Friday, March 24, 2006

 

Jambo Bwana*

One revealing and interesting segment of BBC news this morning showed what some representatives of Israeli people think should be the map of Israel…when asked to draw what he thinks a map of Israel should be a jewish settler not surprisingly drew a map to cover the whole of the west bank to be included inside Israel. When a young man from tel aviv was asked the same , he was more liberal and sympathetic to his Palestinian neighbours and drew a map minus the west bank and gaza strip BUT included the Golan heights and Jerusalem….while another man simply made a simple oval line to include everything and also several hundred kilometers of land outside current Israeli borders and occupied territories for good measure….all these and we are all vilifying HAMAS for wanting to kick out Israel into the sea??….

This is totally understandable because whatever we say, we humans are just another species of animals (some say of higher evolutionary ladder but I seriously doubt this…) and have violent territorial behavior worse than cats dogs and monkeys…nobody should be apologetic about this because we ALL are territorial, it’s in our genes…nobody wants his space to be invaded…if you think hamas or the Israelis or my hero of the day…Iranian president ahmedinejad wanting israel to be wiped out of the face of the earth are showing bad behavior, try digging a couple of flowers from your neighbour’s garden and see his response eh?….and in reality for all the heroic wars and conquests of the world history and constant redrawing of the world maps, this is nothing more than digging a few plants from your neighbour’s and getting away with it….

And another unpleasant fact of human behavior is that we are all racists…fortunately most of us are reasonable enough to be able to mask it most of the time…but in the bigger scheme of things whatever we do…racist undertones are never far from the surface…and territoriality and racism when mixed together gives explosive results… don’t need to look far… every country on the face of the earth have some form of racial problems or other….problems of immigrations, prejudice and so on…

The only way all this can be overcome surprisingly comes from warren beatty!!! A great womanizer but one not known for good acting… but he once said a very good thing… can’t remember exactly the quote but the gist is ; the only way we can rid the world of racism is for us to continue fucking each other until we all come to the same color...how true!...

But in literature mild racism can be very affecting…I’m currently (still) reading evelyn waugh’s travelogue “remote people” and his gentle digs at everybody who weren’t white and british is quite comical…some gems…

….no sound made by mankind is quite so painful as the voices of two arab women at variance….

..Even Indians , a race renowned for dishonour and instability….

…as the malays are prone to periodical fits of homicidal mania….


But it’s hard to get angry with this writer whose wry (and dry) humor is very err humorous…another example from ‘remote people’…I tease him by putting on an earnest manner and asking him for information which I know he will be unable to give me….


if he is still alive (which of course he’s not) he is one person I’d love be friend with…


* excerpt from “remote people” by evelyn waugh

…groups of Kikuyu, the women with heavy luggage on their backs supported by a strap round their foreheads; their ears are slit and ornamented; their clothes of copper coloured skins; the men have mostly made some effort at European dress in the form of discarded khaki shorts or an old hat. They attempted a clumsy kind of salute as we pass, smiling and saying ‘Jambo Bwana’…..

Saturday, March 18, 2006

 

Poot: An obituary & a swimming pool library

There was a cartoon strip that I saw in a newspaper a long time ago that depicted a middle aged man standing on top of three stacked wooden boxes looking forlorn and about to jump down and the caption below says “I’m not that depressed”

And I’m feeling exactly that at this very moment. There were several reasons I can think off why I’m feeling this way but then again since my default setting - as some people these days would say- is permanently at mild depression level I’m not too sure which in particular is the leading black dog of the moment…

But it could be chiefly because I missed Poot which died recently. This is rather unexpected … Poot suddenly dead and me missing Poot I mean… When one day about a year or may be two years ago ( I did not keep track of this kind of things) my wife brought home a sorry looking black and white kitten that she rescued from a drain I became positively cross with her. She – the kitten- was all wet shaking with cold and looked like a female version of Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistol and certainly of uncertain pedigree …and there’s no smell on earth worse than cat shit ( except dog’s of course) and if you want to keep a cat why not go and buy a proper pussy?…

Don’t know for what reason but my wife christened (or should I say ‘muslimed’) her as ‘Poot’ and she painstakingly nursed her to good health ( and spending precious bundle of money at the vet) but I swear I’ve never come across a stupider cat than Poot…. Over the years my wife added a few others to our collection of cast off cats but none was sorrier looking than Poot…or more depressed looking and stupid… one was a hyper active crazy nymphomaniac who eventually died of AID (that’s what the vet said) thanks to any number of vagrant tomcats (chief suspect being a scruffy grey black tom with long & dirty shaggy hair full of fleas which I referred to as “Mat Rock” ….

