square

So my sister finally arrived and today we ventured into Harvard Square. It was strange. People here talk too much and really have not very much to say. First we spent some time in the local Social Security Office trying vainly to get a Social Service Number without which I can't get a credit card or a million other useful things. We failed, albeit temporarily. Then into Harvard Square where I successfully opened a Bank of America bank account. Then to T-Mobile where I successfully got a phone. Both these will be activated tomorrow. Then to the International Office to register my 'alien' presence. Then to Finale, a dessert place apparently opened by a Harvard MBA student. Then we carried our sorry asses back home and fell gasping onto bed when Cyann (the dumbest cat on the planet) decided to jump up onto my ass and circle around a few times and flop down contentedly. And now I'm watching Grey's Anatomy. All in all a useless but somewhat accomplished day. also food sizes here are huge. Also I am missing Sri Lanka.

a-may-rica

so I'm in Boston after long last. Arrived yesterday morning, after the flight was delayed by 4 hours. Then I got into a dodgy cab that ended up picking up 5 more people and after driving around for 2 hours, I finally got into the apartment that I am to be spending the next week in before I move into my place which is finally available on the Sep 1st. Anyhow there was a small detail that my interim landlord forgot to mention to me: She has a CAT!!! Aaarghh. I HATE CATS. And cats hate me. This one, with some stupid pretentious name called Cyann arches her back and hisses at me everytime we cross paths. She has reserved the futon in the living room for herself and the amount of hair she sheds could keep the local wig company in business forever! Anyway. Then I discovered that plugs here are different which I should have known but failed to pre-empt. Down to the local Radio Shack, then to the co-op farmers market which was the first destination that I saw a green leaf in sight. Have you ever walked into an American supermarket? They're full of synthesized chemical shit. I didn't see anything natural for two blocks (inside Walgreens, 7-11s etc.) until this one. I got goat's cheese brie and organic bread. Had some random conversations with storesmen who asked me about my accent. (to save a lot of trouble, and also because it's infinitely cooler, I told them I was British!). alright. Am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my sister in a few hours who will make sense of this bewildering country.

a-may-rica

so I'm in Boston after long last. Arrived yesterday morning, after the flight was delayed by 4 hours. Then I got into a dodgy cab that ended up picking up 5 more people and after driving around for 2 hours, I finally got into the apartment that I am to be spending the next week in before I move into my place which is finally available on the Sep 1st. Anyhow there was a small detail that my interim landlord forgot to mention to me: She has a CAT!!! Aaarghh. I HATE CATS. And cats hate me. This one, with some stupid pretentious name called Cyann arches her back and hisses at me everytime we cross paths. She has reserved the futon in the living room for herself and the amount of hair she sheds could keep the local wig company in business forever! Anyway. Then I discovered that plugs here are different which I should have known but failed to pre-empt. Down to the local Radio Shack, then to the co-op farmers market which was the first destination that I saw a green leaf in sight. Have you ever walked into an American supermarket? They're full of synthesized chemical shit. I didn't see anything natural for two blocks (inside Walgreens, 7-11s etc.) until this one. I got goat's cheese brie and organic bread. Had some random conversations with storesmen who asked me about my accent. (to save a lot of trouble, and also because it's infinitely cooler, I told them I was British!). alright. Am eagerly awaiting the arrival of my sister in a few hours who will make sense of this bewildering country.

khayyam

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

- from the Rubaiyyat by Omar Khayyam

iran again

x60

I'm stuck in Heathrow while my flight is delayed by 3 and a half hours. Instead of bellyaching, I shall extoll the particular virtues of my current laptop, the IBM X60. It weighs about 1.5 kg, about just more than half my previous clunker at 2.2 kg. It also, joy of joys, has a 6-8 hour battery lifespan when using wireless. This is not just a ludicrous claim, my previous Toshiba advertized a brilliant 4-5 hour lifespan, but in reality clocked in at just over 2 hours. In addition to being light, durable and enduring, it also has some great specs, 1.83 Hz Core Duo of course and a stonking 1.5 RAM (YEAH). Things that used to take me 16 mins to download previously, now take 40 secs. That's some serious computing power advance. And it has a TFT screen instead of the SuperBrite screen that comes on so many laptops and causes eye strain. Finally and wonderfully it has a 3 year international warranty. The only drawback is that it is not exactly easy on the eye. IBM has the same standard design on all its laptops, black magnesium alloy casing. But I'll survive that. Prepare for some extensive blogging over the next 5 hours.

