is horrid and unsettling. You uncurl your consciousness and wind it around a house, a city and people. Just as you have relaxed into your new position, it is time to withdraw the tentacles and leave.
Am in denial. Have plans of sitting at this rickety laptop in this windy corner and listening to autorickshaw/bird/dog sounds from the street while I make late evening tea-and-momos plans with people. For ever and ever.
Yup! This calls for some probing. Can’t believe I haven’t been following this stuff!
is a good phrase for the kind of sheep mentality I detest. And the ‘they think’ phrases that drive me up the wall. Am delighted with the phrase. Found it in something written in the Guardian.
Block thinkers on each side give aid and comfort to block thinkers on the other side, and with each exchange they pull us closer toward an abyss. So how can we stop this madness?
-Charles Taylor
The pounding drums always frightened her. She felt a rising panic as they rounding the corner - the hysterical bobbing colourful mass in lurid red, jaded gold and searing pink oozing into the street, and the fever pitch rhythm to which it oozed and bobbed.
All these people gyrating possessed and commanded by those drums. Gyrating oblivious to the half-inches by which they missed breaking a leg in a ditch or slipping the slush and being trampled into it. The vision always made her shut the windows against the drums, draw the curtains and hide beneath her clean white sheets on uncluttered bed breathing the unpolluted air in her silent uncrowded room.
The next morning she heard that a young man had drowned among those drumrolls. Walking among the hysterical dancers, looking to join the festivities, he crossed that half inch – he slipped into the muddy tank and died in the sludge and among the dancing. And to the rhythm of the drum rolls, his father and his brother saw his dead face on the dripping mass that was lifted out of the water by a crane.
She listened and she shuddered – she could almost hear the drums pass by again. And she wished very hard for window-shutters and bedsheets that could shut out the vision.
is apparently how Jews refer to the holocaust. As opposed to ‘what happened then’ which is how others refer to it.
From an article by David Grossman on why he had to write about the Holocaust… and on feeling the holocaust
Excerpt:
In the little notebook she takes on her journey, she writes, “Thousands of moments and hours and days, millions of deeds, endless acts and attempts and mistakes and words and thoughts, all to make one person in the world.”
Then she adds another line: “One person, who is so easy to destroy.”
The secret allure and the greatness of literature, the secret that sends us to it over and over again, with enthusiasm and a longing to find refuge and meaning, is that literature can repeatedly redeem for us the tragedy of the one from the statistics of the millions. The one about whom the story is written, and the one who reads the story
The tyrant Saddam was vanquished years ago, and there is the radiating smugness about the Do-gooder Uncle Sam who swooped in to save the poor suffering little iraqis from the cruel despot.
Here’s what Uncle Sam’s do-gooding brought the Iraqis – the Talibanization of Iraq ( an article published in Ms Magazine by a woman based in Iraq about how the Iraqi women have suffered after the American invasion)
