The Revolutionist

[npr]

Trending on Upworthy today: Dustin Hoffman tears up while talking about his experience testing out looking like a woman ahead of making the film “Tootsie."

"There’s too many interesting women I have not had the experience to know in this life because I have been brainwashed."

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

I will no longer date, socialize or communicate with carbon copies of you

To appease my boredom or to quench my thirstiness I have for attention

And short-lived compliments from ‘sorta kindas’.

You know…. He ‘sort kinda’ right, but ‘sorta kinda’ wrong?

His first name LUKE,

His last name WARM. - via Janette Ikz

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

A Swift Kick in the Nuts

This, like any other story worth telling, is all about a boy. All about a boy. With some bits about me. But mostly all about him. It starts, like any other story scripted by fate and major movie studios, in an 11th grade english class and ends on separate continents. I would like to say right here and now, as a kind of disclaimer, that this is neither a happy story nor a hopeful story. It is not a lesson or a parable, it is not a satire or a romance in which the husband stashes letters for the wife, then dies, and communicates the direction for her broken and grieveing life from the beyond. Although, Hilary Swank, I will love you till kingdom come - and even after that, pending the presence of a stationary shop in heaven. Where was I? Oh yes. This is not a love song, nor is it an elegy or even a naughty limerick.

It is nothing more or less than a giant and swift kick in the nuts. A swift kick in the nuts 5 years in the making. How? I'll bloody well tell you how. --------------------------------------------------------------------- Let's give this asshole a name, shall we? We'll call him...Klaus. He’s not really an asshole, no, that is just bitter cat-girl talking. So there I am, sitting with Klaus, planning a grade 11 bio project that, in retrospect, was ridiculously and obviously overambitious, undoable and, hence, characteristically me. The problem with being a socially awkward, emotionally stunted female child to conservative immigrant parents is that you're a socially awkward, emotionally stunted female child to conservative immigrant parents. Buh. While I am trying to draw up plans for how we're going to cure the world - at least, the world of rats - of Alzheimer's, Klaus is relaying his plans for world domination to me. Now if I had taken my head outta my own arse for just two seconds of my life, I would've realized that the heady-scented product Klaus was trying to sell me was that brand of life experience far past my purview or capacity to understand existed. Don't get me wrong, I had seen the world and loved to travel. My family moved around most of my life. But I was a happy little automaton in the world of instrumental reason and I lived for praise from authority - in the form of grades, pats on the back, metaphorical and literal gold stars, maneuvering just the right tone between earnest, unctuous and sanctimonious while downplaying the bullshitting. Sitting in the back of the classroom, I observe Klaus with a small frown while he chats the light fantastic. His notebook margins are filled with strange doodles and curlicues, as though they had hoisted themselves from his brain, onto his mop of floppy blond hair (which he had a habit of flipping every two seconds a la Bieber) and winded themselves down on his paper. They seemed content. The drawings were beautiful, looking back on them now. They were 3-dimensional. His writing, however, is all boy. I gave up trying to explain the function of prions to Klaus and gave in to the bright scheme he was rapidly etching in words. There was, he told me, a small binder in the guidance counsellor's office that contained a list of national and local scholarships. He had asked for the paper and received it with little trouble. With a little trick he liked to call Google, he quickly searched up the donors and found that some of them owned foundations flush with small community scholarships and award monies for next to no effort. Not that he needed it, he confesses. My dad doesn't mind coughing up the cash. But "why not?" was his motto. You had to write 2000 words on war veterans or something like that, but hey, why wouldn't you? Besides, he said with a hint of smugness, my grandfather fought for Germany. I'll just get him to trade war stories with me. What will you give him in return? I ask him. He looks at me blankly. My time? he offers uncertainly. I roll my eyes at his obvious complacency. It is hard for me to sympathize with a boy whose clearly privileged position means that he can travel for the rest of his life and do whatever the hell he wants without having to worry about economics. At this point, his voice drops to a low whisper. He seems furtive, uncertain now. Hesitant, even. Don't...don't tell anyone, okay? I haven't told anyone. I don't plan to. I consider him under my eyes, as though I am trying to make up my mind about him. What are you going to do after school? I ask him. You mean when we graduate? I nod. Oh, I'm going to take a year off. Maybe two. We'll see. One thing at a time. Life's long. I have time. But I'm just trying to save up money. People don't know how many resources are out there, how many things you can tap into.

