eye spy asked : if you prefer to live emotionally……..do you get conned by an individual who knows your pulse and plays the cards right and presses the right buttons ….. ?
To live on an emotional plane is not the same as to live on an obsessive plane. One is about freedom and understanding, compassion and encompassing. Not to be confused with singular desire, ownership or emotional needs. For these are expressions of one’s own insecurities that get mistakenly expressed as love. If you desire to posses, then of course you are asking to be hurt and conned. Emotions that are a mere reflections of your own negativity. So why blame others for it ?
Why Liu Xiang’s exit from the olympics plunged China into grief
The last time I saw one nation plunge into a stunning outpouring of grief was when Princess Diana died. I could understand that. England at that time clung to the princess as their one great icon. Now Liu Xiang’s inability to run the 110 m hurdles has plunged the whole of China into a grief that is so similar. What causes a nation of over a billion people to invest such emotion in one athlete running one race ? After all , with 39 gold medals in the bag already, China is way ahead already in the total medal count already. What does one race matter ?
The last time I was in Beijing I noticed this good looking boyish face adorn every hoarding on the streets. Selling just about everything. If you think Sachin Tendulkar was a poster boy for India – multiply that by a 1000 times and you would understand the feeling towards Liu Xiang in China. The estimated potential earnings for Liu Xiang if he won this gold medal were over $ 160 million – making this race one of the highest financial stakes for any event in the history of sport. Why do all the hopes, all the national pride of a blliion Chinese get placed on the shoulders of one young man, and every other brilliant achievement pale into significance. With this defeat, for the Chinese people, the Olympics are as good as over. And I use the word defeat deliberately. For the Chinese see this as a personal and national defeat. Why ?
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Sonya’s Picks for Rainy Weekend Reading
Independence Day weekend, and we’re off. To the gorgeous Verandah in the Forest, in Matheran. Where no cars are allowed . So we will be walking, many kilometers, in our raincoats , along the red mud of the railway track, to get to this atmospheric Parsi bungalow. With our rucksacks full of books. And games.
And now for our books : to be read in the hammocks in the garden, or in the easy chairs in the bungalow style running verandah. Along with tea ; masala chai for the spouse, Earl Grey for me.
Message from the Administrator
Shekhar Kapur is now available on twitter. You can follow him at
http://twitter.com/shekharkapur
An appeal from Tbilisi, Georgia
Anna,an actress from Georgia and a regular visitor to our blog, is caught up in the war in Georgia’s capital Tblisi, and has sent us this note :
Stop Russia!
Say No To War!!!
It’s 4 AM at night and a frightening nightmare wakes me up. I am wearing outdoor clothes, that is not very comfortable in bed. But at that moment, I can’t feel it, since I am too scared…too scared that a huge noise might pierce my eardrums and brightness invade my whole vision. I stand up and look outside from the window. I look at the dark, cloudless sky and I look at the street lamps. I look at the deserted, empty pavement and then back at the sky. Then I turn around and go to bed. I hug my pillow tight and try to sleep as much as I can. But I can’t stop thinking about it…all those images of horrible scenes from the TV are flashing into my mind. Then I hear noise of a jet, flying above somewhere and I feel as my heart starts to beat faster and louder. Fortunately, that night goes well. Nothing happens in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
The next day, I wake up and I am happy to see the sunny day. I am happy to be alive.
Western Media’s last Hurrah and Buddhist China
I guess if you have been born to believe that you have a God given mandate to rule te world – and for the rest of the minions to be consigned to pats on their backs, or be out sourcers for your cheap goods at home, or somewhere to flood the market almost forcibly sometimes (WTO and the Opium Wars earlier) with your goods, then you could be forgiven for a bloated sense of your own importance. Long after it has become irrelevant. So with Western Media where they try to belittle China’s stunning acheivment at the Olympic Games by constantly harping on the killing by a psychopath of the father in law of one of the coaches of the US basket ball team. Or a bomb explosion on the Chinese borders of Afganistan and Ladakh. Or the latest reports on the cost of the opening ceremony in Beijing on an (oh so poor) China, or the level of pollution in Beijing . Excuse me, the only major enterprise that the US has to show for itself in the last 10 years is the Iraq War – which cost a 1000 times more that the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games, killed more people and caused more pollution that can be even imagined.
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Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics: Could India have done it ?
