possession, this man who, despite his imposing build, would not hurt a fly or so it seems. Some people are just cursed, whatever they do.
Can't wait to watch the first Munnabhai M.B.B.S.

ending

"Happiness is when what you think, and what you say, and what you do, are in harmony" Mahatma Gandhi

I wish someone had told me that earlier. But I feel like the orthogonal change in my life is somewhat progressing towards this truth. I only wish I had more diligence and discipline to chart it so.

Only two more days to go in proper employment and then freed, again, to travel, to rest, to learn and to think.

I never promised you a rose garden.

hmm.

Sometimes, all the hoopla disappears, the bustle and noise recedes, and the streets are quiet, as though a bombing just happened and a curfew had been announced. But its only Independence day, and millions have left the capital, to make pilgrimages to holy sites, to sit, enjoy and be at peace. And the silence is restful almost, just as it should be after a week of travelling cross country and beyond. The summer is drawing to a close, with only 3 short weeks to be spent backwater-hopping in Kerala with the fam, and then back to school, and all that that represents. I feel as though my heart has slowed down here, even though my body has been busy, and even though I haven't had a moment to myself really for more than a day. Its been good. Filling up the silences has been good, and things have healed. Or are beginning to. I don't know what the coming year will bring, but I am sure things will come together. It always does, right? Oh 20th of August.

omkara

Back from a week in the north, where the colour, vibrancy, urbanization seem exuberant in contrast with this gentle South, of muted tones and temples, of stones, granite and rain, of safety and calmness. Watched Omkara at the Delhi Film Festival, an Indian take on Othello and it was remarkable to see how far along Indian cinema had come, in terms of mastery of plot, screenplay writing, authentic dialogue, setting and scenes and cinematography, while still retaining a uniquely Indian look, feel and sensibility. The movie was let down only by the acting, which unfortunately is where the Indian talent falls short, but there were some stellar performances that transcended script and directing. Particularly I think Saif Ali Khan who valiantly tried to come to terms with the script and Ajay Devgan who merely stalked around as a brooding general, both these performances missed the genius of the original writings, to show the complexity of these man, Othello and Iago. Nevertheless before the movie came on, Vivek Oberoi came out in person to talk to the audience for a brief Q & A and impressed us with his charm and sheer heart (something I think that every Indian person has) and gallantry, thus forgiving his innate lack of intelligence and sensitivity.

shantaram

Getting through Shantaram right now, despite the initial scepticism, a friend made me read the first page and then I immediately went and bought the 936 page doorstopper and am wending my way through it now, and reading it now, ensconced in the North, brings alive the beating heart of an India that I had never quite known I had known. It seems that it is very easy to fall in love with men who are in love with life and some people have a wisdom, born from having fought the difficult fight, without losing their hope or idealism. Despite its lack of literary talent (read discipline) and knowledge of literary grammar, yet, there is a honesty to the writing, a soaring romanticism and a deep understanding of life, through the author, who for all his faults, has never been afraid to live and to most of all, love. And what more could one want in a book?

"The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love".

" The past reflects eternally between two mirrors- the bright mirror of words and deeds and the dark one, full of things we didn't do or say"

"Sometimes you break your heart in the right way"

i love india

So, I love India.

I know its a tired cliche, and I've hated it on many an occasion too, but I actually adore the subcontinent. Who would've even thought for a second that I could live anywhere else except in this part of the world now that I have made it here? Of course I still think Sri Lanka is god's gift to planet earth, and that Eden like it has never existed before or after (and like Eden, its inhabitants are similarly cursed, but it seems as though wars are always fought in paradise). Am off to Delhi tomorrow for a week, and the bustling pitch of the north can be compared to the south, and the exuberant hindi spoke on the streets will ricochet off the extreme poverty (more so than in the South) and maybe I'll venture out to some teak/jasmine/coconut/rubber plantations armed with a survey and ask them ridiculous questions and maybe I'll fall in love with life all over again, because its home, and this craziness will always be home. And tonight I am going to watch shivaji and it'll be awesome and nothing in my life will capture my senses as much as an indian film, and that too a tamil film!

and a google quote seems particularly apt: play: work that you enjoy doing for nothing. which is exactly what I'm doing.