And you're going to keep it from them, are you? I ask him, trying to play a moral card that would allow me to judge him mercilessly. Well - and here he had the good sense to at least look sheepish - I'm not going to pretend I don't want the money. The less people know...the less apply. The more of a chance I have of getting it. I stare at him. But...you don't need it. He stares back at me. So? They're giving away money. It's free money! Vagabond, I think viciously to myself. Has no idea what he's going to do post grad. He has no plan. He and his stupid floppy blond hair are going to while away their days in a commune. On the outside I say, That's cool. It's high school. Everything's "cool". Even if it's not. Especially when it's not. So, he says to me now. Can you edit my scholarship essay? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ His words about taking time off, his wisdomous one-liners about life and its length, come back to haunt me several times throughout the next five years.

A week before I am about to move out into my first year of Universidad del Disastro, Scuolo de Soulsuckingness, I start to have the biggest freak out of my life. The way that white brides flip their shit when they're about to get married to the loves of their lives and suddenly they invent some obstacle so they don't have to pretend to know what they actually know and suddenly they're saying they don't want to do it anymore because they've only just realized that everything about their stupid husband-to-be is perfect perfect perfect and they're ctually in love with their grimy, unemployed best friend who takes photos of cars for a living or that they'll never have sex with another man and other firstworldproblems like that. This freak out is like that freak out. Except it's not invented. But it is firstworldproblems. I spend the first year in near depression, isolation and a general extension of the freshman-15 into the freshman 25.34. I also catch up on a decade's worth of American sitcoms and British dramas. So call this the fog. I let my sheltered parents shelter me under their roof, when I finally work up the courage and gumption to get the hell out of there. And then. Then, I spend the next 4 years in near hibernation. Instead of waking the fuck up, I go back to sleep. Good on me, eh? Once or twice, the fog lifts. I make a few feeble attempts to dream or articulate some other kind of life for myself. Some life of action, of adventure, of travel, of art, of love and beauty, of compassion and revolution, of empathy and pain and advocacy and activism. Every time, I let the lack of imagination, funds and a severe overdose of simultaneous emotional mollycoddling and degradation blow the house of cards that are my elaborate daydreams down. The stork delivers to me my first nice swift kick in the nuts in my second year of university. I'm sifting through a forum for volunteering in an educational facility in Thailand - things I would do when I needed a respite, needed to affirm to myself that I had to go on, when my bones ached to escape - and I catch this name that is uber familiar. Oh yes. Yes, it is Klaus. You just can’t make this shit up.

Two years down the lane, Klaus, that slightly chubby, mop-haired free spirit just happens to be volunteering there. I'm slightly dumbfounded. Is it fate? No no. It is swift-kick-in-the-nuts numero Uno. So what do I do? Well, I do what any self-respecting and resourceful hermit would do. I start to stalk him relentlessly on facebook. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take it from me, kids, if you haven't learnt this on your own already: Nothing good can ever come out of stalking someone on facebook. Unless, maybe, you find a nice distraction from studying for exams. There are many awe-inspiring things that Klaus starts to do in the next three years. He travels like mad. He bikes across Asia. He goes to Europe. He gets a motorcycle license. He travels on the east Coast of the U.S. He takes up cameras. He attends a kickass university in a kickass program. He goes on exchange. He lands a job on campus. He takes simultaneously awesome and pretentious shots of himself in his awesome travels with his overprivileged friends. He chills with his family, each member of whom is equally as illustrious and enterprising and fearless as him, if not far surpassing him. Swift kick in the nuts 2, 3 and 4. I spend much time making up amazingly detailed and painstakingly elaborate reasons (read: excuses) why I don’t or cannot live the kind of life he leads. NO money, for one. No parental support and/or belief. Trapped in the burbs. I’m a girl. Oh yes, yes, I shamefully played that card, too. I was desperate. Desperate to understand how and why he could do these things that were the words and visions of my own heart. And far surpass simply by having done them. Simply by wedding his heart’s desires to his actions. I turned from evaluating myself to evaluating him. Oh, he has liberal white parents, what the hell does he know. He had a brother that could do it first. He’s a dude.

In the end, though, nothing holds.

Nothing.

