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Ok, so maybe I should be making my way through the giant pile of books I need to get through for my dissertation. But I’ve been thinking about notions of god, universe, and religion lately.

Profound, I know.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently, and suddenly a random comment on monkeys led me to realise very suddenly and startlingly, that despite the years and years we’ve been friends, we actually believed very different things. She didn’t think that humanity should be demeaned by a belief that dictates we evolved from a “lesser” (no neither one of us was being specie-ist) being, but is part of a grand divine plan. Hand in hand with my post-modern cynicism and personal belief systems centered on individual license floating around in my confounded head, I respectfully disagreed.

It hit me like a bus.

Simply, I can’t get my head around the faith some people seem to have in a higher power. The very thought of it is mind-boggling, since I couldn’t have that sort of devotion, even if I tried every single day for the next three decades. The sheer number of people who are at peace with this notion of a single omniscient being, makes me the odd one out almost. Then, yesterday I watched this really interesting Iranian documentary called Bassidji (dir. Mehran Tamadon) which dealt with faith and martyrdom in the Iran-Iraq War. Left me thinking.

Hence, the superstitious existentialism, for the lack of a better word. Personally, I would think of humanity as too complex, too individual for a divine hand to have moulded. Science and evolution makes sense in my head, but that doesn’t mean I don’t disregard completely everything religions say about creation. I also appreciate that science doesn’t have all the answers.

Maybe the universe’s own power of creation and continuance is personified in what people understand as god. The omnipotence of the chemistry, the physics, the biology which connects us, culminating in a sort of cosmic energy. All of these things have been gnawing at my brain lately, and I’m still not sure where any of this is heading. I’m not on track to become devout, or join a cult or anything. But these things, just blow your mind sometimes.

Bit of a ramble, but yes leave thoughts. I’m interested.

*Excitement*

I am just effectively spreading my geekish excitement for the Mohsin Hamid Lecture today! Await reviews :)

For more information…

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/Title,39233,en.html

Hiatus

I’ve been on a bit of a hiatus, encore I know. But somehow final year implies that it’s 4 x more work than the previous years, academics and otherwise. Although it seems like I’ve settled comfortably into this St. Andrean lifestyle of mine, it’s nearing the time to leave. Before I get too comfortable. Like some sort of ironic cosmic allegory for changing winds and changing directions.Except I don’t know which way this weathervane is turning.

Summer was transitional, in more ways than one.  I now know that I’m not ready for academia. Not just yet. I need a little life experience before I try to plan the next big research project, especially when I’m still getting over fieldwork for the first one. Fieldwork was difficult, far more than I could have imagined. Especially when you begin to confront people’s problems alongside them. So, I’ve decided that I can wait before I head off on my next big adventure to the Himalayas as hot chocolate keeps predicting.

Meanwhile there’s a pile of books up to my waist, a list of emails as long as my arm, and 10,000 words which need writing.

Everything aside Mohsin Hamid lecture and book signing T-2! I am SO EXCITED! :D

I’ve Been…

I’ve been wallowing in the misery of an irreparably crashed laptop.

I’ve been trying really hard to finish transcribing my fieldwork interviews.

I’ve been reading Half of  A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

half-of-a-yellow-sun

I’ve been admiring the amazingness that are my brand-spanking-new wall to wall, floor to ceiling bookshelves.

I’ve been counting all the books and dvds I own- 615+ and 252+ respectively, minus borrowed and overseas.

I’ve been listening to too much retro-pop.

I’ve been SUPER excited that Mohsin Hamid is coming to St. Andrews in October. YAY. YAY. YAY.

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I’ve been lamenting the end of summer.

I’ve been watching a quite a bit of Woody Allen.

I’ve been giggling at  Sid Waterman’s (Allen) line in Scoop ““I was born into the Hebrew persuasion, but when I got older I converted to narcissism”. Positively hilarious.

Scoop.Poster-723600

I’ve been painting a floral mural on the dining room wall, to which my sister’s math tutor decided he needed to contribute and painted a crooked blossom. *Annoyed*

I’ve been panicking that I need I need to fix the lack of post-graduation plans. June 2010. Cue doom music.

