GABO WORLD

Remembering Haiti

2012-01-27T07:26:00.001+09:00

I never imagined that my evacuation from Haiti, after the earth quake, would be with a glass of prosecco in hand, alone on a private luxury jet, being served ham and cheese by a beautiful stewardess, as we flew through the sky leaving the chaos and madness below.

I had spent the day before waiting in the US embassy with no passport, little money, and had been wandering for 2 days in the haze of confusion that surrounded Port-au-Prince. I had lost everything; my house and my office, everything in rubble, with many friends and colleagues dead, and my own health deteriorating, I needed to get out.

The earthquake was the ultimate leveler and brought me directly in touch with people I had lived amongst and helped as an Aid worker. The first night I made it to the main park in Petionville, where people gathered the dead and wounded. Dead children strewn out like toy dolls, ritualistic dancing and people singing mournful songs collectively. The entire night illuminated by the vibrations of these sounds and scenes. I huddled in a corner with some other expats, in front of a hotel lobby not understanding anything, and able to be moved but unable to share and touch, their suffering. I was an outsider.

I won't go into much more detail, because it's not easy to describe it. But I will say something comes over you, in such situations, which makes you move with a sense of purpose. Having been in New York on 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, my purpose was clear: to get back home, be with loved ones, regroup and figure out how to contribute meaningfully.

I thought about my mother, the Empire State building, former lovers. Anything to help me focus, a goal in mind, to reach it, to help me move forward, to not get caught up in the confusion, anarchy and helplessness engulfing me.

I was not alone in this sentiment, never knowing that there are 45,000 Americans in Haiti, most of whom would be dual citizens if Haiti allowed it, and that many of them would be out in full force at the US embassy, also demanding evacuation. People slept on lawns overnight, overcrowding was an issue, with people slowly transferred to the airport where food and water became scarce. Logistically things were breaking down and made no easier by someone's bright idea to tell people to just show up at the airport in the morning.

In the morning there was a surge of what looked like Haitians, though on closer view with blue passports clutched in raised fists in the air, were Americans just like me trying to get into the airport being pushed back, as there were too many people and the planes and embassy staff were nowhere in site. Complete chaos, and a sinking feeling came over me. Word and panic was spreading about violence, and I was fatigued and sick after 4 days.

I did what any hustler would do, and looked for white people. I asked them how they were getting in, I saw some with cameras, media people, and followed them, tagging along to get inside, pretending to be one of them. I made it in to see more white faces, young 20 something Foreign Service officers with their jaw's to the ground. They didn't know what to do, nobody did, and I knew I had to fend for myself.

I had to hitchhike on the tarmac, after sneaking into the airport without a passport and then, like out of some 80s B film, I saw some Dominicans in crisp white uniforms wearing aviator sunglasses smoking at the tail side of a pristine plane (which I mistook for a US plane). They told me to hop on after they saw me desperately trying to make my way through the circus-like panoply of Aid planes, Marines and the media, not to mention the wounded and stranded, a kaleidoscope under the Caribbean Sun with no water and provisions in sight. I had no idea what this plane was doing there, and when I asked, received only nebulous answers.

It felt strange, I was both awkward and grateful, alone in an empty plane, flying to safety and leaving behind people in need of desperate help. I was not only fortunate enough to survive, but was leaving in style! Quite a contrast to everything I experienced in the days following the earthquake.

I got out, probably because I don't look Haitian and can work the angle of being an international aid worker. But is there some grander metaphor for inefficiency and privilege in being evacuated alone on a luxury jet? I don't know, but I am surprised that this surprises some, enrages others. When did we ever collectively engrain this notion that the world is fair?

If anything, my sense of entitlement, as an American and an Aid worker, was severely challenged that day. None of it meant anything amidst catastrophe and many people far privileged than me died. The earthquake hit everybody equally, rich and poor, but the aftermath with its survivors will be a different story. A story many people will not want to hear.

#occupywallstreet

2011-10-08T05:28:00.001+09:00

9/11 – Set Things in Motion

2011-09-15T12:27:00.008+09:00

I was 24 on 9/11, and was making my way into the adult world, after some years of activism and overseas humanitarian work, when that seismic moment occurred. The immediate impact was visceral, apocalyptic, the closest I'd ever felt to having my world, as I knew it, fall part. Slowly, and soon after, the effects became psychological. 9/11's true legacy will probably be its lasting influence on our collective psyche. There was no going back to before. Everything was tinged with that event and memory, propelling us into a new strange world, filled with uncertainty, violence and paranoia.

Up until that point, I was a part of, what seemed like, a minority who felt something was deeply wrong with our world even though by all outward appearances everything was fine. GDP was booming, unemployment was low, and the Internet was nascent, but already there was a spirit of innovation and energy that many likened to progress. The prospect of war, or violence, was remote. The Soviet Union was gone, and no threats existed. It was the "end of history", and we were all going to be liberal, well off, well adjusted, if slightly bored, but extremely privileged people with mundane problems.

As a result, it was frustrating and often humiliating to be scoffed at by many people when I talked about injustice, when outwardly there seemed little to complain about. There was no Vietnam, or civil rights issues as in the 60s, or threat of nuclear doom. But I went ahead and talked about what I still thought was important anyway: Africa, and immigrant communities, and the inordinate power of global corporations and their growing influence over our sovereignty, and our environment. I kind of knew what I was talking about, though a lot of it was emotional and trying to express a certain unease about the world I was inheriting.

I also started reading voraciously at this time, about everything, though especially history, and I became aware and attracted to the great struggles of the past, that presented themselves to the generations before me. They all had wars, or some grave injustice to overcome. I read all this with an inner zeal to be a part of this continuum through history, and to not miss out on the great struggle of my time. But our struggles, before 9/11, felt abstract, and numbed by extreme wealth and apathy. There was a nagging doubt, that perhaps there would be nothing as meaningful to fight for as there had been in the past. This might have been good for the world, but it was terrible for a young rebel without a cause.

Many of us thought that if this was life at its best, then it was devoid of meaning, and that there had to be something more. We looked to the 60s, nostalgically, because I think many of our parents were boomers, and we still were deeply moved by the music and art of that era. I remember feeling as if I was born in the wrong era and wished for a time with clearer struggles (and better music) that would call upon sacrifice and courage. I had all this revolutionary zeal, and knowledge, and understanding (so I hubristically thought) and I couldn't figure out what our fight was about, and if it really mattered in the end.

Slowly, after some searching, I became aflame to the No Global movement, and I was involved in protests in Seattle at the WTO, and then at the Democratic National Convention in 2000 (Rage Against the Machine!). Pretty inspiring stuff. We started getting the word corporations and globalization into the mainstream lexicon. There was debate, and a challenge to the global order and I think the bigger joy was catching the powers that be off guard, especially in Seattle. But a movement was growing and it was incredible to be a part of it.

I crisscrossed the country (through 40 states) organizing, and working with a network of activists with code names like War cry and Wings. We communicated with encrypted email, with servers maintained in an unknown place. It all felt serious, and we took ourselves very seriously. I also went on to work on the Ralph Nader Presidential campaign. Special interests, corporate welfare, the 2 party system, the state of environment, became the campaigns that helped direct my discontent.

I also briefly flirted with radical politics for a time, Socialism and Primitivism thrown in with some Anarchistic thought. I made communion with the Redwood forests, I became vegan, and I also tried to bend the arc of my sexuality and gender. It was all very enlightening, and gave me a stronger sense of who I was. I even, through sheer luck, and some hustle, ended up gaining a fellowship to sub Saharan Africa to work in Hiv/Aids education, and came back a strong advocate for generic drugs for the region, and worked hard to raise awareness to the tragedy and suffering there.

By 9/11 I decided all that activism was fine and good, but that I needed to make the most of my talents, and I decided to finally enroll in medical school, which I has been delaying for some time. I was still extremely restless, and more moved by the social and policy issues that medicine touched upon, than clinical practice.

I wanted to continue grappling with the big ideas, and understand the truth of life more and build on the adventures and excitement I had experienced up until then. I didn't feel ready to settle down with the extreme sacrifice and rigid discipline that medicine required. But I resigned myself to it, to be practical and to eventually be an even better activist, with the power, privilege and respect an MD degree brings.

And then 9/11 happened, and I was sitting in a medical school lecture in New York City when it occurred. I was stunned, like most people, and afraid, as my mother worked close to the towers. She survived, though she was trapped in a building for 4 hours. The whole time I couldn't comprehend or process what was happening and was disoriented, in shock. And the media fueling the paranoia and fear didn't help. The repeated images of the planes crashing into the towers led to further anguish and confusion. It was a mind fuck of epic proportions.

Much of my political education at that point was anti-American and highly critical of US foreign policy. There were murmurs within my progressive circles that America deserved this. I didn't agree or disagree at that moment, because I still could not figure out what it was that was happening. I needed time, reflection, and calm analysis. I couldn't fathom how quickly it was discovered that this was the act of Islamist fundamentalists. I was skeptical of the scenarios presented about flight manuals and Korans, and how the supposed perpetrators of this act didn't care to know how to land when they were in flight school. I still couldn't understand how anyone could fly a plane into buildings with such precision and calculation, without practice. Something didn't add up, and no one seemed bothered to step back to reflect and investigate, present evidence.

No, we had to take the word of our leaders, believe and follow them blindly down whatever path they choose. All other voices were deemed unpatriotic, crazy, and disrespectful. It should never be forgotten how small the space for dialogue and debate was at the time. We were turbo charged into War mode, and it was a sick and frightening sight to see and witness.

I remember reading the New York Times on September 12th, and that fine paper of record declared: NATION AT WAR. What? Wasn't this a crime against humanity?

It was surreal, as if I was in some dystopian novel, set in some absurd future, like 1984 or the Brave New World. Hysteria abounded, flags came out of nowhere and an empty, hollow, fascist patriotism had swept the nation and my city. People forget this scary part of 9/11. And then civil liberties were swept aside, with almost zero debate and somehow there was this consensus to go to war in Afghanistan and kill innocent people, to hunt down some fundamentalists in caves. It all seemed extreme and far-fetched.

But with time, I came to understand that Al-Qaeda was real, and that there were people out there who were determined to hurt us. In a resigned manner I came to support the War in Afghanistan, even though it seemed to be an impossible task to use conventional warfare methods, to fight a nebulous enemy.

I had thought that was the end of things, but then slowly the talk of Iraq began, and the internal logic used to justify Afghanistan seemed to wear thin with Iraq. Though it was acknowledged fact Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11, polls kept showing that the majority of the US public felt, however, there was a link, and the media played their part diabolically to promote this fallacy with misinformation and innuendo. The truth didn't matter, the polls did, and what people believed was enough justification to continue to perpetuate irrational policy. It was hard not to be dismayed and horrified, if you were a thinking person at that time.

At some point it became apparent that this was going to be an endless war, that would not only go into Iraq, but then Iran, and who knows wherever else struck our fancy. A very deep, fundamental shift in policy had taken place, though fortunately, eventually, many people woke up and organized to try and stop it.

It was around this time, after a year of medical school, that I decided to drop out and pursue my passion to live and act according to the urgency of the moment, to work to make things better. In some ways, I felt the moment I had been waiting for, that struggle of my generation, had finally arrived. I really didn't know what I would do concretely, but I knew I could not be looking at histology slides and sit in anatomy lab, as the world burned and everything I held to be true and good, slowly slipped away. Medicine would always be there, but history doesn't wait. I was ready for the struggle. And I may have had delusions of grandeur, but I sincerely believed that my time had arrived and my purpose was now clear.

Perhaps I was over dramatic, or maybe extremely sensitive, I don't know. Looking back, I don't know if I would react the same now, as I did then. And I am astounded I so readily gave up the secure and tested path, for some unknown quest. And if I am honest, I don't think my motivation was to make the world a better place and to fight injustice, only, though it was a part of it. A lot of it was also about not wanting to be an "adult", i.e., boring, responsible and focused on a bourgeoisie future. It was equally about excitement, and making your mark on the world, shaking things up, making things move differently than predicted and flirting with destruction, because it turns you on. There is something lustful, of that way of living.

Just after March 2003, I decided to leave the country, after having worked hard to organize against the war, culminating on the February 15^th protest where millions of people across the world marched against the impending invasion. I felt much solidarity, and joy, in this collective expression for peace. I remember thinking there was no way the Bush Government could invade after such a huge turnout.

It was a deep blow personally to see the Bush government, completely ignore this and invade on March 19^th. I had had enough. I couldn't take it anymore. All this along with 9/11 and the culture of fear, paranoia and stupidity became unbearable.

I reasoned that if US foreign policy was unjust, I must work to make it saner, and as a citizen, given it was my tax money killing people, I had a say and would work to stop it. I knew the Middle East was not a good time to go to or work with, in the midst of war, and perhaps it was too late with everything that was taking place. After some research, I realized that after Israel and Egypt, Colombia was the biggest recipient of US aid money, much of it used for repressive means. I somehow decided I must go there, and with some hustling joined some incredible groups working in human rights within Colombia. I spent the next 2 years there, on and off, and this slowly brought me into the realm of working in human rights professionally, eventually garnering a fellowship to study for a masters degree and then working around the globe on numerous humanitarian missions in disaster and conflict zones.

All because of 9/11. I almost look back at what I wrote here in disbelief. I suppose different people react to different events differently, for different reasons. But there was something about me that moved, and tried very hard to align the beliefs in my head, with my actions back then. That consistency was important, not just for some moral reason. It was about survival. I couldn't function back then, if I wasn't true to myself, and nothing seemed worth doing, if it didn't meet the ideals I had set forth for myself.

Along the way, in Colombia, in sub-Saharan Africa, in India, in Haiti, with all my work, slowly the heartbreak of the human condition got to me. I became less angry and stopped looking at things through the lense of justice. I saw problems, and I did my best to provide solutions, and make them better, and just tried to do a good job of things and that was it. It became a job, and I was proud that I could do it, and felt privileged that I was called in to help (and often paid handsome sums of money), and then that was the end of it. I detached, I went shopping, and I became concerned with writing fiction, and women, and adventure in other forms (Peyote rituals, deep treks into the Himalayas, etc.)

But I still often think back, to that 24-year-old fresh-faced fiery-eyed medical student who gave it all up. All because 9/11. What destiny, and now I see what that day means to me, and to the future and everything else, 10 years later. This is just my story. I am sure many people have their stories too, if they stop, to think about it what 9/11 means to them.

2011-05-30T12:58:00.001+09:00

Half a Home

2011-05-24T05:23:00.001+09:00

Part 1

There are few things sadder than an arrival, after such a long journey, with no one to receive you. Rishi stood alone amidst the crowd outside Indira Gandhi Airport. Taxis came forth and people slowly, in practical fashion, filed into them. Other people met family, kissed children, smiles everywhere.

But for Rishi there was no family nor the pomp or celebration of years past, when he would arrive with his mother and father, to everyone's embraces; the airport terminal turned carnival; flower garlands and laughter; hugs and tears of joy.

Return was a cherished event coupled with the visceral impact of the Indian heat. And the colors: As if a switch had been turned on to the kaleidoscope, merry go around and roller coaster – all at once. Though now, disheveled and with nobody around he knew, Rishi felt the ache only nostalgia gives. His stubbled face held an empty expression, looking for solace in some strangers face, though everyone unaccompanied waited for their taxi with distracted unease, looking at their cellphones. Airports can make you feel so, alone.

At the luggage carousel, he felt his spirit turn; he hadn't expected such intense sadness. He had a feeling nobody would show. His mother said she had informed the family though something about the way she said it made him think twice.

Now outside, he still looked around. Perhaps someone had come? Maybe it was a mistake? Of course, a natural mistake, with the time difference and all.

Back home, in his parent's Queens apartment, the time difference used to be ingrained through the two clocks upon the mantle; one Indian the other New York time. He could never look at one without looking at the other, even outside the house; he would always know exactly what time it was in India.

The clocks were a constant reference point for Rishi's father, who would work overtime in the 70s to make one 5 minute phone call a week, to hear distant voices that haunted his memories and dreams.

Rishi's father was a man's man; rarely shed a tear, generally unexpressive. But those phone calls were what he lived for. The rest of the time was just in anticipation of that moment or in planning a return visit. Gifts constantly collected, life was suspended till that very moment of return - in the airport terminal- when life truly bloomed, transforming Rishi's father; from a man who read the New York Times in brusque silence; watched Peter Jennings in a trance, into someone who had purpose again; India, family.

Whenever things got tough, his father planned a trip; it slowly became the solution to all problems. And it worked. Upon returning, for months, his father would have renewed energy to pay bills and go to work, only to slow down again, get into a rut and plan another trip. India, India. Repeat ad infinitum. Not a bad life.

New York was purgatory, a grand waiting game, for that moment of return. His father enjoyed New York; it mesmerized with its energy, opportunity and edge. But something about being in- between, in the greatest city on Earth (he sincerely believed this) made him feel more alive to everything. In, but not of it - nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Debilitating for some, exhilarating for others.

His father had come over on scholarship, to study at NYU for his masters in Math, and stayed on to work and gain citizenship, the typical immigrant story of its time. But he was never at ease in this new dreamland, even though nobody waxed more poetic about it; about the subway; the 5th avenue library; the jazz clubs in the village; the New York Times, even.

And then Rishi was born, unexpectedly, or so his father said, after they started frequenting Atlantic City, leaving his sister with family friends. His father gambled while his mother walked the boardwalk, and "that's where you were conceived, Lucky 7", referencing Rishi's year of birth; 1977 and the roulette wheel.

Given his father's eccentricities, he wasn't sure if this was some joke or not. His parents did obsess over Atlantic City; it was almost always where they wanted to go whenever a long weekend came. But he never really saw his parents touch, so it heartened him to think of time when they did. Whether or not it was true, the very idea of them together made him happy. His mother in a sari by the Jersey shore, holding his father's hand, as they looked over at the sunset. Care free, gambling, eating together. Probably not true, but hey, who knew?

He asked his mother about it once and she just laughed. But then she laughed whenever his father did anything crazy because if he wasn't doing anything crazy he got depressed. He closed the lights in the living room, put a blanket over his head and never spoke to anyone for days. And then he'd watch old Benny Hill episodes on VHS and this one dance video of Sridevi, over and over. We all have our unique ways of coping with our frustrations and losses. But these episodes were intermittent and if they got really bad, there was always India if something didn't pique his interest first.

Like how one day, after school, his father gave him a cutting of a restaurant review from the New York Times. It was written in that floral style only the Times gets away with. "Read this article, look at how divine they make it sounds." Divine, his father had taken to improving his vocabulary during Rishi's SAT preparation but had retained his loose pronunciation and grammar.

"We must go there, we must eat there, right now right now!" He got into the car, revved the engine and blasting the horn to make Rishi hurry. Rishi would feel a mad rush of energy and joy in those spontaneous moments. His father thrived on unpredictability. "Surprises, good surprises, are a precious thing. Our lives generally have bad surprises but good surprises make up for the bad ones."

His father was different than the other Indians, less "practical" and too showy, with tastes a bit too refined for a new immigrant. Though he earned no more than his colleagues, he spent more, and feared less. Looking at old pictures of his father you immediately noticed the well-dressed handsome man amidst a sea of tackiness and anxiety. The corduroy blazer, the disco shirts and gold chains, it's as if his father belonged on the Amalfi coast with movie stars instead of ugly modernist Queens with a bunch of square engineers as neighbors, colleagues and friends. All Indian, all so uncool.

Rishi always wondered what it was that made his father different than the rest, and with age, and some life experience, realized it was because his father was already quite well to do before coming to America. He was the main breadwinner for his joint family and as a result the go-to man for all problems. Money, prestige, respect, and already married to Rishi's mother; he had it all. Only to leave it behind for a dream - or was it ambition?

"I wanted to study and come see what all the fuss was about," he said to him looking at him through the rearview mirror. Rishi in the backseat, his mother up front organizing the tapes in the glove compartment, "Why doesn't anyone put the tapes back in the right covers?" This was a pet peeve of hers, though nobody ever listened.

His father usually opened up driving, on those trips to Atlantic City, with the New Jersey Turnpike spiced by Bollywood soundtracks. It was as if the road ahead and the movement made him relax and look Rishi directly in the eye, albeit through the rear view mirror.