excerpt

Paul Theroux from the Guardian's Great Escape

In the monsoon season of 1970, I boarded the MV Keningau in Singapore bound for Borneo. The ship was small, not much bigger than a ferry, the inexpensive way for rubber-tappers and their families to travel to the plantations of East Malaysia. They were down below - hundreds of them, off to work. I was sailing to Kota Kinabalu, for the fun of it, and also to climb Mount Kinabalu. In a few months, my wife would be giving birth to our second child, and this was a selfish and solitary jaunt, before I became fully engaged as a father of two. I also had the notion that this solitude would help me in my writing project at the time, a novel with the provisional title Saint Jack, about a middle-aged American who dreams of getting rich in Singapore. In my small bag with a change of clothes were my notebooks and my book for the trip, a hard-cover copy of VS Naipaul's novel A House for Mr Biswas. Because there were so few of us in first class, we all ate together: the captain's wife and his son; a planter's wife, part-Malay, and her small son, in the cabin next to mine; and a Tamil lawyer, travelling on his own - he was about my age, which was 29. What seems like a cast for a Maugham story was in fact a pleasant and sedate group. The captain and his family were friendly people but all of them chewed food with their mouths open, a family trait I have never encountered anywhere else. Some evenings, I played cards with the Tamil and the planter's wife, usually the game of Hearts. Then I became engrossed in the Naipaul novel, slipped into the life of the Tulsi family and its odd-man-out, Mohun Biswas. The novel is without mannerisms, seems almost not to have a style, yet is so detailed and humane, it offered me a whole world; and as with the greatest novels, it made me care. I memorised a paragraph beginning "The mind is merciful . . ."
"Paul's laughing," the planter's wife said from the card table.
"At a book!" the Tamil said.
I hardly noticed the voyage. Most of the time, I was in Trinidad with Mohun Biswas and Anand. I was dismayed that in a day or so I'd be finished with the book, and I thought - as young writers do - I could never write this. But the passion of this novel helped me see that I had my own novel to write.

Oct 20 2004

from an old email.

Today, my world changed and my life was dragged along with it. It wasn't a big dynamic change, announced with lightning and moving tectonic plates, as one would imagine these things were. It was instead, a shifting of sands. The world as I knew it fell away from me for an instant, and when the clouds had stopped blurring everything was the same again, although imperceptibly changed. I had finally discovered who I was, and who i could never be again. I was a writer.

Whether time would tell me if I was good or not was irrelevant. Today I found out who I am. Whatever I had expected upon attending his reading, I had not expected this. I had not expected this instant awareness, this instant attraction. I felt as though upon meeting him, an old memory of mine was rewoken. I felt as though I had known him my whole life and I felt as though I had the rest of my live to devote to him. It is known that I am particularly susceptible to passions. But I knew his body too,his vigour, his quick movements belied the hyperawareness of a man not used to people or to society. A man uponst whom everyone else necessarily imposed themselves on. A man who I had fallen in love with when i was 16.I know that all this will seem incredibly fanciful, and melodramatic. A writer has to write a story about everything and this will seem one in a thread of many. but believe me when I say this, I had not expected this. I had expected to be provoked, to be stimulated, to see the head that had produced lines that were never to be forgotten,etched into my awakening mind at 16. I had not expected this... absolute knowledge.I could not take my eyes off him. He was home, as in Sri Lanka, a land he knew better than me, a land that he had written about much more evocatively than I could ever hope to do so, he represented the West, and its voices, but most horrifically of all, the thing I did not expect, was that he represented a Dutchman living in Asia. Of which all had one in common, the same alert piercing eyes, the same uneasiness with which they integrated into society, the same hesitance before they spoke ofthemselves. He reminded me most of someone I had once known deeply, of Home, of the war and of the book that had changed my life.

All this I could not tell him, although I wanted to. For the first time that evening he spoke of himself. And I could tell after he spoke, for he ended abruptly as though having spoken more than he had wished to, that it was as surprising to him as it was to me. He spoke of how he had started to write another novel set in Sri Lanka, but the voice and the structure was similar to Anil's ghost and so he had stopped. He spoke also of how he had gone back, how he had gone back after Anil's Ghost and how he would always continue to go back.I could no longer speak. The man's voice when he read of the history of stones, of writings in leaves of palimpsests, of genesis,of lives in Polonaruwa and places I thought only I knew about, for none of my friends or people knew this except my parents. And he said something that he didn't say to anyone else, this man of few words, this man who said it took him 2 years to read his own book out to the public because that was how long it took him to be comfortable with the own characters he had written. The man who had refused to talk about the work he was currently engaged on.Perhaps I am romanticizing as I am wont to do. but this encounter, I can only tell you in this moment, my life changed. I had gone into that room, thinking of being a writer, and I had come out, knowing that I wanted to write something that he would be proud of.