Miami Vice

Just watched Miami Vice and I'm strangely compelled to blog about it. The movie was bizarre, unsettling, sad even when it was supposed to be a stupid action flick!!! But then again, since the director was Michael Mann (of Collateral and notably Heat), it's not that surprising. Much has been said about the movie, but I adore A.O. Scott from the New York Times, a movie critic whom I read as faithfully as Michiko Kakutani, Tina Brown, Cary Tennis, Julie Burchill, Lucy Kellaway and Sathnam Sanghera (newspaper(wo)men). I quote: "This was not a job that anyone needed to do, but then again no one could have done it better". He also cites the fact that the entire reported production cost of the film was 50 mil more than the annual operating budget of the Miami PD. Hmm. Interesting. However I write because I want to pay particular homage to Gong Li, an absolutely captivating, unbelievably intense, extraordinarily beautiful goddess in this film. I didn't actually understand much of what she was saying since she was supposed to be Mexican, but the electricity she generates was stunning. I was awed. Also I've never seen a film that made me want so much to be a part of Vice.

schtuff part infinite

Okay I shall not post now about my extremely boring life at the moment. I've been a total recluse in London the last three days but I really needed the space and time alone, not to reconstruct, not to forget, but to not-think. Nothing interesting about that really, except I've been catching up on film and yesterday wandered into the National Portrait Gallery for the annual BP exhibition and chanced upon the Ondaatje wing which was endowed by Christopher Ondaatje, brother of Michael Ondaatje. And in it, shocker of shockers, he's described as financier and writer. WRITER??? WRITER?? This from the man who wrote the odious, self-aggrandizing "The Maneater of Punanai" (pun clearly not intended) about his travels in the East of Sri Lanka hunting down a maneating tiger which he did not even succeed at. And in the book, he has some digs at fellow writer/brother Michael. Do NOT. Even. Get. Me. Started. on a comparison. ANYhoo.

diaspora

The Tamil Diaspora infuriates me. The definition of diaspora is as follows: the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland. In this case, the ancestral homeland is the Northeast, the heartland of that homeland is of course Jaffna. I was talking to some second generation Diaspora Tamils here. Boys that had been conscripted, shot at, escaped and had bitter, extremist memories of their times and experiences living in the Northeast in Jaffna until 1995. There is widespread belief here that this time, the 'boys' as the movement is called, will get the job done. The end of 2007 is the projected date of liberation for Tamil Eelam. The Northeast of Sri Lanka is no longer referred to as Sri Lanka, but Tamil Eelam. How we name names and draw lines of separation. Does no one understand that if there ever was to be another Partition, it would be accompanied by the same blood loss as happened in India when 1 million people died in the largest cross-border exchange known to human history? That like it or not, or whether because of biased policies, there are now large communities of Sinhalese living in Tamil areas and of course vice versa? And that notwithstanding that bloody transitionary period, the following years under the rule of a military-fascist organization (which already has a pseudo-state consisting of one courthouse, one bank and whatnot in a tiny outpost in the Northeast staffed entirely with ex-military types with no understanding of how to run a social organization like a government) will be also bloody because all revolutions with few exceptions, end up devouring their children? And that this myth of the Tigers giving up their right to power after seven years (after essentially having secured that transition a la Lee Kuan Yew (I'm not kidding, I actually heard this comparison being made between Prabhakaran and Lee Kuan Yew) ) is just that, a fucking myth? To that, the near-universal answer of the Diaspora is that if the 'boys' should turn tyrannical, then the Diaspora would cut off funding, that they, the Diaspora (living thousands of miles away, with practically no intention of coming back) would be involved in monitoring such governance. I mean the logic is riddled with inconsistencies and it frustrates me that everyone abroad is clinging onto such logic, drowning men clutching at straws because there seems to be no other hope to hold onto, no other liberator. No other saviour than the Tigers.

albion

So I'm in London, finishing off some last-minute assignments such as printing agreements and strategic planning documents for work, attempting (and failing) to start an application to business school (although did I tell you I finally managed to take my GMAT in a dingy, airless, third story hovel in Bambalapitiya?), trying to get over jet lag, feedback on a manuscript, meet friends, research bank accounts and furniture etc. and just generally being a totally axe-capitated headless chicken.

But I came across two quotes today which I wanted to write up before I forget. One is from scientist MiguelNicolelis' grandmother: "When the dream is bigger than the place you're in, leave the place to pursue the dream". and "The only lasting bequests we leave our children are two: one is roots, the other wings".

jaffna

so the city of jaffna has been primarily sealed off. Cash shortages are hitting the city, and no new money can get in, because the only main road is seriously closed or checkpointed. Communications are sporadic. The army and the LTTE are both consolidating positions. Raids have happened on the student union of the university there. Jaffna is army-controlled for the moment, but represents the cultural and symbolic heartland of the Tigers, and hence the bid for recapture.

rdom

So am in Singapore now, recovering slowly from the maelstrom of Sri Lanka and the increasing corpse count. It has been devastating.