It was on these trips that he learned that his father rented not a room, but a dirty mattress on Roosevelt Ave, for 8 hours a day. He worked nights at a candy store, and took over the mattress from someone else, on his return, from a person about to do exactly what he just did; a low paying shift if not in a candy store, in a gas station or restaurant.

His father could have gone back to India, and everything would have been fine. He wasn't from a small village, or supporting a family, or any of that sacrificial stuff that paralyzes or motivates many an immigrant. It was curiosity and adventure that drove him. The same spirit of adventure that was bringing Rishi back, to India.

Being of Indian origin allowed him to feel connected to something more authentic than his drab American life. He saw in his Indian family a love and spontaneity few had in America. The absence of absurd consumer comforts made them stronger, healthier and more alert to the visceral aspects of life. Or, so he thought, in his romantic escapism.

We all want to be somewhere else, and that far off place helps us make sense of what home means to us. For Rishi, his dismay with America was always a result of having India to compare it to. It became a deeper fissure, an unwashed wound, that as he got older, held him back from ever being comfortable with who he was; where he was.

Rishi's father understood all this. He knew that excesses and absurdities of the West could only be curbed and tempered by the East. That is why he wanted Rishi to fall in love, with India - but as an American. "India needs a De Tocqueville" he would absurdly say. Rishi didn't expect such highbrow political philosophy from his father. That's what the New York Times did to him. It made him memorize trite phrases that surprisingly worked within the context of what he was talking about. "America is the greatest son, trust me. The opportunities, dignity and possibilities. The endless possibilities of being. You don't know how lucky you are, you have choices, and options, that I never fathomed or thought about. The problems in America are a result of bad choices. Eating too much, drugs, sex, over-spending, but at least people have the choices and the second chances to make it right. In India there are no second chances. People are condemned to their fate, and lament and whither away wondering what could have been, if only, if only..."

These diatribes were a common fixture in Rishi's upbringing, often colored by his father's constant unease for those he left behind. Not guilt, just plain and simple longing. If family defines a man's life, little else can substitute it. If his father every knew love, or was ever pressed to describe it; it would be this one desire; to return to touch again his land and people.

Rishi knew this meant more to him, than being with himself and his mother. In this regard they were similar to families of artists, rocks stars or politicians, all of whom work for something bigger than themselves, only in Rishi's father's case, what filled that god-shaped hole was a huge, poor country, on the other side of the world, filled with smiling, adoring, pandering family. Family.

Part 2

The sky slowly turned a deep electric blue. It was 4am and a loud hush had fallen over the airport crowd. In the past, at the same hour, Rishi remembered more hubbub or perhaps it was the perspective of being older that made things feel different.

In the commotion of an earlier return someone touched his feet, a gesture of respect for elders on the sub-continent. He was fifteen and his younger cousin nephew of seven the culprit. The smudge marks left on his brand new Reebok shoes perturbed him.

Now it was different: Nobody paid attention to his presence, not even the coolies. He was alone, older and trying to solve his problems like his father used to, with a trip to India. It had been five years since he'd been back. The last trip had been short, two weeks, and a teary eyed blur, to submerge his father's ashes in the holy river.

He hadn't had the inclination to return after; it didn't feel the same without his father. Time passed and he got caught up in his university studies, while his mother worked ever harder to run the household alone. Yes, those were tough times. Life without his father had become mundane, mechanical, about survival. He forgot about India. It only occurred to him when he started faltering and was unable to cope with the profound malaise over-taking him.

It was during medical school and by all measures everything was going well. A beautiful girlfriend and on path to becoming a doctor; the dedication to success he harbored was paying fruit. Rishi focused ever harder after his father's death, if only because the challenge and the difficulty of his situation motivated him. He was always like this, even as a child. He looked for difficultly; disdained comfort. He never questioned what the task meant or what it led to, he just wanted to succeed and in turn, make his father proud.

He worked to see his father's face light up in doing complex algebra problems at 7. Or when he was considered too short for the basketball team, he became a 3-point specialist; shooting baskets from afar, deep into the night he would practice. "Make your weakness your strength", his father would say often.

Success was no longer enough. With his father gone, nothing made sense. For the first time he had to examine what he was doing; what things meant, where he was in the world. It tormented him, to have the responsibility of his decisions and life weigh on him, when in the past all he had to do was be successful and not question or think, just make his father happy.

Rishi did not understand how he got to where he was. Nothing appealed to him. People looked at his life in envy; awed by his accomplishments, though they seemed meaningless to him now. Something wasn't right, and he couldn't figure it out.

One may have surmised that Rishi was "depressed", in need of counseling and coddling. Or perhaps this is the normal process of mourning, easily explaining away his existential crisis through psychology and biology. Rishi was aware of all this, and actively rebelled against such explanations.

He was aware his crisis was related to his father's death, but he felt its solution – his rising up and overcoming – was paramount in honoring his father's memory. He didn't know how he would over-come; he just knew he had to. Besides, with his father gone, he felt that somehow he was carrying the burden of what his father always felt – that state of unease, the longing, the searching for ecstasy through the senses, travel, something new, always trying to fill that endless void. It's what made him love his father, and now he knew he had to as gracefully and recklessly follow suit.

A feeling of restlessness eventually started to take a hold of him. At first he couldn't sleep, then he would disappear for days, riding the subway endlessly to every last stop on every subway line in the city, to feel the limits.

"Last stop, last stop, this is the last stop. Everybody off."

Rishi would get off, walk around and talk to random people and ride back, looking off into the horizon, constantly in a daze.

The New York City subway comforted him, with its swaying rhythms and familiar sounds. Like the ringing bell before the doors closed. And then watching all those people: Couples kissing, old people reading, children transfixed by the moving skyline in the distance. As a child, he always insisted on taking rides on the trains even on weekends, and his fascination never ceased. It's where he did his best thinking.

One day he saw a little boy with his bicycle and father. The bike had training wheels, was cumbersome to look at and the boy was quiet as the father sat next to him with a gentle smile. "Today, today is the day, we are going to take these off and don't worry I'll hold you, but you got to believe in yourself." The little boy had a faraway look in his eyes, his attention focused inward.

Rishi discreetly followed father and son, as they got off somewhere in Brooklyn. It was a clear and sunny autumn morning. He was supposed to be in class, but took to riding the subway more often. In the nearby park the father removed the training wheels as his son got on. "I am going to hold you, don't worry." And he did, up to a point, he ran along holding his son as he pedaled.

The rays of the sun slanted as they beamed in through the leaves falling from the trees. Effervescence took hold of the scene and, as if in slow motion, slowly, the father let go and for a brief moment, his son moved alone. Balancing, only to fall shortly after. His father still smiled, walked slowly over and gave him a hug, and picked him up in his arms. The boy tried hard not to cry. "One more time." His father said "one more time." Rishi welled up watching this.

Rishi never cried easily, and this bothered him. The only thing that made him cry without fail were Italian films from the neo –realist period. He discovered this by chance in a film class in university. Bicycle Thief. It moved him so much that he had to run out of the cinema, uncontrollable sobs.

Neo-realism was a break from fantasy, poignantly raw; it tugged on the soul harder than the melodrama produced by Hollywood up to that point in time. And now Rishi was feeling things in real life. He was now in the film, rather than outside, as a spectator.

This was part of a revelation that came to him after a bong hit, watching Easy Rider, with his best friend after the summer he graduated from NYU. They came up with their own philosophy of film, of how reality is siphoned into three categories and our lives are basically spent shifting between these realms. The first one is as spectator, the other as actor, and the third and final is as director/producer. None is better than the other, but we all find ourselves in one of these realms, all the time. And the trick is to move in and out fluidly, and not get stuck in any one realm.

And now he had shifted. He was in, and was feeling the part he was playing, stronger than ever. And the scene with the father with his son and the bicycle is what did it. He thought to himself while watching father and son:

"What more can one want out of existence but those precious moments, the rites of passage and moments of kindness in the face of failure? "

But now Rishi was alone, and had no one to pick him up. He didn't have his father, and an ache deep inside him awoke for the first time watching this scene, on a sunny morning in Brooklyn. Something about this newfound pain didn't scare him, he felt intuitively that it was better to feel and be aware of it than run from it, or pretend it didn't exist.

The idea of going to India came to him later. It was during a during a histology lecture, looking through slides, identifying mitochondria. The exam preparation required that he review numerous slides, which to the laymen look like various abstract shapes. Somehow, he could have sworn, he saw the images speak to him. It was late at night, perhaps he was sleep deprived. He saw an image of India, and the goddess Durga. Rishi never believed in these "signs" and never thought about god or mysticism. But then nobody really does until they are in trouble.

The message was clear: He had to go back to India, get in touch with his roots. Leave this terrible place behind.

He dropped out. He was going to go to India like his father used to. If he had his father, and his father had India, and if he no longer had his father, then he had to go to the source of that goodness – India. Circuitous logic, yes, but desperate times call for such measures. He went in search for that renewable force that always gave his father life, fulfillment, and energy.

Now, he was back and he could have been anywhere, but he wasn't just anywhere. He was in the land of his ancestors and Gods, he thought melodramatically. He looked around at all the empty tired faces. Some of them had people to receive them, but they were small muted receptions. Proper, middle class, as if someone was watching and everyone had to behave them selves.

"I am from here, I am from here," he repeated to himself, in his mind. But he didn't believe it; feeling no connection to the people around him. He absent- mindedly took his prepaid taxi receipt and made his way to the curb. A car came; the driver without saying hello took his bags and loaded them in the trunk. Rishi, about to get in the back, hesitated. He went around to the front to sit next to the driver.

He lit up a cigarette. Dawn's light and the smoke gave him a glamorous glow. His brow furrowed in deep thought, he sighed and looked over at the driver, at his blood shot eyes, probably awoken while in a deep dream and now he drove along mechanically, as if sleep walking; driving. The cool pre-dawn air and that smell, that earthy smell, hit him with exhilaration. Some things never change.

Rishi told the driver in Hindi how beautiful the morning was. The driver smiled, and instantly, as if by magic, his entire tired face grew awake and lucid, more attractive and less hostile than it had been before. "Yes sahib, it is," he said, looking back at Rishi kindly. Rishi felt better, a steady smile took over him, and he looked ahead with greater clarity.

Slowly, he started remembering where he was. As they made their way into South Delhi, familiarity and old memories came rushing in though his heart began to sink, as they got closer to his family house. His mother had informed his uncle of his arrival, but he also knew that his uncle was never the same after his father's death, expecting Rishi's father to finally bequeath his half of the family house.

It was a constant source of anguish and tension in the family. His uncle could not understand why his father would want to keep half his house in India. "You live in America, you are rich and well to do why do you need two houses?" But Rishi's father never budged, a good-hearted person though he was, and nobody more generous in the family, he wasn't naive. He understood how India worked; with no property he had no status, a nobody, only a guest to be coddled and fed on vacations, but forgotten about once gone. Keeping his part of the house allowed him to come and go as he pleased and maintain control and importance within his family. It had nothing to do with money.

Now this half a house, half a one-time home, was a point of contention. What made matters worse was that this house was not just anywhere; it was in a posh South Delhi colony. Estimates of what the house was worth varied, but even conservative estimates made it rival Manhattan property values.

The house was no mansion: A one floor, four-room house that had sheltered at one time the entire joint family; four families in total, one per room. Doors always open, children everywhere, cooking constant, as kitchens were communal, amongst all his aunties or "mummys". There was always action, and noise, it was only during power cuts that everyone quieted down, gathered in one room, and over candlelight told stories.

The candle would flicker and the through the shadows and his elder's words, Rishi would feel the history of his collective past come alive. The partition, Pakistan, his grandfather and grandmother who he never met but could feel, through those stories, into the night. It was in such moments that Rishi felt connected to something bigger than himself, some grand past, a feeling of belonging.

This was India in the 1980s. When there was one brand of car, 2 state owned TV channels, no commercials, and the stagnation that comes from being a closed economy. Joint families, living together, was cultural as much as it was an economic necessity. The economic reforms of 1991 changed all this. And with each trip as a child, Rishi saw greater wealth and materialism take shape. First came cable TV, and then McDonalds, followed by the usual slew of multi-national brands. And then he noticed the confidence and independence that a booming economy provided his middle class family mixed with an indifference towards himself, his parents, and America.

Slowly, and surely, the nuclear family became the norm, and people saw each other less and less frequently. Crassly, he interpreted it as the inevitable triumph of the material over the spirit. The domination of Western over Eastern culture. Simplistic assessment, yes. But then it is hard to be objective when your analysis is colored by nostalgia, identity, post-colonialism and - most importantly – the heartbreak that comes from the acknowledgement that nothing lasts forever. Not youth, nor love.

As a child, his old toys and clothes were constantly sent to his cousins in India. One of the first things done when they arrived was to open up the suitcases around a crowd of family, as they awed and oohed over used Sony Walkmans and Levi jeans. Now he just got word that one of his cousins took a holiday to Paris. Paris! He had never even been to Paris.

And now, as the taxi pulled up to his old house, all he felt was isolation. His side of the house empty and locked up, the other side decrepit and unkempt. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He rang it again, while the driver waited. Finally, his Cousin's wife came to the door, and forced a smile at him. She had been informed she said, and was waiting. Her face was not only older it was if the scowl she now wore was permanently etched on her face. Especially made worse by her trying to hide it by forcing a smile. But her face betrayed her. She opened his side of the house for him, and said, in the most formal of manners, that if he needed anything, to eat, anything, to come over their side, and that they would talk in the morning when everyone was awake.

Rishi paid the driver, who brought in his things. The living room was dusty, and the house was in need of a good cleaning. It was awkward to be all alone on his side of the house. He wanted to wake and hug and laugh with his cousins and uncle, like times past. But something held him back, an invisible, unspoken, mutually acknowledged barrier.

He went to sleep almost immediately from the exhaustion of the journey, but also to escape this new sense of heartbreak. Before drifting off to sleep, he remembered his mother, back in New York, working at the office. She was probably at this very moment returning home, alone as well. She had told him to forget about India. That it had changed. She was here a year back, and fought bitterly to preserve the house, though all feeling of love was gone. She was treated poorly, and harassed by Rishi's uncle. Rishi couldn't believe it could be true though his mother insisted things had changed. It slowly was becoming apparent what was happening. Nobody at the airport, a scowl instead of a genuine smile, their side of the house locked up; abandoned.

Rishi fell into a deep sleep. A sleep so deep, a dreamless sleep, the kind that makes you forget where you are. He awoke to the sound of birds singing, and a hot afternoon sun caressing his handsomely worn face. He had heard somewhere that the face you have at 30 is the face you carry with you the rest of your days. How honest and true the face of a person is. He recalled his sister in law, it was clear that bitterness and anxiety had ruined her face. She was not happy to see him. To be unwelcome in ones own home, motherland, by ones own blood. What did it mean? How he yearned for warmth again. An India without family love, what was the point and why had he come?

He arose, and walked onto the veranda. The trees were just as green he remembered them. In front lay the colony park, clean and pristine, much cleaner than before. A sign said "No cricket playing".

His sister was married in this park, about 20 years ago. His father's funeral ceremony also took place there. Throughout his youth all he remembered were weddings and funerals, and when it was empty, it was over-run with children. Now, servants lay about languidly, everybody was somewhere else, there was a silence that perturbed him. Pristine mansions left empty, servants watching soap operas all day and enjoying leisure. This was new.

Weddings and funerals were now also prohibited in public spaces. The chaos with the noise disturbed people and brought down property values. People wanted to be relax and live in peace in the little time they had free.

"Change is a part of life" he thought. But could India still be a savior for him as it had been for his father? And if it wasn't, how was he to deal with his own frustrations and failures?

When in France

2011-05-18T05:27:00.000+09:00

Downtown

2011-05-11T07:44:00.000+09:00

One of the elements of the downtown movement was the interaction with characters, true individuals, people you may even disgust you but you had to give them their due cause they were their own person. And after a while, what downtown teaches is for you to work hard to make yourself interesting and unique. In some people this seems contrived and after a while you get a homogeneity among non-conformists (ie, they look, talk and read the same books) but its still a worthy effort and a necessary one in America, where corporate culture takes on hegemonic dimensions and the greatest form of resistance is with your ideas and mind.

A beautiful spring day in Paris.

2011-04-28T09:56:00.000+09:00

A beautiful spring day in Paris.
So much beauty. Beauty built once and maintained attracts the world. Through beauty, conquer.

This is quite novel, to jot down my thoughts on the phone. It can take some getting used to but I kind of like it for short pieces. I am finding that my desire to write is directly proportional to my desire to improve and better my life. There is a connection between words and reality making.

2011-04-28T09:55:00.000+09:00

This is quite novel, to jot down my thoughts on the phone. It can take some getting used to but I kind of like it for short pieces. I am finding that my desire to write is directly proportional to my desire to improve and better my life. There is a connection between words and reality making.

The power of words. It all comes down to how we arrange these symbols in ways that speak to people, make them respond, change their thinking. And so many people do not write. They are left out and go about their lives in quiet disdain.

Intelligence = War

2011-04-24T05:01:00.001+09:00

I am dazzled by intelligence and talent, though the end point of what many of them work towards is not always good. The best and the brightest led us into Vietnam and Germany had all the philosophers and scientists, and they perverted morality for their own ends, power. Israel, too.

The US, the beacon of freedom it is now, rests on a foundation of genocide and systematic discrimination, yet somehow is immune to criticism given the concessions it has made over the years, excellent PR and also benefited from perpetuating these crimes in an era when the UN did not exist and media and solidarity with foreign causes was not fashionable. They could never get away with something similar today.

This is the inherent distrust China, and other countries have with the West. They put in place rules, after breaking them, and then hold others to a different standard, forgetting history and preaching justice. Who is the biggest polluter, the biggest war maker and the most unjust and cruel to its own people in recent memory? The West. And now they come along and tell others to behave?

But it's neither so simplistic, as the West has also evolved, changed and made all efforts to learn from its mistakes and work to make a better society, from the ashes of injustice and war. And by many accounts the transformation is historic, and unprecedented and innovative. It' hard to deny the rights afforded to many minority groups and the progress made on many fronts. It's hard to remain unmoved and cynical in the face of such great change.

There is a contradiction, a paradox and a tension that pulls us in many directions about what is true and good about Western Civilization. I think this debate, this constant reflection is a strong suit, and one that will ultimately bring us to a better place.

Where I am going

2011-04-24T05:00:00.001+09:00

Haiti is a sinking ship. Broken in irreparable ways. It broke me too. I am usually content to be in forsaken places, working with forgotten people, doing my part. I am always sustained by the belief, after rigorous analysis, that my work does no harm, that it may not save the world, but the little I do means that much more in such circumstances. On tough days, I am not so sure, but I am still very proud of being in this field, and doing something that is bigger than myself.

I have naively espoused the very American belief that through intelligence and hard work alone, one can solve any problem. A tempting indulgence and one that leads a naturally energetic people into perpetual activity. Sometimes the best thing to do is wait. To observe and reflect and to act at the right moment rather than ceaselessly persisting obsessively with a problem.

Disheartening to meet so many careerists in this field who make this a profession, who don't do it with a spirit of adventure and curiosity. Wherever they go, they get drunk and hang amongst themselves. They watch their laptops, call home. Spend their money in big cities on holiday, basking in the glow of the prestige of being different. This can be a dirty, dirty field.

I don't understand them.

I was a traveler, and I happened upon this work. It is interesting for now, but then I will move on. I do it on my terms. And that is important to maintain. This is more than just a job. Most of us are in this field not for the money, and we are smart enough to be doctors, lawyers and corporate businessmen, with the house and the cars and the football on Sunday. But we decided to leave it behind, to chart a new path for ourselves and the lives of others.

On pornography (even better than the real thing)

2011-04-04T05:43:00.001+09:00

Used to be a time that a young man would come home alone drunk to himself and his loneliness, after a night on the prowl. Rejection was painful. Now, rejection is coupled with intense pleasure. With a push of some buttons, the body awakens, though the conscious mind knows that it's not real, we engage almost in an involuntary trance.

Modernity can make you feel so numb, at times. And when something offers to move and make you virile, how can one resist?

The glow of the screen, the beep of a text message, the constant connectivity prey on our biology; our weakness for excitement and engagement.