ode to studio 60

the best scene in studio 60- the now officially defunct Aaron Sorking post-West Wing comedy? The scene where the black jazz musicians from hurricane-ravaged Katrina play music without lyrics to scenes of new orlean and the snow falls on the stage. The soaring notes of the trumpet and the softer deeper notes of the saxophone send chills down the spine. And then bradley whitford delivers his line: .....but you'd better get a head start because I'm coming for you.

another day in madras and I don't want to leave. prospects of clubbing madras style tonight. Yeah! any excuse to drink imported liquor at exorbitant prices, spend the night at the friend's place because I have a curfew of 10pm and wake up to die another day. And my eye is improving so I don't look like something out of a porn/horror film. Nice.

mumbling

I'll die as I have lived, with a book in my hand says manguel perhaps?.
I'm tired. and i want to lay down somewhere and i want the universe to stop spinning and I want the earth to slow down and I want to read and mull and not do much of anything else. except I have always dreamt of thinking, of having time to think, of walking and thinking and sleeping and thinking, but I only at best, have an hour to think everyday and that too only because I refuse to come to work after I get up and I lie in bed after a shower, with the fan whirring, thinking.

reading the reluctant fundamentalist now and while it is delicate it is not subtle and neither is it revelatory but resorts to narrating the cliched experience of fundamentalism, painting Princeton on top of it does not change it, nor imbue it with gravitas. madras is lulling me constantly to sleep and think I have also developed a mild version of madras eye. on another note, a conversation or two does not actually change reality, even if it offers the brief hope of choosing an alternate reality, yet in that choice between vectors, a whole host of other inevitables are at play and one can change some, but as lincoln said you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. likewise with one's self-awareness and the inevitability of certain behaviours at the ripe old age of 26.

lky

From Lee Kuan Yew: "The Man and His Ideas"

"We have got to live with the consequences of our actions and we are responsible for our own people and we take the right decisions for them. You look at the old Philippines. The old Ceylon. The old East Pakistan and several others. I have been to these countries and places. When I went to Colombo for the first time in 1956 it was a better city than Singapore because Singapore had three and a half years of Japanese occupation and Colombo was the centre or HQ of Mountbatten's Southeast Asia command.
And they had sterling reserves. They had two Universities. Before the war, a thick layer of educated talent So if you believe what American liberals or British liberals used to say, then it ought to have flourished. But it didn't.

One-man one-vote led to the domination of the Sinhalese majority over the minority Tamils who were the active and intelligent fellows who worked hard and got themselves penalised. And English was out. They were educated in English. Sinhalese was in. They got quotas in two universities and now they have become fanatical Tigers. And the country will never be put together again.

Somebody should have told them - change the system, loosen up, or break off. And looking back, I think the Tunku was wise. (The reference is to Tunku Abdul Rahman the Malaysian Prime Minister under whose rule Singapore separated from Malaysia). I offered a loosening up of the system. He said: "Clean cut, go your way". Had we stayed in, and I look at Colombo and Ceylon, I mean changing names, sometimes maybe you deceive the gods, but I don't think you are deceiving the people who live in them. It makes no great difference to the tragedy that is being enacted. They failed because they had weak or wrong leaders ".

in india

you know you're in India when the moment you land, someone rushes from the back of the plane to the front, already having perfected his strategy of being a first-mover at Customs and secretly disobeying orders to unload luggage from the cabin head. You know you're in India when standing in customs, some old guy trying valiantly to be hip with newly-acquired American accent and a passel of kids and a large fanny pack busts out ice gum and offers it to everyone around him saying: want some ice breakers? You know you're in India when some auntie/long-lost third cousin's great-cousin's grand-aunt says to you warningly about her friend/long lost third-cousin's daughter that she was a very bright girl, went to Stanford pre-med, but then switched majors and now is doing Teach for America and shakes her head and says :"and her parents are very disappointed". You know you're in India when you're sitting in an auto, rushing headlong into oncoming traffic, heart pounding wildly, hair flying out of the 2 by 2 hair cabin, and the auto driver having completed a u-turn worthy of Hamilton spinning on one wheel, then spots a lad pedalling on a bicycle standing up, ahead of him, and the lad's butt swerving with every motion, and in madrasi tamil, the autodriver bawls him out for his butt going this way and that way and tells him to sit down, and the youth, undaunted, tries to make a quickwitted retort, but instead crashes into an oncoming van and falls off his bicycle to much merriment of auto driver and passengers. You know you're in India when you start speaking tamil/hindi/marwadi/hyderabadi urdu to a telephone seller, who upon seeing your crisp blue foreign passport, starts yakking back at you in broken English, deaf to whatever else. You know you're in India when the gelato from a five star cafe is a colonic irrigation substitute, and fresh curd from the rural roadside makes you believe in God again. You know you're in India when ... you wake up, and the air is wet with the smell of monsoon rains, and the leaves greener than anywhere else, and the stench from the roadside households mixes with the diesel of the maruti cars and melds with the jasmine and the mangoes and the sandalwood from a nearby shrine and you know you're home, some way, again.

