real love

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)

"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

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

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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