The high minded and civilized scoff at pornography in all forms. The involuntary, the play to base instincts, horrify a person of class and dignity because elements of instinct and nature, need to be mixed with restraint and subtlety for them to have value. It can't be enough that it feels good - that is not justification enough for action. For if we only did what was initially pleasurable, all fecund pleasures would vanish. Reading, music, architecture, combine elements of passion and work. No, animals do what they feel like, though civilized people enjoy things that are a result of work, sacrifice and craftmanship.

And there is something about taking the easy way out that does not sit well with this civilized crowd. There must be an element of impracticality - a risk, an indulgence, that separates and differentiates those with values and those without. Thus, the liberal arts, the theater, the opera, high fashion, it's not just that they are expensive, it's just because their value is uncertain, and they constantly evoke a debate between what it's worth, to which many of this class assert: That if you have to ask, then you don't know what it is worth and never will.

From my side, as a philosophy student, and a purveyor of high culture and travel, I'll say that many things, especially beautiful ones, do much to expand the limited realm of mortality we find ourselves in. No one but people from this class, more than any other, is as conscious of their own and the world's demise. This adds an a special element of urgency, hedonism, and carpe diem, if you like, to the proceedings. And constantly the line is drawn and smudged between self absorbed egotism, or truly rapturous transcendence - brilliance. Modern Art is an Apt metaphor. So much of it is BS, but then Jackson Pollack and Basquiat and Warhol shine though it to make us live and think in new ways. Not always convincing and THAT tension, is what drives us forward.

Half a Home (Part 1 & 2)

2011-02-16T06:17:00.002+09:00

Half a Home

Part 1

But for Rishi there was no family nor the pomp or celebration of years past, when he would arrive with his mother and father, to everyone’s embraces; the airport terminal turned carnival; flower garlands and laughter; hugs and tears of joy.

At the luggage carousel, he felt his spirit turn; he hadn’t expected such intense sadness. He had a feeling nobody would show. His mother said she had informed the family though something about the way she said it made him think twice.

Now outside, he still looked around. Perhaps someone had come? Maybe it was a mistake? Of course, a natural mistake, with the time difference and all.

Back home, in his parent’s Queens apartment, the time difference used to be ingrained through the two clocks upon the mantle; one Indian the other New York time. He could never look at one without looking at the other, even outside the house; he would always know exactly what time it was in India.

The clocks were a constant reference point for Rishi's father, who would work overtime in the 70s to make one 5 minute phone call a week, to hear distant voices that haunted his memories and dreams.

Rishi's father was a man’s man; rarely shed a tear, generally unexpressive. But those phone calls were what he lived for. The rest of the time was just in anticipation of that moment or in planning a return visit. Gifts constantly collected, life was suspended till that very moment of return - in the airport terminal- when life truly bloomed, transforming Rishi’s father; from a man who read the New York Times in brusque silence; watched Peter Jennings in a trance, into someone who had purpose again; India, family.

And then Rishi was born, unexpectedly, or so his father said, after they started frequenting Atlantic City, leaving his sister with family friends. His father gambled while his mother walked the boardwalk, and “that’s where you were conceived, Lucky 7”, referencing Rishi’s year of birth; 1977.

Given his father’s eccentricities, he wasn’t sure if this was some joke or not. His parents did obsess over Atlantic City; it was almost always where they wanted to go whenever a long weekend came. But he never really saw his parents touch, so it heartened him to think of time when they did. Whether or not it was true, the very idea of them together made him happy. His mother in a sari by the Jersey shore, holding his father’s hand, as they looked over at the sunset. Care free, gambling, eating together. Probably not true, but hey, who knew?

He asked his mother about it once and she just laughed. But then she laughed whenever his father did anything crazy because if he wasn’t doing anything crazy he got depressed. He closed the lights in the living room, put a blanket over his head and never spoke to anyone for days. And then he’d watch old Benny Hill episodes on VHS and this one dance video of Sridevi, over and over. We all have our unique ways of coping with our frustrations and losses. But these episodes were intermittent and if they got really bad, there was always India if something didn’t pique his interest first.

Like how one day, after school, his father gave him a cutting of a restaurant review from the New York Times. It was written in that floral style only the Times gets away with. “Read this article, look at how divine they make it sounds.” Divine, his father had taken to improving his vocabulary during Rishi’s SAT preparation but had retained his loose pronunciation and grammar.

“We must go there, we must eat there, right now right now!” He got into the car, revved the engine and blasting the horn to make Rishi hurry. Rishi would feel a mad rush of energy and joy in those spontaneous moments. His father thrived on unpredictability. “Surprises, good surprises, are a precious thing. Our lives generally have bad surprises but good surprises make up for the bad ones.”

His father was different than the other Indians, less “practical” and too showy, with tastes a bit too refined for a new immigrant. Though he earned no more than his colleagues, he spent more, and feared less. Looking at old pictures of his father you immediately noticed the well-dressed handsome man amidst a sea of tackiness and anxiety. The corduroy blazer, the disco shirts and gold chains, it’s as if his father belonged on the Amalfi coast with movie stars instead of ugly modernist Queens with a bunch of square engineers as neighbors, colleagues and friends. All Indian, all so uncool.

Rishi always wondered what it was that made his father different than the rest, and with age, and some life experience, realized it was because his father was already quite well to do before coming to America. He was the main breadwinner for his joint family and as a result the go-to man for all problems. Money, prestige, respect, and already married to Rishi’s mother; he had it all. Only to leave it behind for a dream - or was it ambition?

“I wanted to study and come see what all the fuss was about,” he said to him looking at him through the rearview mirror. Rishi in the backseat, his mother up front organizing the tapes in the glove compartment, “Why doesn’t anyone put the tapes back in the right covers?” This was a pet peeve of hers, though nobody ever listened.

His father could have gone back to India, and everything would have been fine. He wasn’t from a small village, or supporting a family, or any of that sacrificial stuff that paralyzes or motivates many an immigrant. It was curiosity and adventure that drove him. The same spirit of adventure that was bringing Rishi back, to India.

Rishi’s father understood all this. He knew that excesses and absurdities of the West could only be curbed and tempered by the East. That is why he wanted Rishi to fall in love, with India - but as an American. “India needs a De Tocqueville” he would absurdly say. Rishi didn’t expect such highbrow political philosophy from his father. That’s what the New York Times did to him. It made him memorize trite phrases that surprisingly worked within the context of what he was talking about. “America is the greatest son, trust me. The opportunities, dignity and possibilities. The endless possibilities of being. You don’t know how lucky you are, you have choices, and options, that I never fathomed or thought about. The problems in America are a result of bad choices. Eating too much, drugs, sex, over-spending, but at least people have the choices and the second chances to make it right. In India there are no second chances. People are condemned to their fate, and lament and whither away wondering what could have been, if only, if only...”

These diatribes were a common fixture in Rishi’s upbringing, often colored by his father’s constant unease for those he left behind. Not guilt, just plain and simple longing. If family defines a man’s life, little else can substitute it. If his father every knew love, or was ever pressed to describe it; it would be this one desire; to return to touch again his land and people.

Rishi knew this meant more to him, than being with himself and his mother. In this regard they were similar to families of artists, rocks stars or politicians, all of whom work for something bigger than themselves, only in Rishi’s father’s case, what filled that god-shaped hole was a huge, poor country, on the other side of the world, filled with smiling, adoring, pandering family. Family.

Part 2

Now it was different: Nobody paid attention to his presence, not even the coolies. He was alone, older and trying to solve his problems like his father used to, with a trip to India. It had been five years since he’d been back. The last trip had been short, two weeks, and a teary eyed blur, to submerge his father’s ashes in the holy river.

He hadn’t had the inclination to return after; it didn’t feel the same without his father. Time passed and he got caught up in his university studies, while his mother worked ever harder to run the household alone. Yes, those were tough times. Life without his father had become mundane, mechanical, about survival. He forgot about India. It only occurred to him when he started faltering and was unable to cope with the profound malaise over-taking him.

It was during medical school and by all measures everything was going well. A beautiful girlfriend and on path to becoming a doctor; the dedication to success he harbored was paying fruit. Rishi focused ever harder after his father’s death, if only because the challenge and the difficulty of his situation motivated him. He was always like this, even as a child. He looked for difficultly; disdained comfort. He never questioned what the task meant or what it led to, he just wanted to succeed and in turn, make his father proud.

He worked to see his father’s face light up in doing complex algebra problems at 7. Or when he was considered too short for the basketball team, he became a 3-point specialist; shooting baskets from afar, deep into the night he would practice. “Make your weakness your strength”, his father would say often.

I know what you may be thinking, dear reader, that our protagonist is “depressed”, in need of counseling and coddling. Or perhaps this is the normal process of mourning and one can easily explain away his existential crisis through psychology and biology. Rishi was aware of all this and actively rebelled against such explanations.

He was aware his crisis was related to his father’s death, but he felt its solution – his rising up and overcoming – was paramount in honoring his father’s memory. He didn’t know how he would over-come; he just knew he had to. Besides, with his father gone, he felt that somehow he was carrying the burden of what his father always felt – that state of unease, the longing, the searching for ecstasy through the senses, travel, something new, always trying to fill that endless void. It’s what made him love his father, and now he knew he had to as gracefully and recklessly follow suit.

A feeling of restlessness eventually started to take a hold of him. At first he couldn’t sleep, then he would disappear for days, riding the subway endlessly to every last stop on every subway line in the city, to feel the limits.

“Last stop, last stop, this is the last stop. Everybody off.”

Rishi would get off, walk around and talk to random people and ride back, looking off into the horizon, constantly in a daze.

One day he saw a little boy with his bicycle and father. The bike had training wheels, was cumbersome to look at and the boy was quiet as the father sat next to him with a gentle smile. “Today, today is the day, we are going to take these off and don’t worry I’ll hold you, but you got to believe in yourself.” The little boy had a faraway look in his eyes, his attention focused inward.

Rishi discreetly followed father and son, as they got off somewhere in Brooklyn. It was a clear and sunny autumn morning. He was supposed to be in class, but took to riding the subway more often. In the nearby park the father removed the training wheels as his son got on. “I am going to hold you, don’t worry.” And he did, up to a point, he ran along holding his son as he pedaled.

The rays of the sun slanted as they beamed in through the leaves falling from the trees. Effervescence took hold of the scene and, as if in slow motion, slowly, the father let go and for a brief moment, his son moved alone. Balancing, only to fall shortly after. His father still smiled, walked slowly over and gave him a hug, and picked him up in his arms. The boy tried hard not to cry. “One more time.” His father said “one more time.” Rishi welled up watching this.

“What more can one want out of existence but those precious moments, the rites of passage and moments of kindness in the face of failure? “

But now Rishi was alone, and had no one to pick him up. He didn’t have his father, and an ache deep inside him awoke for the first time watching this scene, on a sunny morning in Brooklyn. Something about this newfound pain didn’t scare him, he felt intuitively that it was better to feel and be aware of it than run from it, or pretend it didn’t exist.

The idea of going to India came to him later. It was during a during a histology lecture, looking through slides, identifying mitochondria. The exam preparation required that he review numerous slides, which to the laymen look like various abstract shapes. Somehow, he could have sworn, he saw the images speak to him. It was late at night, perhaps he was sleep deprived. He saw an image of India, and the goddess Durga. Rishi never believed in these “signs” and never thought about god or mysticism. But then nobody really does until they are in trouble.

The message was clear: He had to go back to India, get in touch with his roots. Leave this terrible place behind.

Now, he was back and he could have been anywhere, but he wasn’t just anywhere. He was in the land of his ancestors and Gods, he thought melodramatically. He looked around at all the empty tired faces. Some of them had people to receive them, but they were small muted receptions. Proper, middle class, as if someone was watching and everyone had to behave them selves.

“I am from here, I am from here,” he repeated to himself, in his mind. But he didn’t believe it; feeling no connection to the people around him. He absent- mindedly took his prepaid taxi receipt and made his way to the curb. A car came; the driver without saying hello took his bags and loaded them in the trunk. Rishi, about to get in the back, hesitated. He went around to the front to sit next to the driver.

He lit up a cigarette. Dawn’s light and the smoke gave him a glamorous glow. His brow furrowed in deep thought, he sighed and looked over at the driver, at his blood shot eyes, probably awoken while in a deep dream and now he drove along mechanically, as if sleep walking; driving. The cool pre-dawn air and that smell, that earthy smell, hit him with exhilaration. Some things never change.

Rishi told the driver in Hindi how beautiful the morning was. The driver smiled, and instantly, as if by magic, his entire tired face grew awake and lucid, more attractive and less hostile than it had been before. “Yes sahib, it is,” he said, looking back at Rishi kindly. Rishi felt better, a steady smile took over him, and he looked ahead with greater clarity.

Slowly, he started remembering where he was. As they made their way into South Delhi, familiarity and old memories came rushing in though his heart began to sink, as they got closer to his family house. His mother had informed his uncle of his arrival, but he also knew that his uncle was never the same after his father’s death, expecting Rishi’s father to finally bequeath his half of the family house.

It was a constant source of anguish and tension in the family. His uncle could not understand why his father would want to keep half his house in India. “You live in America, you are rich and well to do why do you need two houses?” But Rishi’s father never budged, a good-hearted person though he was, and nobody more generous in the family, he wasn’t naive. He understood how India worked; with no property he had no status, a nobody, only a guest to be coddled and fed on vacations, but forgotten about once gone. Keeping his part of the house allowed him to come and go as he pleased and maintain control and importance within his family. It had nothing to do with money.

The house was no mansion: A one floor, four-room house that had sheltered at one time the entire joint family; four families in total, one per room. Doors always open, children everywhere, cooking constant, as kitchens were communal, amongst all his aunties or “mummys”. There was always action, and noise, it was only during power cuts that everyone quieted down, gathered in one room, and over candlelight told stories.

The candle would flicker and the through the shadows and his elder’s words, Rishi would feel the history of his collective past come alive. The partition, Pakistan, his grandfather and grandmother who he never met but could feel, through those stories, into the night. It was in such moments that Rishi felt connected to something bigger than himself, some grand past, a feeling of belonging.

And now, as the taxi pulled up to his old house, all he felt was isolation. His side of the house empty and locked up, the other side decrepit and unkempt. He rang the doorbell. No answer. He rang it again, while the driver waited. Finally, his Cousin’s wife came to the door, and forced a smile at him. She had been informed she said, and was waiting. Her face was not only older it was if the scowl she now wore was permanently etched on her face. Especially made worse by her trying to hide it by forcing a smile. But her face betrayed her. She opened his side of the house for him, and said, in the most formal of manners, that if he needed anything, to eat, anything, to come over their side, and that they would talk in the morning when everyone was awake.

He went to sleep almost immediately from the exhaustion of the journey, but also to escape this new sense of heartbreak. Before drifting off to sleep, he remembered his mother, back in New York, working at the office. She was probably at this very moment returning home, alone as well. She had told him to forget about India. That it had changed. She was here a year back, and fought bitterly to preserve the house, though all feeling of love was gone. She was treated poorly, and harassed by Rishi’s uncle. Rishi couldn’t believe it could be true though his mother insisted things had changed. It slowly was becoming apparent what was happening. Nobody at the airport, a scowl instead of a genuine smile, their side of the house locked up; abandoned.

He arose, and walked onto the veranda. The trees were just as green he remembered them. In front lay the colony park, clean and pristine, much cleaner than before. A sign said “No cricket playing”.

His sister was married in this park, about 20 years ago. His father’s funeral ceremony also took place there. Throughout his youth all he remembered were weddings and funerals, and when it was empty, it was over-run with children. Now, servants lay about languidly, everybody was somewhere else, there was a silence that perturbed him. Pristine mansions left empty, servants watching soap operas all day and enjoying leisure. This was new.

“Change is a part of life” he thought. But could India still be a savior for him as it had been for his father? And if it wasn’t, how was he to deal with his own frustrations and failures?

Wishing you a magnificent New Year - 2011

2011-01-01T12:12:00.001+09:00

The future is here. Don't give up the good fight. We're about to lift-off, and GaboWorld wants to thank all its dear readers, former lovers, and lovers to be. I write for you, and only you.

This past year saw less activity than imagined. The earthquake in Haiti, and dealing with its aftermath, took up most of my time. I also have been hard at work on a Novella, when not saving or jet-setting across the world. GaboWorld carries on. I spend many a nights going through my first entries from 2006. Almost 5 years of blogging and I slowly, see the evolution of my voice and craft. Would not have been possible without the Blog. Would not be possible without you.

A hearty thank you. Don't let me go. I need you.

Gabo

Carry That Weight (a long time)

2010-12-29T07:00:00.001+09:00

As much as there is wrong in the world, it's still perfect - beautiful in its existence and possibility.

With out sickness, war and poverty man would be a robot; love and light would have no meaning. We would be indifferent to nature and kindness. Our purpose and work would vanish along with our free will - the will to do good in the face of all odds. To care when no one cares. To brush ourselves off, get dressed and go to work with our head raised high. Even as everything collapses and the dirt of the world works hard to break us. Somehow, the chosen few carry on.

I have seen it in Haiti, after the earthquake. In Colombia, amidst vengeful civil war. In Zambia and other parts of sub-saharan Africa, with the everyday holocaust that is the Aids epidemic.

Some people call this hope. I don't. It's not hope that motivates these people; it's the joy of expressing your will upon a situation that is supposed to defeat you. It takes a brave person to fight the odds, to know with certainty, that certainty is not on their side.

How difficult it is to accept this simple truth. How unconsolable we get in the face of obstacles and tragedy. If we only just remind ourselves that things are the way they are supposed to be, though our work is to make them, and ourselves, just a little bit better through our humanity, grace, dignity.

The truly great are not products of their environment. Where every indicator points to them becoming X, they somehow become Y. Call them mutants; I call them human, truly human.

Prison made Malcolm, Malcolm X. It hardens most; breaks many. But it made him, him. And his truth thundered.

Burdens strengthen, burdens break. But you'll never truly live if your not grateful to carry that weight. Most of us, our world, mediocre people, they spend their lives running from this. They want the comforts of carelessness. They want to be free though they forget that "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

And that was an Orwellian quote, if I ever heard one.

Half a Home

2010-09-08T13:07:00.001+09:00

Part 1

Now outside, he still looked around. Perhaps someone had come? Maybe it was a mistake? Of course, a natural mistake, with the time difference and all.

The clocks were a constant reference point for Rishi's father, who would work overtime in the 70s to make one 5 minute phone call a week, to hear distant voices that haunted his memories and dreams.

New York was purgatory, a grand waiting game, for that moment of return. His father enjoyed New York; it mesmerized with its energy, opportunity and edge. But something about being in- between, in the greatest city on Earth (he sincerely believed this) made him feel more alive to everything. In but not of it - nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Debilitating for some, exhilarating for others.

Given his father's eccentricities, he wasn't sure if this was some joke or not. His parents did obsess over Atlantic City; it's was almost always where they wanted to go whenever a long weekend came. But he never really saw his parents touch, so it heartened him to think of time when they did. Whether or not it was true, the very idea of them together made him happy. His mother in a sari by the Jersey shore, holding his father's hand, as they looked over at the sunset. Care free, gambling, eating together. Probably not true, but hey, who knew? He asked his mother about it once and she just laughed. But then she laughed whenever his father did anything crazy because if he wasn't doing anything crazy he got depressed. He closed the lights in the living room, put a blanket over his head and never spoke to anyone for days. And then he'd watch old Benny Hill episodes on VHS and this one dance video of Sridevi, over and over. We all have our unique ways of coping with our frustrations and losses. But these episodes were intermittent and if they got really bad, there was always India if something didn't pique his interest first.

Like how one day, after school, his father gave him a cutting of a restaurant review from the New York Times. It was written in that floral style only the Times gets away with. "Read this article, look at how they divine they make it sounds." Divine, his father had taken to improving his vocabulary during Rishi's SAT preparation but had retained his loose pronunciation and grammar.

His father was different than the other Indians, less "practical" and too showy, with tastes a bit too refined for a new immigrant. Though he earned no more than his colleagues, he spent more, and feared less. Looking at old pictures of his father you always noticed the well-dressed handsome man amidst tackiness and anxiety. The corduroy blazer, the disco shirts and gold chains. It's as if his father belonged on the Amalfi coast, with movie stars, instead of ugly modernist Queens with a bunch of square engineers as neighbors, colleagues and friends. All Indian, all so uncool.