a commencement speech

Remarks of Hillary D. Rodham, President of the Wellesley College Government Association and member of the Class of 1969, on the occasion of Wellesley's 91st Commencement, May 31, 1969:

I am very glad that Miss Adams made it clear that what I am speaking for today is all of us -- the 400 of us -- and I find myself in a familiar position, that of reacting, something that our generation has been doing for quite a while now. We're not in the positions yet of leadership and power, but we do have that indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest and I find myself reacting just briefly to some of the things that Senator Brooke said. This has to be brief because I do have a little speech to give. Part of the problem with empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn't do us anything. We've had lots of empathy; we've had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have used politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible. What does it mean to hear that 13.3% of the people in this country are below the poverty line? That's a percentage. We're not interested in social reconstruction; it's human reconstruction. How can we talk about percentages and trends? The complexities are not lost in our analyses, but perhaps they're just put into what we consider a more human and eventually a more progressive perspective. The question about possible and impossible was one that we brought with us to Wellesley four years ago. We arrived not yet knowing what was not possible. Consequently, we expected a lot.

Our attitudes are easily understood having grown up, having come to consciousness in the first five years of this decade -- years dominated by men with dreams, men in the civil rights movement, the Peace Corps, the space program -- so we arrived at Wellesley and we found, as all of us have found, that there was a gap between expectation and realities. But it wasn't a discouraging gap and it didn't turn us into cynical, bitter old women at the age of 18. It just inspired us to do something about that gap. What we did is often difficult for some people to understand. They ask us quite often: "Why, if you're dissatisfied, do you stay in a place?" Well, if you didn't care a lot about it you wouldn't stay. It's almost as though my mother used to say, "I'll always love you but there are times when I certainly won't like you." Our love for this place, this particular place, Wellesley College, coupled with our freedom from the burden of an inauthentic reality allowed us to question basic assumptions underlying our education. Before the days of the media orchestrated demonstrations, we had our own gathering over in Founder's parking lot. We protested against the rigid academic distribution requirement. We worked for a pass-fail system. We worked for a say in some of the process of academic decision making. And luckily we were in a place where, when we questioned the meaning of a liberal arts education there were people with enough imagination to respond to that questioning. So we have made progress. We have achieved some of the things that initially saw as lacking in that gap between expectation and reality. Our concerns were not, of course, solely academic as all of us know. We worried about inside Wellesley questions of admissions, the kind of people that should be coming to Wellesley, the process for getting them here. We questioned about what responsibility we should have both for our lives as individuals and for our lives as members of a collective group.

Coupled with our concerns for the Wellesley inside here in the community were our concerns for what happened beyond Hathaway House. We wanted to know what relationship Wellesley was going to have to the outer world. We were lucky in that one of the first things Miss Adams did was to set up a cross-registration with MIT because everyone knows that education just can't have any parochial bounds any more. One of the other things that we did was the Upward Bound program. There are so many other things that we could talk about; so many attempts, at least the way we saw it, to pull ourselves into the world outside. And I think we've succeeded. There will be an Upward Bound program, just for one example, on the campus this summer.
Many of the issues that I've mentioned -- those of sharing power and responsibility, those of assuming power and responsibility have been general concerns on campuses throughout the world. But underlying those concerns there is a theme, a theme which is so trite and so old because the words are so familiar. It talks about integrity and trust and respect. Words have a funny way of trapping our minds on the way to our tongues but there are necessary means even in this multi-media age for attempting to come to grasps with some of the inarticulate maybe even inarticulable things that we're feeling. We are, all of us, exploring a world that none of us even understands and attempting to create within that uncertainty. But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living. And so our questions, our questions about our institutions, about our colleges, about our churches, about our government continue. The questions about those institutions are familiar to all of us. We have seen heralded across the newspapers. Senator Brooke has suggested some of them this morning. But along with using these words -- integrity, trust, and respect -- in regard to institutions and leaders we're perhaps harshest with them in regard to ourselves.