I read about a new musical in Canada somewhere of course, perhaps Edmonton, called Pork Belly Futures which has a song about his girlfriend being addicted to all of Michael Ondaatje's works.

I read another friend's manuscript. Everyone is writing or attempting to write nowadays.

Heard about another play in Singapore about JBJ. It sounds sad.

That's all I can dredge up. I'm still so very tired and doesn't help that yet again, I've been laid low by food poisoning.

the nature of misfortune

excerpts from cary tennis, an online columnist/soothsayer/agony aunt for salon.com

"We don't say that the reason for your misfortune is that the gods are bitchy and full of shit, that they are crazy, sick motherfuckers, that the gods spit on us when they're drunk and curse us when they're mad. We don't mention what is actually known to be true, that although sometimes in some places the gods intervene on our behalf, just as often they get lost and don't show up, that they fight among themselves instead of attending to our wishes, that they look at us with interest and sometimes with lust but only rarely with pity, that instead of offering us protection they scheme to have us for themselves no matter what havoc it causes down here! They couldn't care less! They are gods!

We tend to think only of the good gods, the ones that offer us bountiful harvests and invent intricate bees. It's a habit from childhood, when we were taught to think of one good god, when although we dreamed of monsters we were told that god was watching out for us, that there weren't really any monsters there in the closet, that they weren't really crawling around up there in the space between ceiling and roof. No responsible adult would have thought to teach us that among the gods are horrible nasty fucks that would just as soon sprinkle cancer seeds in a womb as devise a perfect delivery of a perfect little baby.

So what do we do? We toughen up. We quit playing patty-cake patty-cake give a dog a bone, we season ourselves, we take the bit in our teeth, we flog ourselves with birch branches, we bitch and moan and howl at the moon and give up our illusions of a soft loving god who hears our prayers and answers them. We board the windows and doors. We wise up and face the fuckers, we quit lying down and taking it, we let go of our prettiness, we prepare for the battle ahead. We say never again will we be caught off guard, never again will we pretend, never again will we believe that this thing we have created cannot be poisoned in an instant by a shit-head god on a bender, fucking up our paradise for his shallow and grim amusement.

We were taught a lot of silly things as kids. Only later would we learn what pleasure the gods take in disrupting our plans; only later would we learn how minuscule are our options, how puny our plans of defense; only later would we learn there's not a whole lot we can do except rub stone in our eyes, interrogate our lovers mercilessly, place fierce guards at entrances and exits. "

poisoning.

laid low yet again by food poisoning. The past three months have been particularly bad. Perhaps I have become more susceptible to it. I don't know. I spent yesterday with my head down the toilet, retching violently the remains of a rather expensive lunch at a reputed restaurant. That'll teach me in future. I'm now on medication. I also have to move out of my flat in approx 3 days and of course have done nothing, no packing as yet so I am about to be frantically rushing around soon enough, shoving things into boxes and wrapping wads of masking tape over everything.

Fierce localized war has broken out in the East.

forgetting

"But why do you question things today, when you have done all that you could to be ignorant, by developing the art of forgetting"?- Albert Camus

I watched "The Art of Forgetting", a documentary film on the effects of the war and tragedy on memory. The film looked at 20 years of war in Sri Lanka, and was filmed during the ceasefire when the filmmakers were able to access parts of the country that were closed off for years. I couldn't stop weeping throughout the whole film. It was a very unexpected reaction. It opens with the above quote from Camus, It also says that some people say that there are two stories in Sri Lanka, the story of the North, and the story of the South. Just hearing these memories expressed, by these people from all over the island who have lived this war, was just so horrific, and so tragic. Where do all these stories go? Is this the only record we have? Because as a nation, we have accomplished the art of forgetting, which is not the same as the art of accepting the past, or making peace with it. The reason for war is war.

torch

Sri Lankans like to think that they're better than the rest of the subcontinent. Higher literacy rates, better infant mortality rates, a smaller proportion living underneath the poverty line; you name the useless statistic and normally we're better at it. We also like to think that we're slightly more advanced, liberalized culturally and socially than those redneck Indians, with their village practices of suttee (wife-burning) and child marriages and widow brothels and whatnot. Obviously too, most of these horrific practices are always perpetrated against women.