But Poot had one very affecting trait… when she is with you what she would do is to massage you with her two front paws…and it was a real skillful and good massage too! She kind of pressed with one paw than with another and doing this alternate pressing on and on and softly purring away….if I were a Hindu or an adherent of one of those Indian religions I swear that Poot must be an incarnation of some unfortunate massage girl who came to a bad end and reborn as a sad stupid Poot….and the strangest thing about Poot was that she really behaved like a serious sad and depressed human adult. I’ve never seen her play like normal cats or sleep on her back obscenely with all four legs spread akimbo this way and that…and she always looked very sad and walked very slowly and ponderously as though she was always thinking of something….and unlike other cats which are totally self centered she always seemed to be grateful to us all for rescuing her…never fight for anything and always wait patiently to be fed …

..and how she died was really tragic….on Feb 26 2006 the day of terrible flash flood …a mini Katrina … around some parts of Shah Alam.

… when we woke up at dawn and discovered the water quickly rise up and coming into our house our foremost concern was where is the pregnant Aminah? ...and we were too busy rescuing my books from my library to think about saving anything else … Aminah is another of our tramp cat and this one I kidnapped from a roadside restaurant some where in Perlis about 6 months ago. Of all days she chose to give birth at dawn on this chaotic day in the garden of our neighbour and my eighty five year old chimp had to scramble over the locked fence and waded through the flood in complete darkness (electricity was cut off) searching for Aminah and her kittens like a thief…and we never gave a thought about our other cats because we know that they will take care of themselves… but not Poot… she apparently slept under my car and as the water got higher she chose to climb into the engine compartment and as the water completely submerged the car right up to near the roof top she was simply trapped and drowned.

…if there is any consolation Poot did get her 15 minutes of fame as she was once featured on a Pet Program on TV1 and in fact the Question for the quiz at the end of the program was “ What is the name of Ms ….. cat featured in the program? (Answer: Poot)


…and perhaps one other consolation was that we managed to rescue most of our books although some old books that I used to read during my younger days were lost forever…even gandaf did not manage to save himself as all the 3 books in my lord of the rings trilogy -unwin paperbacks - drowned among other old favorite (abridged) classics such as robinson crusoe, black arrow, and more recent ones like sue townsend Adrian mole diary series….the library was a disaster zone… a swimming pool library… and I’m not referring to Alan Hollinghurst first book either…

I know I can replace some of these books very easily but it’ll never be the same…much like you can not replace poot with another black and white tramp even if you can find another stupid one exactly like her…

Monday, March 06, 2006

 

Reading Nabokov

Today started the first few pages of "laughter in the dark" by Vladimir Nabokov...if there is one description that I find exactly fit nabokov’s style of writing it was the quote by John Updike who once said..."Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written that is, ecstatically." …how true it is!!Nabokov once called 'Laughter in the Dark' one of his worst books...but... his worst is worth a whole lot more than a lorry load of garbage blockbusters and pulp fictions in the estimate of many...i agree...

Like many of us I discovered nabokov through ‘lolita’….when I was quite young…and like most young men we were only looking for the obvious and prurient stuff …but oh how as one gets older one can understand and identify with humbert humbert ‘s insane lust and longing for the forbidden…but after lolita I left nabokov quite alone for years …until I received ‘despair’ as a present and that revived my interest and love for nabokov….

But reading nabokov is no easy feat… it requires full concentration as every sentence is so well crafted that it makes you want to cry….reading nabokov sometimes get you into a state of almost mystical transcendence and gets you excited and your mind wander into voyeuristic ecstasy of your own….i have attempted to read a few others by him…’the gift’, ‘pale fire’…and about him ..’speak memory’ and ‘vera’ but somehow other ‘easier’ books intervened and I never finish any….and I’m sure it’ll take probably years before I will finish ‘laughter in the dark’…but I don’t mind…. I’ll savour nabokov at my own turtle pace…..

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