Reality Strikes

Dead Lebanese civilians: The pictures are horrifying; the text angry.

The request, however, is for cessation not retaliation.

(Thanks to Clodette M. for the link. Sending you good thoughts, Clo Baby.)

THE BOY IN TEXAS

Jumps in my bed
lounges on my chest
Just talks so much


He twists in my head
While i try to catch some rest
i miss him, his touch

Married, but Certainly Not to Tradition

Weddings don't make me cry.

Or didn't, until i read about this one .

ODIUM

In the middle
of nowhere

ambiguity always
knows the way

from fight to light
to night and then

silence again

War Begins*

Today, on the Beeb (via NPR), I heard the mayor of a small Lebanese town say that though the population of his city had swollen by thirty percent since the start of the bombings, they have been able to manage by using local resources--such as school buildings emptied ’cos of summer vacation--and NGOs, but that the government has been slow to respond and that they have received no offers of assistance from the international community. No offers. I’m pretty sure that he stressed the word “no.”

I’m trying to imagine what that must be like to be bombed, to lose one’s home, to have to bundle up the children and what papers and provisions you can muster and forget about your job or your vacation plans or your daily gossip with the person across the street or the dish you planned to cook and just set off into the unknown with zero idea about forthcoming sanctuary or safety… or your next meal or potable water. And then no one even says sorry or offers a token of sociability.

It’s difficult to believe that people are doing it to other people.

I’m not qualified to make peace in the middle-east. But I’ve had this recurring dream since my age was in the single digits that someone would go out and mobilize peace just by the earnest, transparent simplicity of their appeal--like my man Gandhi could. It hasn’t happened so far.

I'm thinking about it again, and it’s really difficult to believe that real live people are doing it to other people. And that no one says sorry. For fuck’s sake, we expect an apology if someone so much as grazes us at the supermarket.

Perhaps that sounds naïve, perhaps that sounds like I have no idea.

Perhaps explaining it to me taxes your patience--like it did Dhivya’s when she was fifteen and writing an “O” level essay about the “reasons why” the nazis wanted to exterminate Jews. It’s because the number of Jews in the professional classes was out of proportion with their number in the general populace, she told me. It’s because they were rich and successful and it made ordinary Germans angry and jealous. I’m familiar with anger, with jealousy--it was the cognitive jump to extermination that escaped me. It was weeks later that I understood Dhivya’s insistence that anger and jealousy (A) could lead to the desire to exterminate (B). The A to B progression had been gone over, over and over again by her Sri Lankan grandmother (kind, progressive, politically well connected) who had to flee from Sinhala mobs in the 1980s.

So perhaps, since i have no personal experience of war or serious conflict, i’m talking out of my… let’s say--nether regions. But i do know that CNN’s reportage is cheerfully biased--with token articles in the vein of why can't we all just get along without any authentic analysis. So, i’d like to help put Counterpunch’s articles on record. See Racism Plagues Media Coverage of Gaza Assault and Israel, the US, and the New Orientalism .

Also, this interesting documentary on the Western media’s partisanship and a video by hip-hop Palestinian group DAM.

______________________________________________
*with a "W" as AliG would say.

Me(n) and Science; (Wo)men in Science

I’m awful.

When people assume that I’m nothing but/just/always an airhead, I secretly enjoy their confusion when I tell them that actually, I’m a rather brainy graduate student. Sometimes, I wish I could step it up--truthfully--and tell them I have arcane scientific knowledge--that I’m a string theorist, say--and that’s about the only time I fancy being a scientist. In high school, confronted by the embarrassing bounty of my grades--even in subjects I had no love for, taught by teachers I had zero crushes on-- my guidance counsellor dutifully suggested med school. My mom and I started to giggle when we heard that--apart from the science thing, my tolerance for blood has always been somewhat ridiculously low.

So, unlike the boys in this house--Li’l A, who goes around labeling all his typical seven-year-old's projects “experiments” and Big A, whose favorite line these days is, “trust me, I’m a scientist”--I’ve never aspired to science. But I know bunches of women who do. And bunches more who’re forced to give up because being a woman and a scientist--even in this century--is a considerable battle. It is on their account that I bridle when someone pulls a Larry Summers. And it’s on their account that I’m thoroughly fascinated by the testimony of Ben Barres. Because Ben--he knows exactly how it feels to be a woman in the sciences.

He used to be one. Pre-transgendering, Ben Barres was Barbara Barres and you can read more about how he’s better regarded and more respected now that he’s a male scientist--here.

(Thanks to Susan Chacko for links.)

Drink This

My mom would give the award to most endearing musician who bops his head of bouncy curls to Zakir Hussain--for me, it’s always been about A.R. Rahman.

And for as long as I can remember my dad’s tried to get me to watch soccer, claiming that it was “like a dance” (most of that line's poetic cache was lost when he re-used it to try and get me to watch boxing, but…).

So it was nice to be pointed (thanks, Narain) to this Volvic ad featuring Zidane and the music of A.R. Rahman--if it weren’t so short, it would be a decent Sunday family activity. Kinda kidding! : )

On a side note, I wonder if Zidane (whom my dad, a true fan, calls “Zizou”) would have been as incensed if his father and brother had been insulted--surely, even mothers and sisters stopped being sullied by mere words like a hundred or so years ago?