Yet the empirical evidence would seem to prove otherwise. The Hindus in the plantation region of Sri Lanka are generally from what is classified in the Brahmin system as low-caste (Harijans, or children of God as Gandhi called them). As a result, paradoxically, as is often the case, they embrace the rituals , superstitions and blind prejudices of the same Hindu caste system that perpetuates their down-trodden status. One such example is of a woman who works with us in a menial capacity. She had a 21 year old daughter who did not want to get married. She forced her daughter to get married to a family that the daughter specifically did not want to get married to. (21 years old is already too old you see, to be unmarried. ). This was accompanied by much prayer and rituals. Almost immediately, the daughter was pregnant (and the advent of the baby was hastened by the mother's supplications at approximately 20 temples). The baby was born 6 months ago. Incidentally, for the last year and a half, there was some problem with the payment of the dowry (given by the bride's family to the groom's family normally before marriage). Some grooms are happy to wait for the bride's family to take on untold debt and pay off the dowry gradually. Some grooms send back the wife to their parents' home if the dowry does not arrive. This groom's family's patience was wearing thin.

Last week the baby was in an accident. In a fire. The baby has third degree burns and was rushed to the Colombo hospital from the central province because they were unequipped to deal with the severity of the burns. The baby is now disfigured for life, although she has survived after four days of intensive care. The doctors all grimly assert that such a disaster could have in no way been an accident. The daughter has come back to her family and she will not explain what happened. The groom's family is silent. Everyone knows what happened, that the groom's family torched the baby as a sign of their discontent over the insufficient dowry. Meanwhile Pushpa has not stopped crying for 12 days, at the plight of her daughter and grandchild. And yet no one will file a case against the husband and his family, no one will torch his family. They do not question their right to mutilate the baby because of a rational annoyance over dowry.

It reminds me of a story I read in a newspaper. Of how an unsuspecting NGO worker advised a Bihari family in northern India not to give their 9 year old daughter in marriage. The article went to prosaically state that doctors, after 18 hours of surgery, have managed to reattach the arms that were hacked off by the angry father at the NGO worker's interference.

Development? What use? What a fucking joke. All over the world and throughout human history, I think religion has a hell of a lot to answer for.

And forgive the rambling, but it also brings to mind Shylock's poignant query,

If you prick us, do we not bleed,

If you tickle us, do we not laugh,

If you poison us, do we not die?

And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

And yet it is not true. Suppression does not necessarily provide revolution. One needs a sense of basic human rights, one needs to subsequently know that there has been violation, and finally one needs to want to progress, to advance. But if a community is happy to live according to medieval structures, under modern suppression, if tradition alone defines the value of lives lived, then development? what a fucking joke.

and again

We were talking about Sri Lanka today and the effects of culture on relationships.

The Westerners have a different style of breaking-up. We expect to be friends with the ex, after a decent mourning period, we expect continuity. We expect evaluation, joint post-mortems, some sort of reconciliation before the transformation of the relationship to friendship. We almost always expect friendship unless the break-up was bitter.

During the relationship we are careful. Wary of expressing what is not yet known, or not yet true. We demarcate, draw boundaries and lines of permissiveness. We operate according to the rules within our culture. He said "I love you" already? But he's not playing according to the rules! . To give too much too early is to risk rejection and failure. To express too much is a violation of privacy, violation of self. And we all know to have low expectations in the beginning. We bring baggage too, from all our past relationships (and the exes are still orbiting in our periphery, giving rise to the question, is the past ever past?) and we become more brittle with each passing relationship. We do not expect any relationship to be the final relationship, the odds are against it. We do not expect marriage; indeed we do not even know what marriage is, and view it with a faint sense of foreboding. The expected timeline of a relationship is a lot less than forever.

The locals do it differently.

At play is a confluence of tradition, culture and history. For the migrant Westerners, whose lives are marked by relocation, to come to a culture where a family's ancestors lived in the same square mile 300 years ago as today, is to experience 'deep culture'. Where the expectations and behaviours in relationships lead to marriage instantly, where the combination is evaluated pragmatically, with a view towards propagating children, where the element of the religious and matching horoscopes (and thus of a match preordained in heaven) rules. And 300 years hence, we are still overwhelmingly rural, with collective rural memories, with unconscious tribal expectations of unity and relationships. Love is not what is so important as is stability. And so every relationship begins with the expression of love, for there is no proper word in the local vernacular for the Western conception of love, but instead different words to distinguish different manifestations of affection, lust, romantic love, filial piety, and even love born out of duty. It is the latter that holds sway over the imagination here, the fulfilment of duty to parents (thus getting married to someone of their choice to propage the line), duty to one's wife and children, duty to God. And this carries over, with sometimes alarming effects into modern day love and relationships. One is ill-equipped to combine the two, to combine the almost wary, rational, equalizing, constantly-evaluated love of the Westerner/Modernist with the traditional, society-mandated love rooted in one-sided power relationships (based on traditional gender roles) of the Local.