I am sure that is a question in all our minds. Let aside India – could any other country have pulled this off? Hopefully India could achieve something of this kind of a show if required – the talent is there – but perhaps just the sheer ability to go that last mile is missing and I have always wondered why – why is it that ‘good enough is enough’ is the philosophy we have here in India. We do have some of the greatest works of art down the centuries that could not have been created without complete passion and commitment – but not sure as a nation and society we are at that place now.
I am not sure that we could build a Taj Mahal now, at a time when it is not possible to press gang workers into an enterprise, not caring about the death toll. But it occurs to me then that neither is China. Also perhaps Indian artistic expression is too individualistic ? It’s all about the personal journey, not ony in art but also in our way of life. And maybe we just do not have that sense of national pride the Chinese seem to be exhibiting currently ?
Or maybe it just takes one individual like Yang Zhimou to fire the passions of thousands of people into such commitment to excellence – like one Mahatma Gandhi that fired the passions of millions of Indians to rise against the British.
Stunning opening to the Beijing Olympics
The opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics was the greatest show on Earth that will be hard to beat. It was the best of art, choreography, design and technology combined to create what could be one of the greatest live events ever presented on this planet. Kudos to the Chinese and if this is the way the Olympic games are going to be, it will turn out to be one of the best ever. To me it was a live spectacular with the aesthetics of the great Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (Hero) and artists like Chai Guo- Qiang, who made his name in pyrotechnic art. Simply put – creating art through gun powder and pyrotechnics in the sky. Chai had a brilliant installation at the Guggenheim in New York untill about 2 months ago. And guess what – both of these brilliant men have created the opening ceremony together. I am told that Steven Speilberg was supposed to do the show but pulled out in protest against absence of civil liberties in Tibet. I appreciate his honesty and commitment to a cause, but do not believe that he would have been able to create a spectacular of such aesthetics, for it was so Chinese !
The unified theory of everything, faith and emotion
There will never be a scientific unified theory of everything. Simply because the mind consistently looks to define while the universe exists on infinite layers of existence. Which are both true and not true at the same mpment. How can something be true and not true at the same time ? But then we have always lived with that dichotomy. We learn to evaluate space and objects through measurements in the three dimensions. We learn to perceive distance, which we can measure. Even unamiganibly large distances in terms of ‘light years’. We learn and are adhered to the linearity of ‘time’. Time is running out is something we always say.
Yet we live in a universe that cannot be be measured. It is infinite. We learn to ‘fix’ the beginning of time from different contexts. For science it was the Big Bang, for Religion it was – for example – ‘and God said ‘let there be light;. But essentially we cannot imagine the end or the beginning of time simply because there is none. We cannot measure or imagine the end of the Universe simply there is none. Our concepts of measurement exist only as contexts between two measurable points. Take one away then there is no context and therefore no ability to measure.
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Virgin Comics
Deepak Ravindra asked why I do not write more about Virgin Comics of which I am a co founder, so I am posting his following comment as a blog entry. Though I am a co founder, a huge part of the kudos are deserved by the team, the very young team, of artists in Bangalore led by Suresh Seetharaman, and by the creative leadership of Gotham Chopra and Sharad Deverajan in the US. Go to Virgincomics.com. But thank you Deepak in any case for the following :
“Let me tell you this, I am a huge movie buff and comic art buff.Like any average Indian babyboomer (post Independance 🙂 I grew up on Amar Chitra Katha (ACK).Anant Pai single handedly defined fantasy and mythology for the Indian mindset. As a child up I lost those comics to other friends only to doggedly start collecting them again now.
Your work with Deepak Chopra in adapting Indian mythology to an International audience is simply up there,outright visionary.I have recently finished savouring ‘Devi’,’Shiva’,’Sadhu’,and am eagerly waiting for ‘Ramayan’ to arrive.I wanted to tell you what I loved most about the comics
– The Art work , simply stupendous.Its simply beautiful how you guys have managed to keep it strikingly Indian while giving the characters a western fantasy wrap.The art work is so intricate with personality,you love to go back to it purely to enjoy the art itself.
– The content is surely top notch.You carry an immense responsibility while handling Indian mythology.Its not written by one author who can place a ‘fiction disclaimer’,but is part of tradition,culture and ethos of world’s oldest civilization.Utmost sensitivity while keeping it relevant and interesting is required – and again the team’s done such an incredible job….