His father usually opened up driving, on those trips to Atlantic City, with the New Jersey Turnpike spiced by Bolly wood soundtracks. It was as if the road ahead and the movement made him relax and look Rishi directly in the eye, albeit through the rear view mirror.

His father could have gone back to India, and everything would have been fine. He wasn't from a small village, or supporting a family, or any of that sacrificial stuff that paralyzes or motivates many a immigrant. It was curiosity and adventure that drove him. The same spirit of adventure that was bringing Rishi back, to India.

We all want to be somewhere else, and that far off place helps us make sense of what home means to us. For Rishi, his depression about America was always a result of having India to compare it to. It became a deeper fissure, an unwashed wound, that as he got older, held him back from ever being comfortable with who he was; where he was.

Rishi's father understood all this. He knew that excesses and absurdities of the West could only be curbed and tempered by the East. That is why he wanted Rishi to fall in love, with India - but as an American. "India needs a De Tocqueville" he would absurdly say. Rishi didn't expect such highbrow, political philosophy from his father. That's what the New York Times did to him. It made him memorize trite phrases that surprisingly worked within the context of what he was talking about. "America is the greatest son, trust me. The opportunities, dignity and possibilities. The endless possibilities of being. You don't know how lucky you are, you have choices, and options, that I never fathomed or thought about. The problems in America are a result of bad choices. Eating too much, drugs, sex, over-spending, but at least people have the choices and the second chances to make it right. In India there are no second chances. People are condemned to their fate, and lament and whither away wondering what could have been, if only, if only..."

Hunter

2010-09-04T13:16:00.001+09:00

The awkward moments come in the morning, as the sun comes in through
the window, and I become aware of our nakedness. I try to leave the
light on at night as long as possible, before she says to turn it off.
In the dark, an animal feeling comes over me, I feel taken over by a
mystical force. With the light on I am human, and I stop, remember,
who I am and not what I am a part of. I know this is some great
cosmic dance and in the wave of it, I connect to something I know is
always around me. The sadness, the melancholy felt in the morning is
why we are not part of this feeling more often. We like to be
reminded of this genius, through music, art, and the other expressions
of harmony and perfection, though it would be better to be a part of
it. To live it. It may just be what our lives are supposed to be
about.

In the wilderness, with that feeling of hunting, being hunted and
resting when tired, eating when hungry. Some say we would have no
consciousness of it, that such an existence would be no different than
an animal. That we are more than just our instincts, that something
in us, the calculation and reflection lead us to create and make
greatness.

I am constantly swinging between the the two, spirit and the flesh.

She puts on her clothes, slowly. I have seen her do this many times
before. As she quietly combs her hair in the mirror and looks over at
me with a bittersweet smile. I come up to her from behind and feel
her tenderness throughout. Goodbye. Oh, goodbye.

The rest of the days I am alone. I work hard, and spend many nights
reading and thinking about where I come from, where I am going. It
feels like nowhere on the tough nights. I forget why I am here, why I
do this, what the point of anything really is.

A note on romance and comedy.

2010-06-28T09:45:00.001+09:00

There is no relationship between romance and comedy though Holly wood begs to differ. This formula, repeatedly is regurgitated to produce massive success. People dig it. Not the first (or the last) time mass consumption bears little semblance to reality. Fantasy is yearning, but why do we want romance to be funny?

And it must be noted nobody else but the Americans ever thought to combine the two. Add romantic comedies to the endless list of inventions to come from the land of the free. Up there with the atomic bomb, it is.

Romance + Comedy = not getting laid.

Romance has always been tragic. You lose yourself, you immerse yourself in a feeling; a person, knowing full well it won't last and probably won't end well. Romeo and Juliet was the standard. Now, it's You Got Mail.

Contrary to popular belief, insecurity, chaos, risk and the mystery and uncertainty that stems from this drive people into one another's arms. Amusing safety and security make the whole pursuit of another entertaining. Try laughing in the midst of sex. You got to stop laughing to get it up.

What makes someone laugh, why is something funny? Let me see, I happen to have a neurology journal at hand and it says : "Physiologically there is an element of surprise, a perceived threat that doesn't manifest and sudden resultant relief relaxes us, and we laugh. Ha ha ha."

Comedy diffuses fear, in fact, it is the only in the absence of fear that comedy can exist. They may combine romance and even politics with comedy but it's not possible do the same with horror. That would either be funny or horrific but not both.

But romance is ripe with fear, especially in risk averse cultures such as ours, it adds an element of uncertainty that's frightening because there is no clear path to success. In a culture that likes to play by the rules and win, this is a whole new realm that must be sanitized and made safe. Wouldn't want your precious feelings hurt now, would you?

So what do you do? You make light of it, to diffuse its seriousness.

Why else do we also combine politics with humor? For the same reason. We like to laugh at our problems. It makes them bearable, and laughter, if something is funny, means other generally find it funny, as well. And collectively laughing probably is an update to the whole misery loves company. Well, maybe now, misery loves a good joke (about itself?)

No surprise that the rise of the Daily show and Colbert was during some of the most horrific public moments in recent times (9/11, Bush, 2 wars, etc)

Why to do we feel a need to make serious matters funny? What kind of strange defense mechanism is this?

In the spirit of American pragmatism: if it works, don't fix it. Somehow this formula makes people happy, though they are probably confusing happiness with comfort, amusement and entertainment. But "What is Happiness?" is an inconvenient question for a nation racing in constitutional pursuit of it.

Laugh at your sorrows, fine. But realize that the light heartedness/ lack of seriousness towards what is ultimately very serious - love, makes a fool of everyone. And it takes out the suffering, the poetry, the seriousness of facing mortality and loneliness.

Everybody laughing, everybody alone. Amusing ourselves to death.

Mon Amour

2010-04-07T01:22:00.001+09:00

The human ability to adapt is both a blessing and a curse, as Dostevsky so aptly put it. To survive is remarkable but soon turns tragic when you get used to a situation that is worse than animal.

Similarly Haiti, the horror and the heartbreak lead to incredible moments of poignancy. But the squalor and the absurdity of the situation are nothing to celebrate.

On top of it, the place is over-run by Aid workers who slowly fill up the restaurants and bars. I was in one yesterday filled with internationals laughing and drinking in revelry while just meters away the homeless and the sick wait out their fate in makeshift homes in camps. I supposed it's trite to write about these usual scenarios and I was there too. Though everyone wants a piece of this action for whatever reason, a travesty attracts the businessman, the do-gooder, the preacher, the poet and the prophet.

There are daily strange encounters with different people and the varied reasons of why they are here. It feels like a big party. Who knew disasters were such fun. And so many young white women; intelligent, well meaning, photographers, free lance journalists, students. They are not the only ones but the ones that most stick out to me. If anyone single handedly has benefited from female empowerment; it's me. Wonderful for my love life, so I don't mock them, I just find it funny that's all. I don't know why.

My seductive powers tend to fall flat on cheerleaders. But if they've read Milan Kundera – watch out.

Everyone trying to make a mark, sincere, but adding in their special way to the circus of disaster relief.

There is a deep desperate need to see real suffering and to do something about it. The need to sacrifice, to be heroic is just as important as food and shelter. In this way a fair trade is taking place, between us and them.

We are both spirit and flesh, and forever the two shall joust. It is what makes us human.

And now normalcy sets in. For those who have and have not both, with the usual hierarchy; the cruelty and injustice.

Communism, socialism, imperialism, colonialism all gave us someone to blame, some direction to the anger the human condition provokes. Now, no longer. All problems are technical and a due to a lack of proper coordination, management. Or it's the fault of those who suffer, of governance and corruption. And when that fails there is always bad luck to blame. The Gods. Fate. Destiny. This makes things a lot less emotionally charged. Hard to get riled up over faulty bureaucracy.

Some countries export cars, others terror. Haiti will export the threat of chaos, and constantly seduce with its limitless potential. 1 hour away from Miami, so close, so far.

Success will require a strong response, though already the aid industry works under many contradictions and disconcerted efforts. Would you want the tower of Babel to rebuild your country?

I'm a bit dismayed and confused by all this. And the ways forward all lead to the same dead end. If ever there was an argument for authoritarianism, this is turning out to be a splendid one.

Though I get down by the impossibility and absurdity, there is something intensely exciting about the atmosphere and work. I am developing a lustful relation to the energy. It enfuses every aspect of my life with deep meaning. Boundless opportunities arise to make things move.

It is also hard not to be struck by the images of the people in the camps and streets. It's not the misery I speak of, though there is plenty of that to go around, but the joy, smiles, a form of solidarity that emanates in the strangest of times. I see it on the women selling their goods in wheel barrows and in the children as we patrol the camps at night. Little hands come out of the darkness to hold mine. All this endless cordiality and laughter in such despair.

And you look up and see a whirl of kites soaring above.

There is hardship, so much is lost, the future uncertain and a hard rain is going to fall. But humanity and love burst forth. Dare I say happiness? Not the kind of happiness we seek in America, or anywhere in the modern world. No. We don't really know what happiness is, so we go searching for it.

Real happiness is a survival mechanism. When you ain't got nothing, it's the only thing that saves you. What keeps you going, and it comes to you when you hit so low, touching that space where you end and God begins. The poor and destitute are religious not because of ignorance. It's because they feel the presence of the divine directly because they have nothing to distract them from it.

They feel the elements and thus fear them and pray. They know hunger and eat joyously, and share what little they have. They die suddenly and live and dance like no tomorrow. I don't envy them, but am humbled by their natural spirit that takes this situation and makes it theirs. With their distinct heartfelt mark.

Haiti mon amour.

Santo Domingo

2010-04-07T00:19:00.000+09:00

Passion and its vicissitudes in a University billiards bar, with hot Caribbean girls who make me feel things inside I never knew I had. It’s sad to know what you’ve been missing. But change has to start somewhere, and longing and loss are always good beginnings, though it hurts.

While we work and struggle with nonsense up North these tropical darlings live and fuck effortlessly. I’ve seen this before, I’ve been here. It was a salsa club in Medellin, I went there during the afternoon and was having a drink as the sunlight beamed in. 70s Salsa blaring, I had it all. The girls, the drugs, the money, the life and it wasn’t enough.

I told myself I come from a great civilization, not like these passionate monkeys that don’t know what tragedy and suffering is. They’ve never had to fight war. Build cities, raise armies, invent the number zero. Fuck it, the Mayas don’t count.

Rackety rack go the balls all over the table and the sound makes a nice back drop to their coy glances. I smile and they smile back.

They touch me with their innocence. The joy of youth is a lack of self – awareness, not knowing what they got – till it’s gone. They’re Roman candles aflame, piercing the stillness of time with their light. Nobody knows when or how it will one day end, vitality.

Nothing worse then growing old. Don’t let them fool you. It’s all downhill, all the time.

So these girls and boys dance, as I watch them perversely from my bar stool writing these very words to capture their attempts of making the carnal, eternal. Colors everywhere. If this isn’t truth, I don’t know what is.

I want to make love, all the time. The older I get the more important it becomes. I have a purpose: Every girl is a part of my constellation. I want to look across, before the big sleep, one last time towards the heavens and see all these starlets come together over me; their sum greater than their parts, somehow making sense of my story in this desolate land.

Each woman is different but they are seduced in the same way.

I went after a woman before making my way down here. She lives on the Upper East Side, alone. I felt here body move to my beat. I took her with one eye on the Manhattan skyline, looking through her window at the bright lights, big city. You really can’t take the Queens outtta the boy.

And in the morning a bagel with lox and cream cheese with a black coffee to celebrate.

The refined gringo pleasures.

Sun and the Sea, no longer enough.

2009-12-24T09:13:00.002+09:00

Albert Camus said "A man is not poor if he has but the sun and the sea." This was Oran, Algiers, cerca 1940, but when I read them in Queens in the year 2000, after my father died and we lost everything, I looked around me and felt even poorer in the grey desolation surrounding me. All I had was concrete, and awful 70s modernist architecture. We lost our mansion in the New Jersey forest, back to where it all began - in Queens - because that was all my mother knew, and all we could afford. I had no sun and no sea.

But I felt something deeper in Camus' words. He meant more than he said. I didn't have the sun or the sea, but every poor man gains something, if only he looks and feels, closely. It is there. And that is what Camus meant, that in a man's circumstance and plight, he gains something that is distinctly his own. The suffering, the struggle, nobody can take this away from him.

I looked around me, like a rat in a cage, sleeping in my mother's living room, stealing just enough money from her purse everyday to buy a cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee, to then write bad poetry, on napkins. Sometimes I wrote little love letters, wanting to slip them to the punjabi girls working behind the counter. They would look at my kara, my sikh bracelet, every time I paid them, every time I took my coffee, I could feel quietly that they recognized a piece of themselves in me. But we never said anything. My punjabi is terrible.

Why is it that we don't get what we want when we most need it? Fuck the world.

I looked out one night through the neon donut shop window and saw the train rumble by and beyond it, stood majestically, the public library. The library of my childhood, the place I went to use the telephone (to place bets) and to take a piss (and jerk off) when I couldn't make it back to the apartment. It was newly renovated and was shining in the darkness with its lights on, like a phoenix rising above all the dirt, filth and madness. There it stood looking at me, calling me. Another train rumbled by above. It came to me. I had my Sun and Sea, too.

I never took much to reading. I don't think any hot blooded young man growing up in New York City can. Too much noise, too much to do, too many people screaming at you. Hustling is much more fun and necessary. Carrying a book around my neighborhood was an invitation to get murdered. So much so that many people got two copies of their textbooks, one to keep in their lockers at school, and the other at home for homework. This way you never looked uncool, kept your street cred and your grades up (we all secretly wanted to go to Bronx Science, even if we pretended we didn't care).

But slowly, when one is unemployed, suffering mental anguish and has nothing better to do, books open up to you. I thought I would start with the classics. Kind of like the best ofs for nubile autodidacts. And then I explored world cinema, and then one day I came upon a journal on Latin American studies from Austin, Texas, about Cuba. There was a picture of Fidel inside. I saw that he and I shared exactly the same hands. I was moved. Yes, there had to be a greater purpose to my life. The library, like the Sun, reminds you of that through its unconditional nourishment. Knowledge also burns. But let's not get into that, just now.

The subway my sea, with its ebb and flow, a steel wave crashing into manhattan day after day, never stopping. The library, knowledge, as radiant as the sun, opening me to the pleasures of the soul. Movement and knowledge, the modern day gifts for a poor man.

Bestial needs used to be enough. The sun, the sea, a good meal, making love to your woman, feeling the breeze in your air. Now it's about travel, in all senses, into the known and unknown. Escape. Paradise is a trap.

In my darkest moments, I remember feeling, that if this was all I had, it was enough. It gave me life, even if I felt a strange monotony in taking the train to Times Square and back everyday, just to think and watch people, and search for the great answers to the questions I had. There it was, everything before me, 2000 years of civilization in a building, the culmination of the world's dreams in a city, and back and forth I went, feeling lulled by a certain rhythm. A certain rhythm only the New York City subway (the sea) can give you.

Soon, I began combining all my pleasures into one. The train, a library book and a cup of coffee (with napkins and a pen, of course). 28 minutes Main Street Flushing to Times Square. That's enough time to fill to a young man's heart, to the brim. And to then get out and watch the world being made. And back, with the sun coming down, but at least I moved, and thought and bettered myself. Doing nothing, but moving, with my mind and my body. My primal needs met. Like in Algiers, with the sun and sea. No money, but you felt mother earth move her lips to your song. And you felt blessed inside, even if slowly you wasted away.

Love, come back to me

2009-12-05T07:58:00.002+09:00

A woman is a woman is a woman. Even one who sells her self. Because we all sell ourselves, though some are more aware than others, what they sell.

For a night to feel that innocence, sweetness and joy of a beautiful woman in bed. To sleep and to feel and to hold someone until the morning comes.

After making love she wants me to fry her eggs. The hunger inside her is deep and true. I offer her the finest Belgian chocolate, prociutto, parmesan cheese, some left over caviar, even. No, none of that, she doesn't know what that is. She just wants fried eggs and looks at all the marvels I put in front of her with indifference. And in the darkness, naked, there we stood in the kitchen, with the neon lights from the apartment parking lot seeping in through the half drawn curtains. It's not enough light for me, I go to flip on the light switch; no light, electricity gone. She gets her cell phone, and uses it to guide me as I crack the eggs and then - sizzle, pop. I find her irresistible.

Kundera says to be careful with metaphors when it comes to Love. One metaphor can enslave a man to a woman forever, the deeper poetic meaning, etched in our soul, never letting go. But for me it's less metaphors and more the cinema of the moment, the pure aesthetic grace of being in a film together, no matter how absurd. If the story fits, wear it. And here I am after making love to her, I'm on the stove, in the middle of the night, frying her eggs and kissing her, and she's got one eye on me and the other on a late night dinner. Our passion may burn out, but the eggs won't; I am careful. She comes over behind me, caresses me, and says she prefers them easy over.

"An egg without salt, is like sex without love" - S. Dali

I make sure to add the salt, because I knew she isn't the type to care either way. She just needed something in her stomach and I just needed to feed her, in this moment we were meant for each other; salt and eggs; love and sex. How certain ideas once inside us bear a fruit so beautiful. I've often quoted that Dali quote at many a cocktail party, in vain and feeble attempts to appear cultured, sophisticated and interesting, and here it came to life, in the strangest of circumstance.

It reminded me to add the salt, to put a little love in, it takes so little, means so much.

She ate with that ravenous hunger, the hunger of someone who eats little but wants more, always. Her body was perfect, tight and strong. A body that works to survive is always a healthy body. Nature is perfect that way, it gives so much in poverty and takes so much in wealth. And makes both want to come to the other, to complete each other, master servant, we run to each other, east west, strong weak, the good and the bad, we need each other, each defined by the other, unable to live amongst our own kind.

She smelled of roses and the earth, and after eating, as if she had been sleeping in my bed for years, she snuggled up to me, and took the covers over her and smiled that deep smile of contentment. I looked into her eyes, and smiled too. There was no way to reach her through words. I only had my smile and my manhood, to let her know how beautiful she was. And my kisses, and when you can't speak, and no one can hear you, something deep down in us comes through to touch someone. And that is what I felt.

In the beginning there was the word, but I long for the time before the beginning when there were no words, only energy, innocence and a joy that no longer exists. Well, maybe for a night, on a strange island, until the morning comes.

In Memory

2009-09-02T20:02:00.001+09:00

The only time I loved her was after I hurt her, when she cried tenderly; tired and defeated. She was most beautiful to me then. There was such a moment here in Africa. We had fought violently and she slumped down, at a loss for words, engulfed in tears and pain.

A man's heart breaks, at such moments.

After some time she calmed down, collected her dignity, wiped her face, and walked by my side to where we were headed to, before we had started fighting. She had nowhere to go; she had to follow.

The sun was a big piece of orange candy in the sky, slowing falling, falling down. We were walking side by side, and it was one of those African moments that make you forget yourself.

I felt her slowly ease up next to me, grasping my hand in hers, tightly. I squeezed back, feeling uplifted, ecstatic, to be where I was in the world, with that hand in mine. There was confusion and uncertainty, though we had each other. We didn't look each other in the eyes; we knew we didn't need to, nor could we if we wanted to. I just closed mine while walking, feeling the sun set on me, everything fading away. I wanted to be in that moment, for as long as possible, before it left us, forever.

I felt a sun like this before, once before.

On the 7 train heading back home, twilight hour again, again that same sun in our faces, the buildings rumbling by, painted across the sky. I looked at you through the heat of that New York summer, naked and alive, those nights.

I asked you, in that rapturous joy only children feel, if you wanted to marry me. You said yes, I will always remember, with your chestnut hair in your face and a smile so wide the world could fall in it.

I laughed and you became self-conscious. I didn't believe in myself enough though you always believed in us. You loved English and ugly modernist Queens, your paradise; my prison - but you set me free in it. Making love to you there, in the very place I suffered and lost, so poignant; so true. You showed me how a rose blooms in the desert.

I didn't know what I had, no one does. But that summer, those moments, were precious. Nothing was as beautiful after that. Everything after took on a sadness and more anxious mood. We tried to do it over and over again, and it never came back, the sun, like it was that day. It only returned in Africa - the great mother - tearing us apart, as we held each other, all tangled up in blue.