I’ve been extremely impressed by Coraline- right up there with Nightmare Before Christmas.

coraline

I’ve been cooking. *Shock* Chocolate pudding, trifle, seafood biryani.

I’ve been doodling pointlessly, sketches never culminating in actual art work.

I’ve been toying around with Hokusai’s wave and Kahlo’s Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

kahlo43

I’ve been disappointed by Little Ashes. Maybe Robert Pattinson to being a hot, brooding vampire.

LittleAshes750

I’ve been meaning to watch Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. You would think the the Colombo cinema’s might make an effort!

I’ve been facing an existential crisis of the point of everything I’ve mentioned so far.

Intent, Not Volume

Fieldwork has been an anthology of the unexpected. A compendium of awkwardness. An omnibus of convoluted existences. It doesn’t compare to those poetic accounts of isolated beaches and grass skirted people wearing frangipani garlands in their hair, ready-to-talk with straightforward kinship diagrams etched on their palms. It’s a confrontation of real lives tangled up in very real problems like alcoholism, debt, truancy, poverty and incest. It’s sometimes difficult to contain horror and disbelief at stories I’ve been hearing because truth be told, every mention of the past percolates readily into the grave predicament of the present. Sometimes it’s hard to be sympathetic and keep a straight face, considering the sheer theme of dependency of the situation. The dependency not simply on moonshine, the money lender and the men of the houses, but the dependency on institution. Instances where, we would rather parch in the sun and soak in the rain than fix our own roofs, because it’s the management’s job to provide for us. The patriarchy and the paternalism of the plantation societies has transformed into a rising culture of dependency. One which smells like deep open drains clogged with refuse flowing or stagnating before two-roomed houses for 5 people, the lack of sanitation fused with the tang of drying tea leaves in the air. One which needs to be fixed.

Perhaps the line between anthropology and advocacy flourished through these experiences of witnessing injustice and neglect. Yet, here I am put off by the dependency it has fostered like a titanic behemoth casting a long and terrible shadow (as our good man Berger would say). Do we blame colonialism, for the hierarchies it bred or the post-colonial planters who exploited the white native hierarchy to create more critical problems?

However, the title of the post stems from the last weekend at home while panicking over a crashed laptop.

The loudspeakers started bright and early, LOUD enough to be noxious, unintelligible noise. The kind that drums in your ears, making your sanity teeter on the edge of a steep precipice. They were Buddhist songs as far as I could tell, but all meaning, all purpose was lost in the rude loudness that echoed across the streets. I live in the suburbs, lovely part of town really with a canal constantly on the verge of flooding the golf course at the slightest hint of rain and a dozen checkpoints considering the proximity to the parliament. Best of all, constantly interrupted-by-stop-paddles journeys aside, it is quiet. Can’t say I dislike it that way. I spend most of the day at the opposing end of the house, attempting drown out the wailing megaphone songs with ipod headphones glued to my ears. From religious songs it went to other songs, other songs to a bunch of children singing, badly if you were wondering.

The driver says that they all having an all-night pirith ceremony to bless the war heroes and the area. Bit late no? And so this noise, this very loud and unbearable noise powered on through to the night. Loud, obnoxious, unbecoming of any religious matter. The kind of sound that makes generally politically correct types like me blurt out sporadic tirades of very politically incorrect things. Fair enough, my religion too and I sense that the rest of the household is appalled at my intolerance. The intention is for the well being of the area. I’m area too, I argue back and I never agreed to this noise, noise, noise. By now my cosmological karma is way off balance with all of this ranting but for heaven’s sake… the children singing badly, was the dried icing on a week old cake. The glazed cherries (now the just syrupy sludge, being a week later) was that it lasted ALL night, which meant that I slept two winks and a nod as the volume increased, increased, and increased (To keep the ammes from dozing off at 2 am perhaps?)