And when East meets West, though never the twain should meet (wrote the Twain himself) then the consequences are disturbing especially in a country where gender roles are shifting. A local youth yesterday blew himself up with a hand grenade purchased from the black market, killing himself and critically injuring the girl with him (an ex girlfriend who had jilted him). Love suicides are very popular here (and to a certain extent are romanticized in local literature). It is fashionable to risk everything for love. And people who have multiple relationships are stigmatized (not held up as the benchmark as they are in the West and people who have sexual relationships are almost completely dishonored in the wider society. (People who have multiple sexual relationships are completely beyond the pale). There is a very confusing map to navigate for the young local male, who holds the most power. What he says dictates roles. The young local female can jilt him and move on, but at considerable risk to her reputation and to her chances of garnering another suitable young local male (since no one wants what someone else has already had). Notwithstanding that, amongst the Colombo elite, the rules of the West play, with the naked emotions of the East and if you don't know where you are, the combination can be heady.

Because the other thing, is that due to the giant collective trauma engendered by a 20 year war, people have come to accept loss far more readily. And live far more intensely. So they say I love you instantly and throw themselves into a relationship and when it doesn't work out, they walk cleanly away, meaning they make a clean break and cut off communication because they can deal with loss a lot better than the unsuspecting Westerner, caught in this bewildering emotional web. And it is astonishing because in the end, it is they, it is they who in fact experience greater total net pain than the Westerner, who is cautious with his affection, and who has not learned to let go.

petrol

It is a particularly irksome time to be in Sri Lanka at the moment. In addition to having foreign programs basically being de-incentivized on being shown on local tv (goodbye desperate housewives (tolerable) goodbye West Wing (not so much)), in addition to having a satellite provider decommissioned (rumours abound as to the underlying reasons but suffice it to sum it up with one word: 'politics') we now have no petrol.

This is shocking. The government has appointed a crony (former cricketer) to the post of co-chairman of national petroleum board Ceypetco. In response, the unions have gone on strike. Ceypetco had 8 fuel storage units when they went on strike. All 8 units have been depleted. The strike has been going on for 2 days and there is an impasse. Yesterday there were 3km queues at Colombo petrol sheds. Now, there's practically no traffic. Soon, we'll all be walking, in a throwback to the prehistoric days. F***ing ridiculous.

trade union

We are engaged in a trade-union dispute, my very first and I'm quite excited. It has been instructive in the tensions between classes, between corporations and labour, of the power of mobilization, why trade unions fill the vacuum of political representation amongst the poor, why they are always socialist in nature and the reasons why the much-vilified trade unions still exist and wield considerable power. The situation is as follows:

A partner-NGO in the much-mobilized plantation sector is responsible for securing land to build a school. The land must be given by the corporation owning the plantation. The corporation has refused to give the land to anyone other than another corporation-friendly NGO (whom we have severe reservations about working with). After months of negotiations between all four parties, the corporation held a board meeting (some members of the board were pro-worker friendly) last week and finally majority-ruled that there would be no deviation from this policy. Our partner NGOs have now enlisted the help of the trade unions of which pretty much every worker on this plantation is a member of (since the school will benefit the worker's families) and the whole jingbang is going on strike for the whole of the coming week in the hope to hold the corporation hostage to their desires. The corporation seems unbending and we're not sure how long the workers can hold out without their daily wage. Our NGO can't publicly take a stand because we'll be accused of using foreign influence to bear on the situation. But behind the scenes, we've been working the phones to the relevant government officials, to the corporation, and of course to our partner NGOs. Of course in none of this, is anyone a complete saint. But it's good to take on the Man. The only thing is, I'm pretty sure we'll lose.

nyt

So yeah. Our fearless leader was featured in the New York Times Sunday magazine this past Sunday. (From Today to the NYT, not bad) but unfortunately it was a hatchet job. The inside scoop is that the actual interview was pretty long but the interviewer condensed it into sensationalistic soundbytes and as a result, he sounds a bit of a clown. But never mind.

Why is it that some things are harder to get over than others, defying all rational explanation? Perhaps because of the lack of closure, the lack of finality. Why is it that some people can live their lives with no heed to the consequences of their actions, with no heed to responsibility? And their carelessness ends up destroying other people's lives, scattering ashes over the ruins of possibilities. Their inability to face the consequences of their actions, their running away, their cowardice can be more damaging than a bitter fight sometimes. Because the running away, lends no closure. No finality. And when you do finally gather up the pieces and move on, it's always as scarred.

But anyway.