I was driving her to the airport in a broken down car with a radio. The entire night making desperate love, a love that tries to suck dry the very source of our endless vitality. I was tired, confused, not sure when I would see her again. The car filled with a deathly silence. I took the road to the airport, a long expansive road opening up into the African horizon. The sun shining her face, the wind blowing in her beautiful hair, I turned on the radio and held her hand. And then, as if in a dream, a karaoke version of Let It Be came on, all cheesy and elevator music like. She lunged for the radio to shut it off and I stopped her. I said no, let it be, Let It Be. I sang for her and she smiled sadly, "there will be an answer, let it be...".

And then as she was getting into the plane, I knew it would all be in the kiss. The kiss
never lies. And we kissed, as passionately as we could, though I felt something patronizing and assured in her kiss. As if she was kissing a child good night, and no longer her lover. I could tell she would be alright, she would live without me. And when you feel that, you know it's over.

A Speech to the Youth Of Africa

2009-08-12T17:12:00.000+09:00

A speech I recently gave at a graduation ceremony for SPW - Students Partnership Worldwide - www.spw.org - the NGO I manage.

91 volunteers spent 8 months living and working in rural communities of Zambia. These words are for them, and their indomitable spirit.

__________

I want everyone to know that I wrote my own speech, like Obama. Who likes Obama? Who knows, amongst us today, we may have not only the future president of Zambia, but quite possibly the United States of America.

America is everybody's country. The blood, sweat, tears and dreams of the world are tied up into America's destiny. It is the reason I am here, so deeply honored to speak to you. I suppose you want me to speak because you deem me important. But you are the true heroes and dignitaries. You are the most important people here today, more important than ministers, presidents, NGO country directors and senior managers. We are brought up to respect these people of authority, as they seem very important. But they rarely do anything as noble as what you have done. You didn't just talk about social change, or give money, or take a class, you were social change. You went directly into the community, lived with them, shared in their joys and sorrows, and broke bread with them, and listened, and guided and provided for them a service that the government cannot provide. You took responsibility for your fellow countrymen and made their problems yours. Do you realize how tremendous this is? Do you realize what you have done? You have done more than any of us who sit in our comfortable offices, and go to our conferences and trainings. Who fly all over the world and buy expensive things in duty free shops ( oh, I am sorry, maybe that is just me).

I am honored, first of all, to be here in your presence, asked to say some words to mark your tremendous achievement.

You are truly the heart and soul of SPW, without your works and efforts, SPW would cease to exist.

This is only the beginning, that is why it is called commencement. Your new life begins here, in this moment, today, as you now you go on, into the world as ex volunteers of SPW.

Let me remind you, that we have numerous managers, even our current country director is an ex-volunteer. So the future is bright if you seize it and make the most of your experiences. You will have help along the way, but the ultimate responsibility for your life is with you. As the bible says, "ask and you shall receive", not receive even if you haven't asked. You need to voice yourselves, be active and engaged, in a new york city word, as I am from New York, you got to be a hustler. The world is yours, if only you ask for it, and see yourself as worthy of having it.

Look at your older peers, and see where they have come from. They were one day like you, and now they are coordinators, managers, country directors, and have traveled to Europe, America, India, and other parts of Africa to join the global movement to fight not only HIV/AIDS, but to give a voice to young people who consistently get spoken for, rather than speak about their own needs. And this is what makes us special. Youth teaching youth, youth leading youth, youth are our future, without the youth we are nowhere.

I can't express in mere words my joy in working with fellow young people ( I consider myself forever young). Your energy and joy is contagious. Don't lose your youthful spirit, no matter how old you get. It is the ultimate elixir against all the perils that surely come in our way, along life's winding path.

You may not realize everything you have learned, but over these past months you have built the foundation for future success, both professional and personal. Teaching, presenting, meetings, mentoring and being responsible for the day to day operations of the program, these are not little things at all. These will help you no matter what you undertake next, and opportunities will be vast if you apply yourselves, and move with the same energy you moved with in SPW.

And let's not forget about what you were a part of. You were the embodiment of young people making a difference in their communities.

Your work makes a huge difference. Not because I say so, or Richard and Mary, or anyone else. This program has undergone external evaluation from reputable sources from the United States of America which have determined that your work changes young people's behavior. This is a landmark for SPW, to have such results, and its because of your efforts. You are making a difference. You also have gained the support of the Finnish embassy, DFID in the United Kingdom, personal individuals, new Zealand aid and a host of others who have visited and continue to be impressed by your teachings, your enthusiasm, and your songs.

I thank you very much, and for those of you who know me, know how much I like the songs of the program.

I remember my first visit near kapiri, in a rural school, on a visit from new zealand aid. It was my first day of work, four months back. I observed a lesson, by a volunteer who had a michael jordan buckle on his belt. And they came together and went through the lesson, which was excellent, though what struck me was the songs and happiness, the smiles, and positive energy emanating from that classroom. That was beautiful, something magical for me to see and feel.

The world has so much to learn from Zambia, from Africa.

Here we were, in a community that struggled under the weight of poverty and disease, and still some how the human spirit soars and sings. It fights back against all circumstance and refuses to be defeated. You were a part of this fight, this struggle for dignity and refusal to resign in the face of so many odds. Don't see yourself alone in this. Look around you and see who is here, people from different parts of Zambia, different tribes and languages, even all over the world, all coming and working together for a new and better world.

We can't make it alone, we must seek help, genuine help, from anyone who wants to work by our side. SPW is international, and we express solidarity with young people all over the world. Be it America or Ghana, people are people, and we must learn from and work with each other. We are more than zambians and americans or British, we are people, young people, who want to change the world, for the better, a place where young people are listened to, who help shape the world according to their dreams and aspirations. That is a day I am sure will come upon us if more people do what you did. It is for this day and the work required to bring it forth, that keeps me in SPW, and makes me happy to see that we can work side by side, for the years to come.

My profound love, blessings and good wishes for your future. A future brightened by the African sun.

Don't call it a comeback (I've been here for years)

2009-07-30T16:11:00.001+09:00

It doesn't take much to be happy. All children know this; give them a stick and a ball and the great outdoors and they are free.

Television, we are bored without it. Internet, makes us lonely without it. Stimulating, titillating only to withdraw, leaving us dazed and numb to the simple pleasures.

To sleep when sleeping, eat while eating, be while being. Life and nothing more.

We don't need much to happy. A simple smile, and the basics, and we feel that warmth and energy inside of us. You know that feeling, don't you? The one that springs forth in effervescent bursts, where you feel happy being who you really are; a child of heaven and earth, both the sun and the sky. My My My.

Bare your feet in the soil of our mother and feel that cool warmth. This is where you are meant to be, always.

Some acts, even when performed for the first time, make you feel as if you have been and done them before. A connection. Re-legion; reconnection. A religious experience.

Swimming in the sea. Feeling the sun brighten your childhood. Love making. Wine. Meat. Killing a man??

Yes, take me back to the essence, to the pure and harmonic, instinctual virtue. When the Lion didn't apologize.

But being there means no consciousness. No literature, no art that is self-referential. Though there will be dancing and singing, of course, though you won't remember enough of it to package and sell. It will pass through you, like a rose does, in the desert, alone and free, both in its beauty and in its demise. But it bloomed. It bloomed for you: ((((((()))))))

Can you let go? Can you go back? Has the illusions of the modern world become more real than reality?

I feel a rush with technology. I can't imagine my life without popular culture. Nature is over-rated. I want to be moved while sitting still, in an office, during a meeting, I want all these thoughts and desires to rush into my head, converge into one big cataclysm.

Cry, break free, and yearn for something better, always, that's what I want. Always on the run, the ups and the downs. Modern man, hear me blog and text, and live in an alternate universe where I am who I want to be.

What does this all mean? Do these questions even matter, any more? They hurt and torture me less, though I express them better. My anguish has given forth to cogency. It doesn't feel the same. And I miss that. I would give up clarity for opacity for it gives birth to ambiguity; the mother of all genius and ecstasy. Contentment is not always a good thing.

When we don't need all this junk to make us happy, why do we do it, and why can't we live with out it?

Life is more than "happiness".

Creation, destruction, absurdity, resurgence. To feel the Earth move, under your feet and the sky fall.

No looking back. Head into the abyss.

Get your kicks before it's all over.

HONOR

2009-07-27T04:07:00.000+09:00

On a drunken revelry in Bologna, with an Italian professor, I chanced upon a universal truth that only comes to you at such moments of surrender, rapture. When that dollhouse of a city shines with all its lights, through porticos and piazzas, only for you. Only for you. During my time there, I often pictured what Bologna looks like from up above. It would make anyone say, "what is that preciousness?" And I was there in that walled city and one night in particular, I remember quite fondly.

It was myself and four white american classmates of mine, WASPS. Anglo-saxon to the core, white as white can be. I rarely hang out with white americans, not because I am a reverse racist or something, but only because they are usually so uncool. I still give it a go, at times, who knows, there may be a Jack Nicholson, a Sean Penn, or a Johnny Depp amongst them. But that's only in the movies, I am convinced. Plus the cool ones all moved to France. I digress.

We had a common purpose these white people and I. We all loved dearly our cynical and tough-minded Italian professor who was so cool, so casually, effortlessly hip even though he was stereotypical; approaching 50 though always with younger women, and driving only classic cars; Porche, Alfa romeo or the Mercedes depending on his mood. He chain smoked and always looked as if he had somewhere more important to be, and if he was talking to you, someone more important he needed to talk to. But he indulged us, of all the uptight professors at our elite institution, he was the only one who drank with us - if only to mock us. But such abuse turned us ON. Yes, we wanted to be made to feel inferior, to be broken down only to be built up again, as cool as our Italian professor. We worshipped him. We wanted to look into the future with wonder and awe, wishing - dare I say hoping (our Italian professor hated this word)- that we too would eventually dress better, have young ladies, classic cars and the cigarette dangling off our lips as we popped champagne corks on the Amalfi coast, on our spare time, when we weren't engaged in the exciting and glamourous world of international affairs.

He came to our parties, hit on our women, and then drove away with them in his fancy cars.

He outdrank us, and was always the last one home. And the next day he would be in seminar as sharp as a razor bearing down on our collective ignorance. He was tough and mean in the classroom, and jaded and cynical outside. But we loved him, a group of us, don't ask me why. Some people just have that kind of hold on you.

He knew quite well that I was a romantic, and idealist, a lover of life. We would often talk alone, about literature and women. Though he studied in the UK and America, I could tell he loathed the Anglophone culture. He couldn't truly open up, and I asked him, on a particular night, in the company of my classmates, if there is a difference between Italy and America and by extension the UK.

He said: "Let me put it to you this way. In the form of an allegorical exam. Imagine you are at school, and your school has a strict honor code against cheating. You know this though one day during an exam your best friend asks you for answers. Do you help him? Do you tell on him? What do you do?"

Our Italian professor's answer differs from answers most WASPs give.

So does mine.

real love

2009-06-28T18:07:00.000+09:00

Yes, yes. This is the article I have been waiting for that perfectly explains why I look for love outside of the hyper-educated liberal elite that I am a part of. RISK. PASSION. LUNACY. That is what makes love so grand. Not the companion-ship bullshit currently being played out in sunday brunches across the nation and at IKEA. FUck.

I knew something was wrong and leave it to the NY Times to FINALLY figure it out. Because they themselves ARE the hyper educated liberal elite, they are a bit slow on trends and only 5 years down the line get it right. Iraq war, slow food, and Kristof wrote about polluted water supply the other day. When I was talking about, way back when, I was called paranoid. But things slowly take their turn in America.

Obama is compilation of everything that has come before. The country truly responds and changes, albeit slowly, but it comes around and is not tied to any dogma. At heart, we are a practical people, and if it don't work, we are game to fix it. Health care is coming around. And eventually so will all the other irrational and unjust policies out there. We have been pushed to the brink. And there is no better time to be American, and to be a part of all these changes. I see them clearer in the distance.

The times, they are a changin.

I still loathe Americans, don't get me wrong. We got a long way to go. Especially culturally. The hyper pragmatism is daunting and completely uncool. It gets things done, though so do sweatpants. But like Seinfeld says, if you wear sweatpants outside the house, you might as well say you've given up. For Americans, what they have given up is: The good life.

Time to be a dignified Empire, worthy of emulation. Step it up, come on, the world depends on us, if you haven't realized already.

_______________

It's been a good month for reckless romance in America. The nation's most famous reality-television father, Jon Gosselin of "Jon and Kate Plus Eight," threw over his marriage for a fling with a 23-year-old schoolteacher. Not one but two prominent conservative politicians torpedoed their careers with public confessions of adultery — with Mark Sanford's Argentine disappearing act eclipsing John Ensign's accusation of extortion against his lover's spouse.

These irrepressible passions make a fascinating counterpoint to the complaint, advanced this month by two of the nation's finest essayists, that modern relationships have been drained of danger and purged of eros.

In her new polemic "A Vindication of Love," an assault on the idea of safety in romance, Cristina Nehring complains that contemporary couplings have so restrained true passion that "the poor beast has become as impotent as it is domestic." In a post-divorce essay for The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh autopsies not only her own marriage but those of her peers, a cohort of middle-aged Los Angelenos who've let the quest for security turn them into sexless drudges.

Both writers depict a country where pragmatic anxieties — think of the children! think of the mortgage! — are forever trumping romance and dulling the libido. Theirs is a nation of nesters who have clipped their own wings.
So which is the real America? Is it Tsing Loh's dystopia, where everyone "works" grimly on their relationships, and post-feminist husbands happily cook saffron-infused porcini risotto but rarely practice seduction on their wives? Or is it tabloid country: The land of Jon minus Kate, and governors who vanish to "hike the Appalachian Trail" — not to mention gossip-column fixtures like Britney Spears (rumored last week to be contemplating her third marriage in six years) and the mistress-parading Mel Gibson?
One possible answer is that our stars and politicians are a species apart — more impulsive and incautious than the average Dick and Jane, and more libidinous as well.
But the evidence suggests the opposite. The high-wire love lives of a Jon Gosselin or a Mark Sanford — or a Spears, or even a Lindsey Lohan — are remarkably true to the America that watches their shows, buys their CDs, and votes them into office. It's the highly-educated, highly risk-averse milieu lamented by Nehring and Tsing Loh that's a world unto itself.
Their complaints about this world's romance deficit are substantially overstated, obviously — and shot through with a dash of self-justification. (Tsing Loh had an affair; Nehring recently became an unwed mother.) But both do put their finger on a post-sexual revolution paradox — namely, that the same overclass that was once most invested in erotic experimentation ended up building the sturdiest walls against the passions it unleashed.
As Nehring observes, our hyper-educated, socially-liberal elite is considerably more romantically conservative than its blasé attitude toward pornography or premarital sex would lead you to expect. The difficult scramble up the meritocratic ladder tends to discourage wild passions and death-defying flings. For bright young overachievers, there's often a definite tameness to the way that collegiate "safe sex" segues into the upwardly-mobile security of "companionate marriages" — or, if you're feeling more cynical, "consumption partnerships."
This tameness has beneficial social consequences: When it comes to divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, Americans with graduate degrees are still living in the 1950s. It's the rest of the country that marries impulsively, divorces frequently, and bears a rising percentage of its children outside marriage. Indeed, if you're looking for modern-day Percy Shelleys or Mary Wollstonecrafts (to pluck a pair of Nehring's romantic risk-takers), you're more likely to find them in Middle America than among the environmental lawyers and documentary filmmakers who populate Tsing Loh's depressing social world.
Better, perhaps, if this dynamic were reversed. Our meritocrats could stand to leaven their careerism with a little more romantic excess. (Though such excess is more appropriate in the young, it should be emphasized, than in middle-aged essayists and parents.) But most Americans, particularly those of modest means, would benefit from greater caution and stability in their romantic entanglements.
Maybe this reversal could start with some creative matchmaking across lines of class and politics. The dutiful, somewhat-boring husbands from Sandra Tsing Loh's Los Angeles, for instance, sound like ideal soulmates for Kate Gosselin, the soon-to-be-single mother of eight.
And as for Cristina Nehring, who can't live without being "derailed by love, hospitalized by love, flung around five continents, shaken, overjoyed, inspired and unsettled by love" — well, maybe someone should introduce her to Mark Sanford.

scenes from a marriage (of Heaven and Hell)

2009-06-23T04:18:00.001+09:00

"What if I turned you on with a button and made you happy, would you want it just as much baby? Would you enjoy it just as much?"

Two reasons for a failing relationship:

1. We're Different

2. It's (one of ) our fault(s)

1. I acknowledge difference, unlike most people who feel we are all part one big happy human family. If I indulge in, what people consider, hyper-generalizations, it's mostly an effort to navigate through difference, not allowing it to come in the way of our common goals, aspirations, dreams.

This requires study and commitment, to languages and culture, travel and those unmeasured nights of revelry where the stars and sky take on a deeper meaning.

But first, we must accept that we are different, in ways that matter. Differences are overcome if the love is there.

2. So, it's (one of) our fault(s)

Rings true, and works well with my American self-reliant upbringing. Blame yourself. Accept responsibility. But when passion and magic are lacking, it's hard to have your heart in a plan; feels mechanical and forced. Sometimes our acumen of organization and go-getting, can land us in a lifeless relationship. One can adjust to anything if one tries hard enough.

The fundamental question becomes: Do you feel it? But what am I suppose to feel? Sexual passion, respect for the other person, a feeling of awe as the light of their inner and outer beauty bathes me in ecstasy?

Yes, yes, and yes, if that is how you want to live and be. How alive do you want to be? How much can you handle before it tips fatally into the "Anna Karenina" realm.

Beautiful, passionate, irrational women are riveting as much as they are dangerous. That is what attracts us to them. Their capacity to both create and destroy, that balance and uncertainty, is what turns us on.

But.

After awhile we become tired and old, and then we look to someone we can build a life with; pay the bills with. A very different form of love grows; the loves of comfort and certainty. The joys of bearing beautiful fruit; children and careers, and a home in the world.

Can a man have both?

What was founded on recklessness and irrationality, can it grow into taking on the very serious conditions of human existence; War; poverty; suffering; death?

"I'm a warrior baby. I believe stronger in the fight, then our love. You feel uncomfortable that I believe in a truth so strongly, that I can kill for it?

But not believing is believing; in nothingness and nihilism.

You were my joy, my salvation, for those dark and quiet nights, after a hard day's work. Someone understood me, and beauty filled my life, as if I had plucked the most precious flower from the garden of Eden, whose fragrance bloomed only for me, forging my soul, renewing my strength and faith for the good fight. You made it all make sense. You saved me from selfishness, cruelty and a bitter life nursed by Jack Daniels and Marlboro Reds.

Though slowly this flower began to whither in my arms. And though I was made of the same element as the Earth, from which she came; wind, rain and fire; there was nothing I could do to bring her back to me. She was gone"

The Joy of Less

2009-06-02T06:49:00.000+09:00

The Joy of Less

By PICO IYER

"The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles." The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen," though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.

I'm not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. "There is nothing either good or bad," I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." I had been lucky enough at that point to stumble into the life I might have dreamed of as a boy: a great job writing on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment (officially at least) on Park

In the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Avenue, enough time and money to take vacations in Burma, Morocco, El Salvador. But every time I went to one of those places, I noticed that the people I met there, mired in difficulty and often warfare, seemed to have more energy and even optimism than the friends I'd grown up with in privileged, peaceful Santa Barbara, Calif., many of whom were on their fourth marriages and seeing a therapist every day. Though I knew that poverty certainly didn't buy happiness, I wasn't convinced that money did either.

So — as post-1960s cliché decreed — I left my comfortable job and life to live for a year in a temple on the backstreets of Kyoto. My high-minded year lasted all of a week, by which time I'd noticed that the depthless contemplation of the moon and composition of haiku I'd imagined from afar was really more a matter of cleaning, sweeping and then cleaning some more. But today, more than 21 years later, I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media — and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack.

I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did. And it seemed quite useful to take a clear, hard look at what really led to peace of mind or absorption (the closest I've come to understanding happiness). Not having a car gives me volumes not to think or worry about, and makes walks around the neighborhood a daily adventure. Lacking a cell phone and high-speed Internet, I have time to play ping-pong every evening, to write long letters to old friends and to go shopping for my sweetheart (or to track down old baubles for two kids who are now out in the world).