First, not everyone in the area subscribes to the spiritual truths imparted in pirith. It maybe against your religion entirely to listed to the vociferous words of another creed. And by vociferous, the loud which drowns out all coherence and meaning making religion sound pollution. Thereby, if the meaning of the words are the very thing which showers blessings upon the good and virtuous upasaka crowd of the area, what does sound pollution do? Shouldn’t the blessings come from the intent as opposed to the volume of the speaker system? I am certain in the little Buddhist scripture that I know that there’s something sinful about empty words. Empty words, empty noise. Same difference as far as I’m concerned. The of course the sound factor make generally placid types (me for an example) into incensed screaming messes unable to bear the loudness of this empty noise! Thus, by some sort of complex cosmic proxy, they are turning me into a veritable hater, criticizing words of worship by their clever idea of loud blessing. How many years in hell is that again?

A few words of wisdom to the wise. Intent not volume.

Anthropologist Ahoy!

The materialistic Colombo girl in me would confess that I have indeed disappeared off the surface, or well at least the map. But, we wouldn’t want to be politically incorrect now would we? The fact of the matter is that I’m in The Field. That out of the way, middle-of-nowhere nook where pith helmeted, khaki clad budding anthropologists venture to discover the lives of curious peoples whose customs are strange, eating habits  stranger and personal lives sordid. Places where the beaches are golden, the coconut trees graceful and people are yet to discover the shallow wonders of clothing. This is how they end up in boiling pots around which savage painted natives in grass skirts and shrunken head necklaces dance to jungle drums and coconut shell tambourines.

I resent this image of the anthropologist. This is not what we do. I like to think of us as oracles of cultural wisdom and sensitive mediatory beings of unprecedented coolness.

Yes, the mountain air is clean and has me rambling and delirious. Truth is I’m at a tea plantation. There’s miles of walking up and down hills. The air is cool and amazing. The green, green hills and the silver blue rivers are too beautiful. Most of all who said colonialism was dead? Said got some things right.

Being in the field is difficult. It’s everything that you don’t expect and all the discomforts of awkwardness and sheer terror of forgetting all the languages you speak. Being a second language speaker of the major language is hard too, especially when you forget to take things like dialect and regional lingo into account. Now I know that baby, and tea buds are referred to by the same word. That putting on the pounds has a whole new meaning in work relationships that have grown a little too personal. That there is a family that breeds rats for the purpose of consumption in the middle division. That there is a mynah bird who asks the child to stop screeching like a dog and smokes beedi (cheap cigarette?). You heard right the bird steals lit beedi and smokes it.

Positive words on learning curves come to mind. But, right now plantations are a world of their own.

Strange and exotic like grass skirt clad natives to the colonial anthropologist.

Summer Looks Like

Summer looks like swatches of white cloud against a blue-grey sky through a canopy of jack leaves.

Firmament

Firmament

Summer feels like a towel against your back, as you lie on the roof with the evening breeze in your hair.

Roof

Roof

Summer sounds like retro-pop, while sipping iced lemonade to thwart the heat.

Afternoon Fix

Afternoon Fix

Where on earth has the past month gone, I ask as I realise I’ve done nada on the productivity front. Ok, so I read a bit, painted a little more, watched 4 seasons of Alias and procrastinated on re-reading Said’s Orientalism before I head off to the “field”. The best read of the summer so far being Tamima Anam’s A Golden Age, and by painting I mean I actually ripped it up appalled at my own lack of inspiration, and by procrastinating I mean I’ve been shamelessly reading Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books (We’re talking Twilight for Adults in the form of HBO’s True Blood).

I don’t really have anything worthwhile to say except that I’m sick of seeing a certain someone’s goddamned face plastered across Colombo and that I’m off to Nuwareliya for the weekend.Good times.

Bullet Point Post

My brain has been detoxing from the tedium and stress, so I don’t think I can write coherent prose for the time being. So here’s the Colombo update.

- People were burning tyres on airport road on Saturday. What’s the deal?

- If I see another political poster, I will puke. These people are no eye candy and should realise this fact before polluting the public field of vision with their faces.

- It’s like several cargo ships full to the brim with Sri Lankan flags, exploded in Colombo. Maybe someone should consider collecting a percentage of the proceeds and donating it towards reconstruction.

- The weather is amazing, my house happens to be some kind of wind-tunnel and it is never hot and I love it.

