BOOKED

i'm very disturbed reading RPK's latest 'No holds Barred' blogpost in his Malaysia today netpaper today. it's true that RPK is wellknown for his flamboyant writings and histrionics but he's a man of his words. and a very very principled and brave man and i very much fear that he really will carry through his threat to starve himself to death if he is found guilty tomorrow and be sent back to jail. he sounds very depressed and i hope that what he wrote is no reflection of his 'saner' self. and i hope and pray he'll not be found guilty tomorrow. but what if he is?

i don't have too many people that i particularly look up to as 'heroes' but RPK is one of them. one of my local heroes. not that i always agree with his writings. he can be a real nut when he writes about islam but taken as a whole, he's my kind of guy. and i certainly don't want him to starve himself to death in jail. i think he can fight a better battle than that. nobody is jesus. jesus was very lucky. the world changed when he was cruficifed on the cross. that could only happen when people were idiots and believe in superstitions as was in jesus' time. but not now. nobody cares about sacrifice these days. and RPK won't change that. if RPK dies, people will forget him in seven days. a romantic form of protest but the world will go on. may be, just may be there will be stories writen about this man but i doubt it. malaysia is not a nation of writers. so RPK will be forgotten. no great literature will be written about his heroics.

oh and i finished reading Lucifer's alligator last night. and incidentally it's about protest too. a protest that did not give any good result. a hopeless protest. perhaps not dissimilar to RPK's threat to starve himself to death. i too sometimes can't keep my mouth shut. i too sometimes feel like shouting and protesting. but i'm just a weak bastard. i like life too much to do anything significant in life. i'm just like many of us...we just wait for the RPKs of the world to do the dirty job for us. we just reap the harvest. and this realization makes me feel depressed no end. i feel guilty.

but i do try sometimes. not much but sometimes i try to shout and holler. take this local book blog for example. bibliobibuli is a fairly popular local book blog visited my many (young?) local aspiring writers so i thought ok, i'll come in here and say my piece "as and when neccessary". i thought , writers shapes the nation and hopefully i can give my POV on things. one thing i notice is that most writers believe they are the most intellectual and liberal people there are. to put in another way, their egos are as big as this universe. but i often detect that they are mostly normal people. meaning as stupid and ignorant as any average guys. and i notice that many are terribly ignorant about islamic worldviews but unlike scientists who by default are keen to understand things objectively, writers are more lead by the heart. you can't say things that opposed their views without being hounded out of the discussion. this arguments on the talibans in a recent bibliobibuli post is an example. i guess it's not the writers fault really. i just bark at the wrong tree and the wrong place.

but all these dark musings make me want to fly away. escape. and incidently one of the more memorable books that i read about trying to escape is Birdy. It's a book writen by william wharton. and here's a good news for old geezers aspiring to be writers. Birdy was his first book and written when he was 53. well, at least it was pubblished when he was 53 that is. and he got $500,000 advance for it too. and it was a damned good book. i read it way back in the eighties and watched the movie version too. mainly because the sountrack is by my favorite musician peter gabriel. mr wharton passed away last october without much noise around here but there is a good orbituary in nyt as you can read here.

I hope we won't be reading RPK's orbituary any time soon. I hope not for a long long time. I salute you RPK.