When the phone does ring — once a week — I'm thrilled, as I never was when the phone rang in my overcrowded office in Rockefeller Center. And when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven't missed much at all. While I've been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or "Walden," the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started. "I call that man rich," Henry James's Ralph Touchett observes in "Portrait of a Lady," "who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination." Living in the future tense never did that for me.

I certainly wouldn't recommend my life to most people — and my heart goes out to those who

Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most when it isn't pursued.

have recently been condemned to a simplicity they never needed or wanted. But I'm not sure how much outward details or accomplishments ever really make us happy deep down. The millionaires I know seem desperate to become multimillionaires, and spend more time with their lawyers and their bankers than with their friends (whose motivations they are no longer sure of). And I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.

Being self-employed will always make for a precarious life; these days, it is more uncertain than ever, especially since my tools of choice, written words, are coming to seem like accessories to images. Like almost everyone I know, I've lost much of my savings in the past few months. I even went through a dress-rehearsal for our enforced austerity when my family home in Santa Barbara burned to the ground some years ago, leaving me with nothing but the toothbrush I bought from an all-night supermarket that night. And yet my two-room apartment in nowhere Japan seems more abundant than the big house that burned down. I have time to read the new John le Carre, while nibbling at sweet tangerines in the sun. When a Sigur Ros album comes out, it fills my days and nights, resplendent. And then it seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.

If you're the kind of person who prefers freedom to security, who feels more comfortable in a small room than a large one and who finds that happiness comes from matching your wants to your needs, then running to stand still isn't where your joy lies. In New York, a part of me was always somewhere else, thinking of what a simple life in Japan might be like. Now I'm there, I find that I almost never think of Rockefeller Center or Park Avenue at all.

[Editor's note: an earlier version of this post included an inaccurate reference to the constitution of Japan. It has since been removed.]

The Virtue of Strong Ideas

2009-05-12T17:40:00.000+09:00

I'm Drunk. On South African wine. In the middle of fucking nowhere with my Italian girlfriend gone wild. The only thing that keeps me going is olive oil. And the stash of French films I have guarded for those impossible nights; yearning for anything that isn't simple.

The nature, the people, all pristine, almost untouched - pure - the only word that comes to mind. I gather that for some, expecially those who are sick of the modern, civilized world - this is paradise. A respite away from ambition and energy. But I'd rather choose a place with both good and evil, rather than a place that is good by default; because it is forgotten.

What feels strange is the terrible incapacity for people here to feel tragedy. Tragedy, that deep sense of it, comes only to those who were great once. Having fallen, knowing full well what they were capable of. But here, no. There is no barometer of success and little anxiety as a result. Some may envy this, especially those who despise what is done in the name of progress; environmental degradation; war; human exploitation. But it is easy to forget what beauty also comes from these horrors. I don't justify civilization and developed societies, though, more and more, it does seem that once you've bitten the Apple, there is no going back to Paradise.

Especially if there is no internet.

I smoke Dunhills and listen to jazz and cook spinach risottos and go to the racist white guy's cafe to drink espresso from his 6000 dollar coffee machine. In the middle of nowhere, as if he exists only for my edification. The great coffee and cosmopolitan food remind me how certain places can be replicated, anywhere, all the way here in Africa, even. It makes me sick, but it tastes so good. A homemade banana muffin, some espresso and wireless, and I've orgasmed. How pathetic.

This place is fucked. By disease and christianity. I can't figure out which is worse. And here I am . A New Yorker, of third world descent trying to save....I won't even try to live up to such pretension. I just want freedom and to be left alone to write my short stories, and enough to live in a huge bungalow with a maid who can't iron.

I read books on colonial history and see little difference in what I do and what the British did in the past. They were probably much more succesful. We half ass it, though I can't say I don't touch peoples lives; I do. But so much more can be done; if only we controlled the place more. Instead we need to appease donors who need to appease corrupt governments. We are the middlemen, enriching our careers, and having our adventures, providing a service and doing effective and worthy work. But nothing will change if governments are not held to account and if people here don't start producing something of value to the world. Everything else is just fighting fire.

But hey, at least we are trying, and personally, spiritually the experience moves me, deeper into parts of myself and my belief systems.

This time I refuse to deal with the absurdity and impossibility of the situation with nihilistic cynicism. There has to be another way to deal with the failures of the world, ourselves. At the very least, it feels good to confront this, and myself, in the process.

Love from the heart of darkness, dear reader. I miss you.

Mysterious Ways

2009-04-13T02:52:00.000+09:00

Addis Ababa

Here in an airport lounge, stuck after missing a connecting flight, I ponder the wonder and grandeur of it all. The hurt and the heartbreak, the love and the love lost. Nothing challenges me deeper to my core than traveling.

You really get to confront all your demons, in a strange land.

"Oh holy holy holy. All land on this Earth, sacred, all men, my brothers."

With this prayer I enter the great mother continent, again. Africa, deep into your heart I go.

India my love, my first true love, I've left you behind for now, though these past nine months have given me a sense that you are never far; always close to my heart, right from the start.

The love India has given me, the strength to make it anywhere, knowing I have in her, home.

Home is where the heart and hurt are.

I left India again to the fireworks of a wonderful party, with my dearest friends, amidst such positive energy. A strange sort of tradition of mine, parting with a party. In the past it was with family, and now, it is with friends and loved ones. How times change. I party it up while next door my cousins sleep, and I leave without saying goodbye.

I wonder if it hurts them as much as it does, me. After all, I was the one descending into wonderland every couple of years on vacation, toting gifts to buy their love and affection, to assuage the inevitable jealousy and frustrations that defined their lives.

And now India is my motherland; spiritual home; my Israel. And for them it's just a corrupt, backwards and cut throat jungle. They lack perspective because they've never traveled. They don't realize how special it is as a result, caught in routine and mundane habits. Kind of how I felt about New York until I went to University, and then I understood. Education, from books or experience, gives you that perspective to understand your life - what they lack - and what kills them slowly.

My poor Indian family, and they have money!

In India my creator, my soul, the divine energy, I felt it flow through my core, aware of the blessings and joy of following the path of love and spiritual rejuvenation. This is my life, how I've decided to live it and what I work for. India saved me, again. Though it is never easy. It always make me suffer and brings me to the edge of what looks and feels like the abyss. I stare out into that unknown, unsure and apprehensivve, humbled and destroyed; my arrogance checked, my ego vanquished. And each time I feel tested by Mother India. Do I trust and believe and transmit the smiles and good feelings, or do I allow the negativity to engulf me? And that is what India is about, about making the right choice, amidst the chaos, about believing in humanity and the struggle.

There is much that is wrong in India; where does one even begin?

But the vibrancy and the colors truly open up a man's heart to the possibility of what it means to be human.

Behaviorists, believing in the sanctity of experience/environment as the defining influence on humans, need to come to India. For if experience was paramount, nobody would ever smile in India,and the place would wipe away any humanity that has to suffer such indignities and cruelties. But not only does humanity endure in India, it bursts forth in unexpected ways. There is something that refuses to give in to circumstances, almost perverse in its tenacity. That is India for me. And for all her lovers. She moves in mysterious ways.

Journals - India, Africa

2009-02-26T00:44:00.002+09:00

"They remain slaves because they can't see what is beautiful in this world."

"Any talented decadent can make unreality believable. To make reality convincing is another matter, a matter for only the greatest masters."

New Delhi, India

December 30, 2008

I am here to prove all those fearful and cowardly people wrong. Those who doubt, who feel that life happens to them, rather than make life, happen.

We are here for one reason only: To choose love and the righteous path in the face of everything and everyone that tells us to act otherwise. As spiritual love warriors, we have to accept being burned, we need to revel in the risk and insecurity, because the safe way, is death.

If we choose life, then be prepared for a wild ride, with courage. Determination. Perseverance. Hard work. Embrace the struggle, and all things will come.

On a train to Jaipur

January 23, 2009

Travel, like the cinema, is a grand party in this country. Everybody happy, joyously sharing what little they have, together. Extraordinary manners for such uncivilized people.

Traveling in India tempers my cruelty, makes me realize the wonder and magic of this place. My frustrations and disappointments dissipate in movement.

Ajmer, Rajastan

January 26, 2009

On the way to the most holiest of shrines, my woman, sitting next to me on the bicycle rickshaw, begins to weep. The rickshawallah looks back at me, and I just shrugged my shoulders.

It is a powerful place.

I got off and left her outside, indifferent to her, unable to care. I was on a mission; to make it to the center of the shrine, give an offering and make a wish.

Quite suddenly I was approached by a well dressed and handsome Muslim. I was immediately impressed. He was a kind of 5 star guide/fakir. I told him I had a 100 rupees and a wish. But he looked through me, told me not to worry.

I waited on no lines and while masses of people packed themselves in, waiting, I was praying with the head priest. And then afterwards, I was let into the center, thrown in. This I had to do alone. It was a bejeweled room, filled with chaos and madness. Screaming and crying. And all I could do was smile. I'd never felt more at peace.

Money, money, everybody wanted your money. The inner priests, everybody wanted to bless you, I took what little more I had and gave it to whoever wanted to bless me.

There was a child inside, being held, his nose began to bleed, and the blood went everywhere. And it left my heart so tender. And before I knew it I was thrust back out into the sun. What a profound, beautiful place.

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

February 7, 2009

I've come here, passing through, on work, to see a doctor friend of mine from ten years ago who I met in New York. I met him when I was still on the medical school path and right before I was to go to Namibia, with a grant from UNICEF. I was 22 and wanted to change the world. And now I am older and, well, I still want to change the world. Though I wouldn't put it quite in the same way. Not change it, more, change myself, work to make myself strong and true, to fight the good fight. It exists, but in oh so subtle forms I have realized over these years.

My doctor friend went on a Fulbright 20 years ago and never looked back; adopting children, settling down, saving and bettering lives. He was an automatic hero in my eyes back then; I was fascinated and in awe.

But now I was indifferent and didn't want to spend too much time around the horrifically deformed and sick people in his midst. I admired his courage, patience and honesty - he was a New York Jew who made no airs of sainthood. But everything else about him left me cold and perplexed. Everything about him was a mess. If he wasn't a famous doctor, one would think he was a mental patient who lacked female companionship. His house was a mess; his car filled with garbage; his nails uncut and dirty. He was absent-minded as one could understand, but something just wasn't right. His loneliness and having given up to do anything about it, distracted me from his nobility.

But it went beyond aesthetic, there was something inhuman in the way he went about his work. It was as if there was nothing else in the world he could do without completely falling apart. All I could think about was how much love he needed. And why it was that he was alone with all these kids in his house, and what was it that prevented him from opening up and sharing his beautiful life instead of being lonely through altruism.

But he has found his niche, but somehow it felt like he was pouring water into the ocean. The essence, left untouched. That it was also more about him than anything else.

I left, after only some hours with some patients, and didn't want my entire time to be in a clinic, warping my perspective of Ethiopia in the process. Kind of like all those people who go to Calcutta to Mother Theresa's and leave without realizing the majesty of the Bengali Renaissance. I knew there was more to this place than sick people and I went in search of it.

I started wandering the city, an ugly city, a modern unplanned nightmare. Dead, poor and stagnant, though full of people so beautiful, and a sense of some past greatness. Christianity is also a profound undertaking in Ethiopia. As well as coffee and food. A refinement and confidence not felt in other parts of Africa I have been to.

I ended up focusing in the hedonism; sex and cigarettes, great conversations and a whirlwind of movement so grand, that I will never forget.

Passion versus Clockwork - Nadal versus Federer

2009-02-16T00:42:00.000+09:00

My everyday existence is punctuated by the pleasures of a historic rivalry; passion versus clockwork; Nadal versus Federer. Like all great things, there is more to it than meets the eye. This is tennis as transcendence; a battle between two different ways of being.

How does one succeed? By controlling passions, or letting them take hold of you, drive you, to victory? The iron dicipline, the unorthodox spontaneity, who are you, and how will you go about fighting the good fight? One must decide, which side they are on.

Nadal, so spring-like and ebullient, young and strong, energetic and fashionable. He makes the heart soar. Federer, the precision and perfection, the smooth workings of a master of his craft.

The duality of the universe exposes itself upon a tennis court.

Clockwork fails. Cannot compute or understand the energy. Tears of frustration. Clockwork must be unemotional to survive - and win. Sometimes winning is not enough. At times a loss opens us deeper into the unknown; inside ourselves.

"There is no success like failure, and failures no success at all."

Clockwork will make a comeback. Passion will burnout. The world will re-generate and we all watch in awe because we don't know who to root for, anymore.

The Politics of Dignity

2009-02-10T20:22:00.006+09:00

Of the many perplexing elements that make up India's political landscape, the abnormally high rates of voting amongst the poor, is most peculiar. Everywhere else in the world the trend is reversed; the rich outvote the poor and have a greater stake in politics. But not in India. The poor mobilize, wait in long lines, undertaking significant costs to themselves, gaining very little in return.

Government spending on social services in poor districts hasn't improved despite higher representations of lower-caste and historically marginalized groups in politics. The system co-opts these low-caste elites who obsess over further reservations; engaging in unapologetic patronage politics, instead of policies that bring about meaningful social change.

Why do the poor put up with it? What makes them, election after election, vote, and still see no material improvement in their condition? In a word: Dignity. In a country where for thousands of years, the lowest of the low, dare not cast even a shadow on their upper caste brethren, being a part of the political process - courted by all castes and classes - is empowering. The psychological impact of seeing your caste represented within the higher echelons of power cannot be underestimated; explaining the enthusiasm India's poor have with politics.

But how long will this all last before the poor desire tangible results? It's doubtful if politics, in India, can ever be the means for social change. It's been good for stability; better to have the poor vote and engage in politics, rather than riot. Caste reservations are also a cost-effective strategy; it costs less than spending on education and health and is a significant reason why the poor are still poor, even though India is booming.

Lower caste mobilization also takes place within the context of an upper class/elite exodus from politics, in stark contrast to India at its inception in 1947. The founding fathers, Nehru, Gandhi, and a host of others, all came from elite backgrounds; hyper cultured and educated aristocrats. They inspired a whole generation of middle classes. The current elite. rather than mobilize, demand better governance, and take active roles in politics, choose instead, to buy their way out. Gated communities are on the rise; private school fees are exorbitant; private health care grows all at the expense of public goods. Those are left to the poor and the poor vote for whomever gives them dignity.

India turn the prevailing political science theory, that higher incomes leads to a demand for better governance, on its head.

After Mumbai, in November, there was a sense this might change. There was talk of a party for professionals; the middle classes. But this momentum has subsided; politics is still mostly a poor person's game. But issues of governance and security, which effect rich and poor alike, makes many re-think this exclusionist tendency - especially in a democracy.

In a country of 40% illiteracy, empowered ignorant masses, leads to mob rule. And this is what India suffers from. Parliament is a chappal throwing, paan spitting, buffoonery. There are a handful of cultured and educated politicians. Everyone else is in it for the money. Even Maywati, the lower caste Queen, par excellance, has seen her personal fortune multiply 300 percent since being elected.

All trends on the horizon point to further mobilization of the poor, ignorant, historically oppressed masses and the continued voluntary exclusion of the educated elite. I can't think of anything more alarming. An example that serves as a direct contrast is the United States, which always has had it's best and brightest engaged in politics. Obama is a by-product of this trend, and if you go to any top American University, the idealist and politically ambitious always abound.

Indians don't like being compared to America. It's not fair they say. India is poor, and has too many people and problems. I agree that the comparison is not always fair.

How about Egypt then? There was no place more happening, liberal, enlightened in the Middle East after its independence. In 1947 Egypt published over 3000 new books. In 2007, 300. (Painfully, a small country like Israel publishes 3000 now, explaining it's rise and it's Middle East neighbors demise). And let's not even get into the high-quality films, and journalism, and women's groups and over-all air of liberty in Egypt at the time. All lost, mostly during the Sadat years, when the liberal and secular middle classes disengaged from politics, leaving a vacuum filled by religious fundamentalism. The reasons for middle class disengagement in India may be different, but modernity, in both case, led to apathy. Egypt is a disaster now, and India may well be - if it doesn't take these political trends seriously.

New York Was So Much Older Then

2009-01-19T00:21:00.001+09:00

By Kevin Baker

How the places Barack Obama has lived might have helped mold the man who will be the next president of the United States.

I CAME to New York, and to Columbia University, just a few years before Barack Obama arrived in 1981. Like him I was a poor boy, eager to get to the city and start my life as an adult.

It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting — more accessible to poor, eager young people. We lived four and five to a railroad apartment, the bathtub in the kitchen in some places, the floors lined with clumpy chalk lines of boric acid that were our useless defense against the cockroaches.

We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn't open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.

We lived dangerously, I suppose. Everyone's apartment was broken into. We were told that if we got out of the subway at East 116th Street to never, ever try to walk through Morningside Park back to Columbia. Women would go out to lunch and come back to the office to find their wallets somehow missing from the pocketbooks they had held tightly between their knees throughout the meal.

Late one night, leaving a party on the Lower East Side, we saw a hulking, derelict figure emerge from under a stairwell, ready to do mayhem. When he saw how many we were he frowned and retreated beneath the stairs without saying a word, waiting for the next victim.

It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.

Like Barack Obama we read everything we could get our hands on. It was a movie-mad town then, and we lined up for hours in the cold on the East Side to see the latest Fassbinder or Fellini, the new Woody Allen. We nailed long, flapping schedules of all the revival houses to our walls, from the Thalia and the New Yorker, Theater 80 St. Marks and the Bleecker Street Cinemas. I saw my first Broadway show, "Equus," for $3, and sat on stage.

We danced all night at Danceteria, and ate breakfast served by the transvestite waiters. I fell in love with an artist who lived at the Salvation Army's Evangeline residence for women, and we walked the slate-blue paving stones around Gramercy Park for hours, talking about art. Everything seemed like a revelation, right from the first day at Columbia, when my art humanities professor took us to St. John the Divine and explained what a Gothic cathedral was.

I'd like to think that New York taught Barack Obama how indomitable people can be, even in a city that has been written off, consigned to a dozen cinematic apocalypses. It was a poorer town then, a harder one, but still a place of vaulting ambition, of indelible beauty. We thought we could do anything. We felt such pride to be there.

Goodbye 2008

2008-12-31T23:46:00.001+09:00

The year ends, and I am here, in India, in awe of the time passing and my life moving in so many different directions. I usually try and write about something serious and avoid all reality TV fueled excesses about the details of my life and emotions. But I am human, this blog is more than just an intellectually driven machine, pumping out film reviews and political analysis, it's got soul, dear reader and a heart of gold.

The backdrop to everything right now is India. This grand and tragic place, so thoroughly embedded in the collective imagination. This new year will be even more India- focused.

I've also gotten very good responses to the film reviews, more will follow.

Just to spice things up, I will add a bit more from my personal journal, for which there were some requests.

Keep reading, and thinking and acting. Something tells me, that 2009, is the year, that small window of opportunity that comes only so often, to change the world, for the better. It will be a year of great changes.

Here is to a new year, together, in Gabo World. 2009 got a nice ring to it. I can already feels its magic and transformative power. I wish you call courage and strength and love. Thank you for your support, it means a lot to me, more than you'll ever know.

Gabo

A Dialogue on School

2008-12-31T01:52:00.000+09:00

I wrote this to X in response to his dismay to his graduate level program in the UK. I don't know if it will have the impact I want. His other influences are too backward. And India, northern India especially, is hard on anyone who wants to study. It's short term versus long term thinking, the latter predominant mentality, is changing ever so slowly. It is a very, very anti-intellectual society to the shock of any American, I am sure, who associates Indians with education. The survival mentality breeds a hyper utilitarianism Bentham would envy. It's sick. "Be practical, be practical", I never want to here that word again, Practical, what does it mean? To have no vision, be a follower and stagnate? And if I bring this up, at once, in unison, all Indians say: Because you are an American you can think this way. Yes, I am, but there is a reason Americans rule the world and its imagination. We are much more than our wealth and arms. American didn't become rich and then choose to have wonderful, liberal, humanistic ideals, on the contrary, it's BECAUSE of those ideals, that we rule and are powerful and will continue to be so despite all the doomsayers.