Every protest, every dissent, whether it's an individual academic paper, Founder's parking lot demonstration, is unabashedly an attempt to forge an identity in this particular age. That attempt at forging for many of us over the past four years has meant coming to terms with our humanness. Within the context of a society that we perceive -- now we can talk about reality, and I would like to talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality, and what we have to accept of what we see -- but our perception of it is that it hovers often between the possibility of disaster and the potentiality for imaginatively responding to men's needs. There's a very strange conservative strain that goes through a lot of New Left, collegiate protests that I find very intriguing because it harkens back to a lot of the old virtues, to the fulfillment of original ideas. And it's also a very unique American experience. It's such a great adventure. If the experiment in human living doesn't work in this country, in this age, it's not going to work anywhere.

But we also know that to be educated, the goal of it must be human liberation. A liberation enabling each of us to fulfill our capacity so as to be free to create within and around ourselves. To be educated to freedom must be evidenced in action, and here again is where we ask ourselves, as we have asked our parents and our teachers, questions about integrity, trust, and respect. Those three words mean different things to all of us. Some of the things they can mean, for instance: Integrity, the courage to be whole, to try to mold an entire person in this particular context, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know. Integrity -- a man like Paul Santmire. Trust. This is one word that when I asked the class at our rehearsal what it was they wanted me to say for them, everyone came up to me and said "Talk about trust, talk about the lack of trust both for us and the way we feel about others. Talk about the trust bust." What can you say about it? What can you say about a feeling that permeates a generation and that perhaps is not even understood by those who are distrusted? All they can do is keep trying again and again and again. There's that wonderful line in East Coker by Eliot about there's only the trying, again and again and again; to win again what we've lost before.

And then respect. There's that mutuality of respect between people where you don't see people as percentage points. Where you don't manipulate people. Where you're not interested in social engineering for people. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences. And the word "consequences" of course catapults us into the future. One of the most tragic things that happened yesterday, a beautiful day, was that I was talking to woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now.

There are two people that I would like to thank before concluding. That's Ellie Acheson, who is the spearhead for this, and also Nancy Scheibner who wrote this poem which is the last thing that I would like to read:

My entrance into the world of so-called "social problems"
Must be with quiet laughter, or not at all.T
he hollow men of anger and bitterness
The bountiful ladies of righteous degradation
All must be left to a bygone age.
And the purpose of history is to provide a receptacle
For all those myths and oddments
Which oddly we have acquired
And from which we would become unburdened
To create a newer world
To transform the future into the present.
We have no need of false revolutions
In a world where categories tend to tyrannize our minds
And hang our wills up on narrow pegs.
It is well at every given moment to seek the limits in our lives.
And once those limits are understood
To understand that limitations no longer exist.
Earth could be fair.
And you and I must be free
Not to save the world in a glorious crusade
Not to kill ourselves with a nameless gnawing pain
But to practice with all the skill of our being
The art of making possible.

madras

So. Having lived in Sri Lanka for a mammoth year and a half, one would assume that living in its subcontinental neighbour for just three months, especially where one spoke the language unlike in Sri Lanka, would be a relative walk in the park. Or if not exactly a breezy jaunt, then at least not angst-inducing. But a year in the developed world with every luxury and convenience to hand has simply marinaded me in my usual comfort expectations such that even taking a normal auto ride in the heat of noon amidst traffic and pollution of the Indian variety leaves me dazed and confused and utterly bereft of the will to live. Add to that spending one days in a sub-arctic airconditioned office researching, sleeping on a bed with a mattress of crushed stone, violently swatting at mosquitoes mid-dream, and worst of all, eating South Indian food (once is a novelty, twice is nice, more than that, Sri Lankan food it just ain't) ALL THE TIME has made me depressed. So, regardless of the cost, I am off. To Barista for a fake-latte but right now, even the semblance of espresso will have me up, and then back to work no doubt. (And of course it isn't as bad as all that, there're a great bunch of people here and lots of laughing at how insane India is, and everyone meddling in everyone else's business here and general Indian life, which is just on crack). Just a little dejected right now that's all, and looking forward to a long, hot, dry (of that OTHER variety too) summer.

temperatures.

Someone please explain to me how it is possible that it is the beginning of June nearly, it is 35 degrees celsius in Boston and when I land in London, it is SEVEN DEGREES CELSIUS? It boggles the mind. I had to immediately purchase on the cheap, a white fishermans' cable knit sweater. While it does nothing to hold up the fashion front, I am warm. The BBC has quite a funny series of pictures on the weather: check it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6698607.stm