- We have acquired a fish bowl, and I think the cat is having a series of field-days. Zissous and I think he (Socrates) may also be the mastermind behind my transport problems.

- I read Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist and I really loved it. Must try to track down Moth Smoke, despite the slim chances finding this in Colombo. Is there a good bookshop in Colombo that I have not yet discovered?

- Also read Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I liked the above better, but this one was delightfully ironic. Although, it reminded me of something else and I can’t quite put my finger on it yet.

- Will be planning a collection of goods for the relief effort as soon as the jet-lag decided to lag someone else.

That’s all for now. I think.

Island Summer, Soon

Per, annual ritual once again I’m sitting in a sparse room: a void which has seen many a stray sock, paper explosions galore and the messes which accumulate in thickets. I never claimed to be tidy. The space is unusually sterile, almost sad considering that it was more a personal space, than the drab dorm rooms had ever been. It’s reassuring though, that I’m going to return to the same slanted skylight and a view of rooftops, with a blue and white Scottish flag fluttering in the breeze over the town hall.

Home is another question, all the footage I’ve seen of the celebrations leaves me nervous. I don’t really know what to expect any more, what this “victory” means on home soil besides what I’ve been seeing from the mechanical eyes of others. Pixellated evidence of rejoicing and suffering juxtaposed side by side. Children hanging on barbed wire fences, while others light crackers and make merry. The e-mail circulations are sending around threats to those who screamed genocide asking for true patriots to forward them the photographs of those who apparently should be “eliminated” and never allowed to set foot in Sri Lanka again. Is this a vigilante proxy-war stirred by the new presidential proclamation of the divide of patriotism (or in Sri Lanka’s case, should it be Jingoism?) and those who do not love their country?  I agree that arm chair fanaticism has risen steeply, among the LTTE supporters abroad who insult the deep scars of the real victims by toting fake bloodied bandages, as if to prove an elusive point. The attack on the Buddhist temples and the students in Sydney was especially horrific, as terror seems to be breeding into new mutated forms of street and cyber wars. But is counter-armchair fanaticism the answer? I do appreciate these are empty threats (because what the hell are they going to do? have someone ready with a rifle at the immigration desks?), but it’s appalling these thought processes spin sticky webs of extremism, at a moment in history where we should celebrate with reconciliation and reconstruction as opposed to trying to kill off those who do not support a political party line or light fire crackers (evidently, I have some very big issues with the fire crackers).

I’m headed home to the purgatory of what next, to the hazy folds of summer, the warm blanket of home which drives other anxieties away, albeit temporary.  24 hours in this place, I’m sustained by the thoughts of an island summer, soon.

Ayubowan

I trawl the Internet for news every few minutes, wondering what has changed. I see people’s digital patriotism and ponder if the rumours are true, as photochemical evidence surface on the news as breaking alerts and exclusive footage. If the war is really at an end. The government has no post-war plan outside an IMF bailout package and that looks shady, considering the level to which the country has managed to alienate itself in the stand-off against the western world and media.

What does this mean to us, the war being over? I think the real war is only beginning- the combat against not only poverty, unemployment, illness, disability, and damage but, possible insurgence. It frightens me the uncertainty as Sri Lanka’s future appears to hang in a balance.  It seems to be the topic on everyone’s tongue, this impending war victory. The end is nigh, they say as they look for out of season firecrackers. The great feats of soldiers of a government who have managed to “destroy terrorism”.  Sri Lanka’s problems always arise from a legacy of myopia we seem to have inherited from the generations before us. We have selective memories and we forget too soon. People are lining up to bid a proverbial Ayubowan to a three decade-long crisis which has no doubt been perpetuated by the poor judgment of the political upper rungs, the ethnic violence and racism which has shadowed our small nation’s history for longer. Real predicaments which run much deeper. Does the end mean, that we forget those who have been truly scarred by the horrors of war? Do we clear our minds of the injustices committed by our own people? Do we choose not to remember the reasons which breathed life into such cruel animosity?

Ayubowan… Welcome. Goodbye. Long life.

Ayubowan… Blood. Death. War.

Ayubowan… Poverty. Displacement. Disease.

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