I can understand why X feels the way he does. All those who currently rule and change and transform india, did not spend their free time learning Latin and Ancient Greek, or reading philosophy or history. They were technically oriented. Where we come from, is different. Our highest echelons of power are dominated by people who seriously study liberal arts. Even our medical entrance exams, the MCAT, a third of it is just reading comprehension. It is a very different approach, with very different incentives. But for India to change, and to change fundamentally, it will need to embrace all fields of knowledge and intellectual curiosity. And forget personal gain, for a second. For a person to have a meaningful and deep life, true education and knowledge, allows you to make sense of your failures. It brings a narrative to your life and a way to view the world, that nothing else can provide. Also, in a consumer society, it refines your consumption, curtails it, and makes you weary of what you are force fed. That is why I am so adamant about studies and education, especially in a democracy. Ignorant people anywhere are a tragedy, but empowered ignorant people; nothing is more dangerous.

MY INITIAL LETTER

2008-12-31T01:43:00.000+09:00

I have been thinking, very deeply, about your adverse feelings towards your Masters program at your university. I agree, that many theories, and what is taught, is not always correct. That "ground" realities are not taken into account, that very, very smart and capable people, mess things up. That is all true. But the main point of studying is not the content, necessarily. There are of course imperfections in the process, but the point is - the process. The evolving conversation of what is true, and how to apply it.

There is a HUGE divide between those who make policy and those who suffer from them. Most people with "ground" reality, who have deep insight into how things really are, rarely have access to circles of power, and if they do, often do not have the tools to communicate it. You are getting that chance.

University education, in America, at least, has evolved over the past 40 years to include more people, and give them the tools of argumentation, both in terms of assessment and making arguments.

It is this process that you must master. Without this imperfect process, there's anarchy and nothing else.

Some very concrete goals you need to have for yourself: You need to write what you feel is true and be able to get assessment from leading scholars in the field. That feedback is priceless and that is not always based on the content but how you frame your arguments. It's good writing plus good research, skills that are necessary in whatever you do. For good writing is what leads to good thinking. You also need to get to the point of being able to publish an article, write op-ed pieces, in a convincing way. You also need to be familiar with the pre-dominant theories to understand the mind-set of the outsider, in dealing with them. Just saying it's Western, or White, or because they are not Indian, is not enough. You need to attack their ideas, not their identity.

My good friend , who is Lebanese, suffered similar problems in the beginning. He had just come from the 2006 war and sitting in a class about theories seemed so frivolous. Its easy, when we have direct experience, or when we have suffered, to just say everything is about power and money and might. If you believe that, why study at all? Isn't knowledge power? Aren't we in a knowledge economy? Knowledge is the motor. What you are mistaking, is the content for the process. Theories, most of them are wrong, but the courage and work in putting one together, does move mountains. India would be nowhere without nationalism, and those ideas, and Pakistan would probably not exist if Jinnah wasn't so deeply moved by john stuart mill's "On Liberty" which argues forcefully about the plight of minorities in a democracy.

Everything you do, every action, the ancestor of it, is an idea.

So go back now, but be positive and focus on writing and expressing your truth to those white fuckers. And they will be open to it, they always want to be proven wrong and are open to criticism. You needn't see the game as rigged, as see all sources as bias, and everyone brain-washed. And you can't just say it without giving specific examples, and dissecting arguments, and persuading someone. Right now you are not persuasive at all. You are acting like a thug. The essence of your argumentation is: I am indian, I know ground realities, I have my classified courses, I just know and you don't because you don't know india, are american, are white, are western brain-washed. Thats just rubbish. How does one respond to that? The argument is over before it began. You shut down all discussion.

That's it, please don't take this the wrong way, and please don't laugh this off or make fun of my concern. Your doing this impressed me beyond belief. It made me see you as someone who is more than just money and business. Someone who believes in a truth and wants to contribute to making the world better. You can write my feelings off to me being "weird", but trust me, I am not weird. I feel much, much more confident in introducing you to people, and collaborating with you, knowing you are going through the process we all went through. I just want to see you make the most of it.

My love to you,

Gabo

MY SECOND RESPONSE TO THE RESPONSE OF THIS LETTER: basically the recipient just saw western education as brain-washing and narrow

2008-12-31T01:41:00.000+09:00

I wrote back:

Dude, thanks for taking the time to respond to my concerns. It is not easy to do, with someone you care about, and who is a great friend, but that is precisely why I wrote you. A couple quick points to your points.

1. I agree that western educated people, The West, whatever you want to call it, is bias. But it's the only system, that I know of, that has institutional mechanisms, to foster the accountability and transparency you talk of. It has the possibility to correct itself, though not perfect, it is at least trying to check power. All significant changes, 40 hour work week, end of slavery, environmental movements, have all been a result of popular struggle and these mechanisms within these countries. There is at play, constantly, a dynamic interplay between people and their respective governments in the West. This does not exist in other countries that have no checks on their power.

I have seen far to many people say, including the Chinese, that the US does what it convenient to it, and then preaches to others, especially when it comes to human rights. But the West did not change magically, they change because the people within these countries are powerful and influence their government to change. The change is a result of massive struggle; the civil war in America, two World Wars in Europe, the French revolution, and on and on.

Is there no difference between Russia, China, Iran, the gulf states with Europe, US, Latin America, India?

I agree, on an international scale, there will be little difference. Because there is no world government, or police, much of international affairs boils down to Realism. Power is more naked, but on internal levels, the civilization and the quality of life provided by the West is without precedent in human history. That is why the WTO was created and the UN, to buffer the Realism that takes place when there is no authority. In their own ways, it makes states accountable on a global scale. I think you confuse the International effects of the West, and see that as an indictment of everything they are about. But it's more a failing of the world system. Don't extrapolate the realism demanded by the international sphere, into seeing all countries as the same, and it all being about power.

2. The next thing is your distrust of "rational" thinking based on data and studies. Of course they can be flawed. But the logical conclusion of your statement becomes anti-research, anti-science. The best way is still to cite sources and then challenge those sources. That takes effort, and investigation, but if we don't commit ourselves to this process, than we can never be sure of the truth. How to you convince anyone then? It will all boil down to he said, she said, I heard, and I saw, but that is just your subjective experience. I am repeating myself, again, but it bears repeating because the scientific method is the BASIS of the Enlightenment and is what took us from Darkness to Light. It separated the Church from the State and was what was used to challenge traditional hierarchies. If you give up on this, then you are take a huge step back.

3. I think if you come out of this focusing on the skills and contacts you can get from this experience. it'll be worth it. Focus on the writing, and focus on getting to know interesting people. You will, with your alumni network, eventually, be able to recruit top talent to your organization, and get a sense of where they come, and what they study. There is an aspect of bullshit to what you study in Graduate School, but its so much more than just the studies. You understand a bit more the complexities of making decisions. It is hard to rule the world. So much of the "failings" that hurt you, are a result of the difficulty of running a fair and just world. Free trade economics was to counteract the corrupt government monopolies that slowed down the 70s. Ideologies and theories innovate and then they stagnate, and then new ideas are needed. Free trade and liberalization has done loads for the world, but then it over-shot, and now new thinking is needed. And that is what is being done. It is easy to be critical, but much harder to innovate.

Enjoy your remaining time at University and study your ass off. You will have the rest of your life for work and screaming at your peons on your mobile, at all hours of the day. And, please, sleep around and make some white girls happy with your brown love.

Will be in touch with everything else. Be positive and don't let the white man get you down.

Much Love,

Gabo

The Silence - Ingmar Bergman

2008-12-19T16:52:00.000+09:00

Two sisters; one dying, the other sexually promiscuous - both haunted by the others presence. Trapped in a hotel room, in a foreign country, on a holiday gone awry. With such a simple premise, Bergman weaves together his characteristic obsessions; man alone in a godless world, death, longing, suffering. Watching his films is like driving a car destined to crash. You know it'll end badly, but you carry on, for the sake of the ride. It's worth dying for.

It's not all bleak, just refreshingly serious. There is not a frame that doesn't force you to meditate on the purpose of our lives. As so much is said, in Silence. The acting is magnificent, the scenes hypnotic, technically I can't remember watching something so flawless in a long time. But Bergman is more than just a master of his craft. He searches for a morality in such morally confused times. How is one to act? How does one live? If nothing is sacred, is all permitted? Each of his films, though different, all deal with is these fundamental dilemmas. And always, there is someone who personifies the way forward.

This time, it's in the form of a child, the illegitimate son of the sexually ravenous sister. His longing for his mother and her indulgence of his innocence make for some remarkably tender moments. The sister's clashing egos are assuaged by his presence, forcing them to pull away from their selfishness. Both look to him in times of trouble, but he's just a boy, not yet a man; incapable of curing their insufferable alienation.

Language is also an interesting subtext. Both sisters find comfort in being unable to communicate with the foreign men who enter their lives. It allows them to soliloquize, this solitude in the presence of another, liberates a feeling, words so often enslave.

It ends badly. The car crashes. But Bergman makes the wind fly in your hair and gives you those moments of exhilaration, only recklessness can give. This is film, in its highest form, by one of its greatest masters. It's worth dying for.

Paris Vs. Havana (NY Times)

2008-12-12T23:28:00.000+09:00

By Roger Cohen

Since visiting Cuba a few weeks ago, I've been thinking about the visual assault on our lives. Climb in a New York taxi these days and a TV comes on with its bombardment of news and ads. It's become passé to gaze out the window, watch the sunlight on a wall, a child's smile, the city breathing.

In Havana, I'd spend long hours contemplating a single street. Nothing — not a brand, an advertisement or a neon sign — distracted me from the city's sunlit surrender to time passing. At a colossal price, Fidel Castro's pursuit of socialism has forged a unique aesthetic, freed from agitation, caught in a haunting equilibrium of stillness and decay.

Such empty spaces, away from the assault of marketing, beyond every form of message (e-mail, text, twitter), erode in the modern world, to the point that silence provokes a why-am-I-not-in-demand anxiety. Technology induces ever more subtle forms of addiction, to products, but also to agitation itself. The global mall reproduces itself, its bright and air-conditioned sterility extinguishing every distinctive germ.

Paris, of course, has resisted homogenization. It's still Paris, with its strong Haussmannian arteries, its parks of satisfying geometry, its islands pointing their prows toward the solemn bridges, its gilt and gravel, its zinc-roofed maids' rooms arrayed atop the city as if deposited by some magician who stole in at night.

It's still a place where temptation exists only to be yielded to and where time stops to guard forever an image in the heart. All young lovers should have a row in the Tuileries in order to make up on the Pont Neuf.

Yet, for all its enduring seductiveness, Paris has ceased to be the city that I knew. The modern world has sucked out some essence, leaving a film-set perfection hollowed out behind the five-story facades. The past has been anaesthetized. It has been packaged. It now seems less a part of the city's fabric than it is a kitschy gimmick as easily reproduced as a Lautrec poster.

I know, in middle age the business of life is less about doing things for the first than for the last time. It is easy to feel a twinge of regret. Those briny oysters, the glistening mackerel on their bed of ice at the Rue Mouffetard, the drowsy emptied city in August, the unctuousness of a Beef Bourguignon: these things can be experienced for the first time only once.

So what I experience in Paris is less what is before me than the memory it provokes of the city in 1975. Memories, as Apollinaire noted, are like the sound of hunters' horns fading in the wind. Still, they linger. The town looks much the same, if prettified. What has changed has changed from within.

At dinner with people I'd known back then, I was grappling with this elusive feeling when my friend lit a match. It was a Russian match acquired in Belgrade and so did not conform to current European Union nanny-state standards. The flame jumped. The sulfur whiff was pungent. A real match!

Then it came to me: what Paris had lost to modernity was its pungency. Gone was the acrid Gitane-Gauloise pall of any self-respecting café. Gone was the garlic whiff of the early-morning Metro to the Place d'Italie. Gone were the mineral mid-morning Sauvignons Blancs downed bar-side by red-eyed men.

Gone were the horse butchers and the tripe restaurants in the 12th arrondissement. Gone (replaced by bad English) was the laconic snarl of Parisian greeting. Gone were the bad teeth, the yellowing moustaches, the hammering of artisans, the middle-aged prostitutes in doorways, the seat-less toilets on the stairs, and an entire group of people called the working class.

Gone, in short, was Paris in the glory of its squalor, in the time before anyone thought a Frenchman would accept a sandwich for lunch, or decreed that the great unwashed should inhabit the distant suburbs. The city has been sanitized.

But squalor connects. When you clean, when you favor hermetic sealing in the name of safety, you also disconnect people from one another. When on top of that you add layers of solipsistic technology, the isolation intensifies. In its preserved Gallic disguise, Paris is today no less a globalized city than New York.

Havana has also preserved its architecture — the wrought-iron balconies, the caryatids, the baroque flourishes — even if it is crumbling. What has been preserved with it, thanks to socialist economic disaster, is that very pungent texture Paris has lost to modernity.

The slugs of Havana Club rum in bars lit by fluorescent light, the dominos banged on street tables, the raucous conversations in high doorways, the whiff of puros, the beat through bad speakers of drums and maracas, the idle sensuality of Blackberry-free days: Cuba took me back decades to an era when time did not always demand to be put to use.

I thought I'd always have Paris. But Havana helped me see, by the flare of a Russian match, that mine is gone.

Bombay Blues

2008-12-02T21:19:00.000+09:00

I was there, trapped in the Lawrence Hotel, near the gateway of India. I somehow find myself in the midst of seismic geo-political events. The World Trade Center and now this, but I made it back to Delhi, but completely, after many days, still in awe of what has happened and what this means for the world.

If before Mumbai the War on Terror seemed a paranoid figment of the American imagination, think again. All of us, no matter what we do, what political party we support, need to come to terms with the severity of what has occured. The threat is real and the response - the direct response - has to be more than just appealing to the hearts and minds of terrorists. There isn't enough time. At this point, appeasement will not work. Not Palestine, not Kashmir, nothing of that sort can derail what has been further set in motion with the events in Mumbai.

When joe six-pack, in America, is carving his thanksgiving turkey to the backdrop of live minute by minute news of the carnage, you know something is horribly amiss. Something terrible has been unleashed on our collective conscious. The level of coverage and global concern is perplexing and bizarre. The monster that is 24 hour news is making perverse voyeurs of us all.

But on to practical concerns. The geo-political chess game continues.

Invading Pakistan, or engaging in a any direct State to State confrontations will be counter-productive and only serve to exacerbate the situation. Its in our collective interests to have a strong Pakistani state which is capable of governing and dealing with internal elements of extremism. Any weakening on this front, will lead to further chaos and uncertainty.

Pakistan is fighting a war on two fronts; the northwestern frontier against the religious extremists and the eastern threat with India over Kashmir. Pakistan needs to be re-assured that they need not worry about India, in order to focus all efforts on dealing with the religious extremists in the NW territories. Its understandable that this is difficult and that there is anger at Pakistan for harboring terrorists. But Pakistan itself is aware, having been victims of numerous and devastating attacks over the past year. Working with them, makes more sense than working against them. Pakistan has sent out signals indicating transparent cooperation, and India, along with the US, need to use this as an opportunity to gain concessions in terms of intelligence sharing and taking extreme steps to purge any terrorist elements in the ISI, Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency, which, if early reports are to believed, played a role in training the terrorists that perpetrated the Mumbai operations.

Besides this, India needs to do a lot more to enhance its competency in terms of intelligence and preparedness. Early evidence, that warnings of the attack were not heeded and the amateur response (terrorists blazing revolver toting policemen with AK 47s, along with the delay in reacting, or having any serious contingency plan), are unacceptable. This will be a much needed wake-up call and also an opportunity for meaningful solidarity with the US and other Western nations.

But I am pessimistic. India's, so far, wonderful growth and transformation, has been despite the State. The State remains incompetent and it's never more apparent than in moments such as these. How will terrorism be prevented if basic simple service delivery(health, education, infrastructure), of which we know how to fix, cannot be accomplished? Why doesn't someone just come out and say it: the Indian state is pathetic. The only thing good thing they have done in the past ten to fifteen years is step out of the way. That can work for business, but in matters of State, more specifically, the integrity of a nation, it's impossible. There needs to be something done to increase governmental capacity at all levels, and especially of matters pertaining security.

It is promising that there is bi-partisan cooperation, but more is needed. These events have done great damage, confidence is an element of economic growth, and confidence is shaken. New York can recover quicker, because it's New York. But Mumbai and India need to work harder to rebuild, both the infrastructure and the faith.

Kashmir – India’s Albatross

2008-11-13T15:27:00.002+09:00

The Indian government finds itself in an impossible situation in Kashmir. The largest demonstrations in two decades in the valley have brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, calling for freedom. This surprising turn of events is a stark contrast to the relative calm and optimism in the area following the much-lauded 2002 local elections, coinciding with President Musharraf's commitment to control jihadist elements across the border. The current situation only demonstrates New Delhi's flawed strategy to an untenable situation, inevitably bound to become more difficult given the dormant frustrations and tensions in the region.

This past year was especially good for the valley, with record highs for tourism and economic activity. There were no outward signs that a flare up of this magnitude was on the horizon, let alone enormous, unprecedented, mostly non-violent calls for independence that have caught the Indian security forces off guard. Having been trained to fight an insurgency they now, quickly, are training for crowd control.

The spark that set off the crisis was a transfer of 92 acres of land for a Hindu pilgrimage. It is, of course, not the direct cause to the current conflict. The roots are much deeper. About a half a million soldiers pursue a few thousand militants, making Kashmir the most militarized zone in the world. Human rights violations have been rampant. Nobody has figured out how to deal with insurgencies mixed with terrorism, and the Indian state often finds itself stuck between doing nothing and doing too much. To make up for it, New Delhi - to their credit - focuses on appeasement through economic and political means.

No state, per capita, has received as much economic aid as Kashmir has, but to no avail. No state has experienced as much political autonomy either - in no small part due to a special constitutional provision dating back to Nehru. Elections in the region are promising but prominent Kashmiri leaders focus not on improving governance but rather on independence and an emphasis on Islam as a guiding force. Democracy has this illiberal underbelly, much like Hamas in Palestine and the Islamic parties of the northwestern frontier in Pakistan, which, though elected by the people, often work against the people's interest by promoting terrorism and repression.

So force is not working, neither is money or democracy. If Kashmiris had a right to self-determination they would very likely secede and/or join Pakistan. There is little doubt about that. But then again, so would other parts of India if given the choice. Besides Kashmir, secessionist problems existed in Punjab and currently one can make the case that Assam and Nagaland would be motivated by any loss to Indian territory. And these are just the overt cases. Since independence, a dialectical balance has constantly been in play between the center and peripheries. Concessions and compromises were always made; Hindi being a case in point, first being force taught to the South, to later being dropped after numerous protests. All this has led to greater decentralization and the rise of regionalist parties and the creation of new states, allowing for India to stay integral and united amidst tremendous diversity.

What has worked in other areas of India has not worked in Kashmir for a whole host of reasons none greater than the fact that Pakistan is right next door. Since independence three official wars have been fought, not to mention numerous skirmishes, with the insurgency being directly aided by the ISI; Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency. In fact, in the period 2002-2008, violence has gone down in no small part to Musharraf's commitment to control infiltration from jihadists. With Musharraf gone and Pakistan slowly slipping into chaos, Kashmir will be as vulnerable as ever. An independent Kashmir will bring Pakistan and its instability that much closer to India.

With the recent unilateral actions by the U.S. in Pakistan's tribal areas, with a possible fall-out between the two governments likely, the situation is getting trickier. India can be that missing piece that can add pressure from the LOC given Pakistan's current vulnerability. Recent deployment of 6 of its most capable warplanes to Kashmir precisely sends this message.

All this makes a Kashmiri state, or any redrawing of borders, extremely unviable. An independent Kashmir, or worse a Kashmir as part of Pakistan is not a possibility as far as Indian strategic and security interests are concerned. The implications for the region are too great. The point is moot whether Kashmiris are freedom fighters or terrorists. A supposed emerging super power will not be keen to show weakness and no secession or compromise will be made; already clear from Manmohan Singh's "no borders will be redrawn" statement. Further agitation will only serve to challenge his authority and with time, if continues, will only provoke more violence and ruthlessness.

That national elections are looming on the horizon doesn't help the situation. The BJP has a history of riding the waves of religious controversy to power. Further calls for freedom, or any threat of Kashmiri independence will make Kashmir be what Ayodha was in the 1995 elections: A rallying cry to unite Hindus against Muslims. BJP's 2004 strategy emphasizing economic growth and "Shining India" failed. They've wised up and know that people are motivated more by threats to security and more importantly threats to their identity. Hindu agitation in Jammu, with their own protests and economic blockade of the valley, is evidence enough that the times ahead with only get worse.

Sonal Shah - A case of political naivete

2008-11-11T16:03:00.001+09:00

Let's be clear: Sonal Shah is not a Hindu Fundamentalist. She is, however, politically naive and was unable to grasp what any association with the VHP, BJP and RSS would mean for her and her commendable social work. This is either because she is out of touch with ground realities in India, or felt she didn't need to make serious efforts to distance herself from what she may have perceived as just exaggerated leftist smear campaigns. But while Leftists are more alarmist, ridiculous and unconvincing with their rhetoric (fascist, Hitler, etc), the underlying assertions, of her troubling affiliations and collaborations, are valid. And with her recent appointment to Obama's transition team, the issue has inevitably come to the spotlight.

The only comments, thus far, from the Shah family have been Anand Shah's recent statements condemning the Gujarat riots. Who doesn't? But what about condemning VHP and specifically CM Narendra Modi for his documented role in the massacres? Why does he choose not to condemn the Sangh? Most probably, because he feels Indicorps' work would be compromised as a result. Most of their social projects are based in Gujarat. They need to be on Modi's good side and, also, when your father does (or did) have leadership roles within these organizations, you want to respect your elders. But sometimes a clear stand is necessary, and one must break away from those you love. Obama did it with reverend Jeremiah Wright. He was forgiven the moment he dissociated himself. The same would have been true, and is still true, if both Anand and Sonal dissociate themselves from their parents and their own former collaborations and activities with the Sangh.

But that would take guts, and would politicize an organization focused on "Service for the Soul". But Sonal Shah's and Indicorps current stand is not neutral. What is best at this moment, if she wants to salvage her reputation and that of her work, is to admit she made a mistake. That she wasn't careful, that she believes firmly in the secular founding principles of the country and not an India dominated by those who wish to impose a Hindu state. These very curt and brief statements would go a long way in allowing her to make the many meaningful contributions she is, and will continue to make, in her ascending and bright future.

We need Sonal Shah. I am saddened by those who want to bring her down, hurt her work, and are calling for her resignation. Her work, commitment, vision and dedication to public service are laudable and all efforts should be made to work and dialogue with her, instead of destroying her. Take it from someone who has had many, many brilliant dialogues with the woman (see old posts on this blog). Her openness, ideas and life, are exemplary. I firmly stand behind her, wish her the best in her new role as advisor and ask now - for the practical concern of moving on from this controversy now and forever - that she make her apology and make clear her dissociation from the Sangh. Saying you have no links, when your father has had a leadership role with the Sangh, when you were a former national coordinator yourself for the VHP-A, when Narendra Modi has been a guest in your house, when you have received an award from the man himself, all come off as unconvincing. I realize her dilemma in this. Sonal does not want to jeopardize her relationship with Gujarat, but she can't have it both ways. A clear stance is necessary and I look forward to some official statement in the forthcoming days.

America!

2008-11-06T17:33:00.004+09:00

It's here in New Delhi, of all places, that for the first time in my adult life, I am proud to be an American. So much has gone wrong in these past eight years and, though its hard to say, its probably why I write this from abroad, in a state of self imposed exile. But now I feel different. I want to go back to what feels like, my people. Being of Indian descent and growing up in New York City has always left me feeling cold to America, the mainland as I like to call it, with its weird and strange ways. The beer pong, the football, the strip malls and driving. I was done with it. I never wanted to see it again.

I tried to come to terms with it, back in 2000, when I worked on a presidential campaign, public interest and grassroots campaigns that took me throughout 40 states. Many long nights riding in my car, listening to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, eating beef jerky, drinking black coffee and chewing bubble gum, looking for America. Through the purple mountain mesa tops in Utah, the star filled mountain nights in Colorado, the Ozarks, Oklahoma City, Birmingham, Louisville, I realized how beautiful being American can be. But I still felt out of place. Though people came from all over to join us and fight against the numerous injustices in our society, I still felt a distant sense of alienation. As if I was on Mars.

But today, in New Delhi, an elderly gentleman, got out his guitar during our victory party and sang "The times they are changin" and then "we shall over come" and I saw all those who had been there in the 50s and 60s, who lived through assassination after assassination, and riots and maddness, see the day they never dreamed was possible and in India! Who knows what they were doing here, perhaps they were beatniks, or hippies, or in this day and age, software developers or social entrepreneurs. But we were all together, in India, with everyone, singing and knowing a new day had arrived for the country we all loved at one time, in some way. And now we're back, and it's a healthy and humble patriotism, one that acknowledges the tremendous responsibility and humility that comes with power. For I agree with Obama, we are not great for our arms and wealth alone, it is our ideals, of democracy, and liberty and opportunity that truly make us shine and will make us shine on for years to come.

We shall re-invent, we shall always change, we will always right our wrongs eventually, because we constantly surge towards a more perfect union. There are miles to go before we sleep, but being awake has never felt better and never more sweeter. I look forward to dealing with the likely perils of the future with courage and dignity. Thank you Obama. Thank you for taking the tougher road instead of the easy, comfortable path of privilege and showing us what we can be in this great country of ours, America.

I have decided from this day on, I will no longer be a hyphenated American. In no disrespect to my motherland, or ancestry, but today I have become whole, I go from Indian-American to just American. Not from the republic of New York, or New Yorker, today I embrace all of me through this great nation of ours, as imperfect and treacherous as it can be, I know it will consistently strive to perfect itself, if not in my lifetime, in the generations to come, we will get there, I know. This is Gabo Arora, American, sending you his love from the motherland.

Shoot The Piano Player - Truffaut

2008-11-03T23:34:00.002+09:00

I have seen many Truffaut films, and always felt him to be less intellectually potent though more heart-felt in his film making than his contemporaries in the New Wave. It was Godard that transcended the frontiers of the mind, body and soul through the power of his ideas. But Truffaut acquiesced to emotions, more so than others. Its as if he had less to prove and thus allowed for the camera to reveal his troubled childhood and prolonged adolescence through wayward images.

Thats what 400 blows was about and every film after with Antoine Danoiel, his very on screen alter-ego. But Shoot The Piano Player is something else entirely, again though, with an emotional feeling that is rare within the hyper-logique and dialogue heavy tendencies of the French. What turns out , on paper, to be a spoof on american gangster movies, in the end is more a reflection on love and losing your way in the world.

"I can't be in two places at once" is what the lead says to his brother, when asked why it is he is in a beat-up bar playing popular diddies for the masses when he is more deserving of the pomp and celebre his previous concerts received. The expression and the dignity he leads his life is more important. He may be down and out, but he plays the piano as the world moves around him meaninglessly, lost and searching he has found himself, with the piano, wherever he may be. And that comes through. In the end, after more tragedy, he is back at the piano, whenever things take a difficult turn, the piano, but eventually the piano is to him what the rock was for sisyphus : a reminder of his own absurdity.

The french are not as warm as the Italians, nor as cold as the Germans, but more innovative than both when it comes to culture. But Truffuat does the unlikely, he is able to for fleeting moments, combine a warmth with his heady mindfulness.

There is something to the kinetic energy of the film, a quickness, that doesn't give way to superficiality. I don't know how he does it, but the film lingers, you are able to revel in the aesthetic while being moved by the content.

Why? After-all its just a film about love and love lost, and succeeding and failing in the world, but then again, isn't that what everything is really about? But its how you play your tragedy and the humanity you allow in during the inevitable demise. And your character, this film has that character.

The entire new wave started out as critics for Les Cahiers and what always astounds me is that they made films that are beyond criticism. I can't imagine anyone saying anything bad about shoot the piano player.

2008-11-02T15:37:00.002+09:00

I have taken up photography or rather stealing my loved ones pictures...some photos from some travels through the motherland. Don't you wish you were here? Wish you were here. I was thinking about India, I am always thinking about India. It was during a re-reading of thucydides, the part where T, says extreme situations bring out the extreme in people, when in the the athens - sparta war people take to sleeping in sacred temples and killing each other for food. The lesson being that our goodness is only a result of our circumstances. But India is an exception to this rule (as it is to many, many rules). It is a cruel place, with many hardships but somehow the people shine, shine on.

My love to you from here. I am starting to miss you.

Gabo

2008-11-02T15:32:00.001+09:00

My B Sides - for my groupies.

2008-10-16T01:25:00.001+09:00

So below are all the postings that did not eventually make as official
blog posts over the past 2 years.

Purposely unedited, with spelling mistakes, poor thought formation,
but to cleanse and show to my loyal following the roughness and energy
of some of the work. I am at heart a beatnik and the raw comes more
often from a deeper honesty that the editing can often kill.

But you have to know the rules to break them as kerouac said. well I
don't know if I know them, but by breaking them, I am that much closer
to knowing.

Enjoy it, or ignore it, but its for you and only you.

All my love to you.

Gabo

PS - a big shout out to my loyal following in Romania.

ideas for short stories

2008-10-16T01:18:00.001+09:00

Writing. if I treat this process as mechanical and put my time in I
will see the difference. I rush and do things too fast. Thats my
problem. i need to dedicate more time and not get emotionally upset
when things don't work my way. Things move only with hard work and
dedication done without attachment. Remember that. Just write then
give it a day and look over it and then you will see a big difference.
You can write those short stories....

How about on women. Cliche but women are universal. If I could
capture the many facets of women.

1. being a beautiful woman as a man

2. Monica Lucia, 35 year old fading beauty trying so hard to hold on
to life as it slips by

3. Renu bhabi , the beautiful widow frozen in time.

4. Isabel, the woman who loved too much

5. Raping a Nun.

Top ten - HA HA

2008-10-16T01:16:00.000+09:00

Here, just to play to my cheesy american side, I will make a list a la
letterman of my top ten concerns for humanity (I am aware that such a
framework is stupid but I want to entertain you, which I also realize
is dangerous, given you may be contented by the amusement value of
this exercise which would mask the capacity necessary to feel the true
discontent necessary to make change, in your life and in others)

- China. From their fish, to their global adventures in pursuit of
natural resources, to their dangerous quality of goods, and to their
eventual inevitable aggression. Before we pack our kids off to fight
them, wake up!

- middle east blah blah. Important but lets not get caught in a
hyponotic trance by the poetry of 9-11 and the jihad. China, asia
even is a far more important part of the world to come to terms with.

- The FARM bill. obesity, ethanol, high fructose corn syrup,
immigration, third world poverty all come colliding in big time in
this.

- PHARM- med Complex, an 80 billion dollar a year industry.
America's make of 2 percent of the world yet consume 50 percent of
prescriptions. This is one of America's biggest exports. 10-20
percent of this usage is probably justified and a needed palliative,
but the problem is in the over-prescription and efficacy of medical
research.

-. ok, global warming, but its more than just recycling. Stop
driving! Stop the Agricultural industrial complex. With its
pesticide run offs, antibiotic, hormone pumped meat and dairy. Not to
mention the cruelty to animals. Kill them but don't torture them.

- The internet. I know, the irony of it, but really, a better
assessment is needed to understand this medium. Currently it is
unquestioned good. We need to come to grips with its seductions and
powers. Google, GSM, facebook, there is a concern about privacy and
also a possibility that one day we will live in one big pod. American
high school reading rates also dropping, we need to do a conscious
assessment of what the digital age provides and what it takes.

There are more, but this is what is on my mind.

So what are you gonna do about it? I am uncomfortable with the
"professionalization" of activism and campaigns to save the world.
Its important but the first step has to be personal, individual, you
have to feel the gains in your life, from understanding this
knowledge.

Into the Wild - random ideas inspired by one of the most important American films to come out in a long time

2008-10-16T01:15:00.001+09:00

Into the Wild

Sean Penn's new film is profound on many levels.

Historically being based in 1991 after the fall of communism and the
end of history, no coincidence.

Pre SSRIs and all the mental health maddness. in this day and age
someone like him would be convinced that they were nuts or think they
were nuts and drug themselves up. Back then these did not exist.

Plays on the tradition of Thorueu, interesting to note that the Wild
was not hostile to him back then though we have gotten so faraway from
nature that it attacks and kiils us. In all of T's writing there is
not an element of a fear of surivival. American man at that time had
sufficient contact with nature in order to surivive. Penn's character
is saved by a bus, a piece of modernity in the jungle.

The idea of solitude in nature is a strange one. Striking that Penn's
character did not want to be around people. Can't take the American
out of the boy, individualism, alienation, go at it alone mentality.

The need to cut himself off from his family. It was what he
questioned least. It gave him the greatest sense of freedom. The
family, especially post 50s American family has been the greatest
source of destruction on children, with what they feed, the schools
they send you to, the stuff they buy you, the TV they make you watch.
you can be free unless you have no feelings for them. That radicalism
is needed nowadays, that no mercy, non sentimental way of living.

He is very clearly not a hippie in the limited sense of that word. he
does not want free love, does not want drugs, does not even want sex.
he doesn't care about any of those things. He is beyond that, not
interested, what he wants is a divine connection with the wild. Why?
What does it give him?

The modern world with all its trappings is absurd and frustrating,
especially for a 22 year old searching for the truth. That was where
I ws for a time. And i am still on that journey in many ways.

New York - so far so close

2008-10-16T01:11:00.001+09:00

Big Apple Fashions was a huge success. Its fitting irony that my
father sold dresses to black women. That they adored him and he
secretly them. Like all Indians, my father was a bit of a racist. In
that Archie Bunker, loving way. New York egged on his prejudices.
The city is surprisingly tolerant to expressing verbal bigotry,
probably explaining why we all get along so well. Because we express
just how we feel about jews, the chinese, gays, blacks. If you over
hear any real new york crowd of kids on a school yard, faggot and
don't jew me out are a accepted part of endearing yourself to someone.
Political correctness was invented by upper west side liberals who
went to columbia and NYU. The rest of us used language to express our
endless frustrations.

My father was also an anti-semite. Jew this and jew that. He got a
c+ in graduate school in a course taught by a jew. It was his only
non A grade, and he became convinced it was because of the jew. In
the the class there were also my father's other indian friends.
According to him they got c+'s as well. I heard that story millions
of times. I got strange chills reading Mein Kahph years later with
Hitler expressing similar dismay over a C he recieved by a jew that
turned him off painting. Jews should be careful with grades they
give. man.

But my father loved Israeli jews, and the orthodox. He called them
real jews. Most of his interaction was at the falafel place on Jewel
aveneue, a hassidic enclave. Back then, there were not many options
for vegetarians when they wanted to eat out. My parents would eat
pizza or go for falafel. overtime these falafel joints became hindu
haunts. It was filled with yamacas, those hairy curls, turbans,
salwar kammezes, it was astounding how well we got along. I still
remember the warmth and friendliness of many of those people. They
would come sit next to my father and talk of india. Many had gone
there after their military service. India held a special place in
their heart for them.

I dream of Brando

2008-10-16T01:10:00.001+09:00

In the Rajastani desert, this past summer, I had a communion with
Brando's spirit. He made me realize who i was: an actor and a
teacher. I couldn't believe that we got together but there he was,
standing by a window, over looking paris, asking me who I thought I
was. He did it with a sense of strenght, no nonsense directness, with
love and kindness.

I remembered this watching "The Ugly American" the other night, a
hallow film, made brighter and candid by Brando in the leading role.
He overpowers it with each move, perfectly doing what he always does:
be himself yet still convince you somehow of the role he plays. Its
as if brando is everything, takes on so many characters but what you
see, and what attracts you to him is his authencity. You know deep
down, he is always brando, and he winks and nods to you underneath
there but it doesn't take away from the character. He tells you to be
anything you want to be, as long as you know who you are and have a
strong foundation on that. Everything else is just play.

Live by the Drug, Die by the Drug

2008-10-16T01:09:00.001+09:00

Live by the Drug, Die by the Drug

This modern world puts you between a rock and a hard place. It makes
you choose between your first born or your left arm. The calculus and
choices it imposes through its framework and rules is horrific. It
just wants you take the first step into the maze, and then its got
you. Take a drug, it makes you feel better, though now that you have
accepted this game, you have to work your way around the haphazard
science and the side effects. Try new ones, old ones don't work
anymore, keep uneasy, unstable, completely preoccupied with the state
of your health and mind.

Health, its the way to de-stabalize any resistance. How you gonna
fight george bush if you are sick? If we are not internally well, all
big changes are lost. Thats why they attack it, sickness is the basis
of domination in America. Their business is to make you sick and then
make you better. Providing solutions to the problems they created and
keep this cycle going. This is what is called economic growth and
progress folks. Wake up.

Always the lesser evil is justified in a world of such intense
suffering. Nothing is seen as being sacred, true, pure, the right
way. A good friend takes welbutrin to quit smoking, my expressing my
horror at such a choice is met with my not caring about how lung
cancer will end his life. My sister wants bariactric surgery, she is
obese and her diabetes is getting to her. Decisions decisions. I am
told I am an extremist and unrealistic. The day people stop saying
that about me, I know I will be doing something wrong. This world can
only be met with extremism and to be a realist is to be insane and
completely unhappy.

I met a great young woman, though a woman is a woman is a woman. Even
if they are activist revolutionaries. She doesn't believe in the
pursuit of happiness. And is not sure if anyone is happy. I felt so
sorry for her though she wanted to feel sorry for me. Its sickness
when we like feeling sorry for people. Patronizing, christian,
charitable, mind sickness.

If only you understood what its like to be alive, out in the wild.
But you are too scared to travel. To comfortable with your pain.

But these lame people, there only aim is to instill doubt in yourself.
Some doubt is healthy, but don't confuse doubt with fear.

I understand Neitzhe's frustration with people. We institutionalize
and justify weakness. We coddle people's problems, we take ourselves
way to seriously and fret when we have everything.

even if you got what you wanted, you would still be unhappy. Don't
you see that it has little to do with that? Our mind falls into
patterns and churns away good and bad.

Telling stories to myself

2008-10-05T11:06:00.001+09:00

My friend, in explaining his justification for taking psycho-tropic pharmaceticuel medication for his mental disorder, told me a story. About synapses and seratonin. He is a bright guy, full of intellectual rigor and I realized quite suddenly that his decision to take this drug was because the story that was told to him about his brain made sense to him. In fact, without that story he would not have taken it. There had to be a story. Now whether or not that story was complete, true, or false, is hard to assess. Most of medicine for years and years has not been based on these stories but authority. But the empowered consumers we are now, makes experts create elaborate stories about our brains. And it works.

Likewise, nations create myths, build histories bending the truth and in some cases lying outright (Israel) - but who cares, it works.

Stories are powerful, especially the ones we tell ourselves.

We all have them. They either haunt us or give us a sense of worth. But to what extent do they have to be true? Fake stories also have their utilitarian function.

As a child, my father used to call me a genius. He used to say I could do whatever I wanted, that I was the smartest boy he knew. Imagine the effect this has on a 5 year old. I immediately felt a sense of responsibility, of having to always be the best, and prove my father right. I often wonder how I would be if I wasn't given this encouragement as a child.

In retrospect, I am no brighter than the average bright kid. But my father with this story, he captured my imagination, and made me work to make it true.

What stories do you tell yourself? If we just break down all the narratives we have flowing endlessly in our minds, it would tell a lot about us. I am not saying there isn't any objective reality out there, a truth, a certain way, but there are blurry lines, that can be crossed, smudged over that can make the difference, make the reality, reality.

Positive affirmations work on this assumption. As does Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain. These techniques work, I don't know how, but they work.

The mind is such a powerful thing. Its sad that most of us subject it to television and allow other people to fill it with nonsense and worse, so many people drink it away. Maybe they are afraid of their powers. Of what's possible. For with power comes responsibility.

Dear reader (you know I love to refer to you as such), I miss you, wherever you are. I send an electronic rose for your troubles and sorrows.

((((((()))))))

But cheer up and take in the day.

I am here in Delhi awaiting the change of seasons. What a marvelous place to be, even as bombs go off around me.

I know I have not written in quite sometime. It happens. But I owe to much to this blog to abandon it. Whenever I meet new people and they discover this archive, I feel as if they have had the privilege of entering and playing with my soul. If they care, at least there is a written testament to what I believe in, what moves me, and the beauty of words.

I met a girl in Lebanon who said my style reminded her of Henry Miller.

Another girl wanted to fuck me immediately, while reading Blake.

This all plays so well with my narcissism.