There is something to be said for circumstantiality and materiality. It is not as if I’m saying that all that is holding anyone back from achieving their dreams or whatnot is moxy and will-do. No. There are very real and very deep and very material systemic inequalities that hold certain groups of people down and elevate others. Yes, it is, for some people, relatively “easier” than others because they are materially furnished in ways that other people are not. They are marked (or not marked) in the way that less privileged others are not. But for me, me personally, I couldn’t see why or how I could not even summon the flaming agency to do this. For me, the above is only partially true.

My parents are relatively well-off but I have nothing to my name. Still, a shred of ungratefulness starts to slip in – for me, at least. I’m speaking personally, here. On my account and only for my situation – it was all hollow excuses. I did not lack material circumstances – rather, I lacked the commitment, the energy it I knew it would take if I wanted to accomplish and do all the things that Klaus has done and is doing. (Or rather, all my things, because we have established one thing, if nothing else: these are all my heart’s desires. First. Because I said so and I am a petty four year old like that.) Yes, Klaus does not need to worry about or consider some things I do. But so what of it? It just meant that I would have to be a little more creative and realistic about how to experience all I wanted to experience.

It became very clear to me that I was a coward. I was unwilling to fight. I was unwilling to change because I had become fearful, entrenched in dogma, coated in self-doubt, swallowed by rhetoric of what is what and “how life is” and that shit ideology. I was complacent. I implicitly enjoyed the comfort of my life. I was unwilling to provoke a groundswell.

And so I hated on people who did that. Who “settled” in their own lives. Because it was an implicit and secret recognition of what I myself do in my own life: settle.

He doesn’t live the life. No. He lives my life. Every single fucking thing that I’ve ever wanted to do or have ever THOUGHT of doing in my life, have ever half-started planning only to fall into the abyss of work and depression and fear and self-doubt, this boy has done before me and I don’t know if he has done it better – but by george and Charlton , he’s done it.

Hell, I have bought guidebooks for Turkey and Scotland and they are gathering dust on my carefully constructed Canadian Tire cheapass bookshelf. Enough is enough! When does this fucking madness STOP?! This boy, gawdamit, is living my gawdamn life and I would like it back please! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- SKiN (swift kick in the nuts) number 5 – call it the straw that broke the camel’s back – is delivered to me, by my own hand (as, really, all of this is well and truly a masochistic parade, a one-way street of obnoxious self-pitying) on my facebook newsfeed.

Facebook feels the need to inform me that Klaus has just changed his profile picture. Well good for him, I think to myself, but I’m also intrigued. It’s a bad, noxious habit, really. I click.

What do I see? Fuckitol, I see this picture of him quietly reading in India. I stare at the picture. And then I stare some more.

I miss my bus. I keep right on staring, ripping this photo apart with my eyes, trying to burn a hole through it or maybe unveil some secret power to myself wherein I could switch places with him and be the boy reading a book, oh so tenderly, in India.

He is on MY HOME TURF, my brain is yelling at me. Sirens are going off. Red lights are flashing. Voices on the megaphone.He is in my heart’s land. MY HEARTLAND.

This kid…this kid…I keep thinking. I can’t give voice to the thought. I can’t even bear it. Because to say it, even mentally, would be to acknowledge how much agency I have deprived my own self from.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Good ol’ Klaus. I do not, despite this tirade, begrudge you a single drop of your achievements. You are kickass even if you are not a critical humanist and are okay with prancing half naked in a desert and taking a shameless amount of photographs to spam the inter-webs with. I want to take this moment, Klaus, to really thank you for existing. Thank you for doing shit. Thank you for being a shameless facebook poster. Thank you for reminding me what the thread, fabric and consistency of my life needs to look like, and how ardently my thoughts need to align with my actions by embodying it in your own life. I’m not going to do it better than you or worse than you. But I’m going to do it my way. This is not about you. But if you weren’t here, I wouldn’t have multiple (and swift) kicks in the nuts. Thank you. My nuts are now, FINALLY sore to the point of being intolerable. Going to start with some 212. 

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Things have been hard lately. My arms are flailing. I've forgotten why I am doing what I am doing - or what that even is. For all the moments of being lost, I found this. To remind me. To fight until I can't fight anymore.

- via "Fault Lines", Al Jazeera English

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Visit Original Link

Nina Simone - Revolution

The great Black liberation artist Nina Simone wrote this song in response to John Lennon’s pacifist “Revolution” single, performed by The Beatles. Lennon, in a more militant frame of mind a few years later, said he thought it was best reply to his lyric and embraced its message.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Because we all need some damn militancy right now: ford's cuts, the drummond report, british and greek austerity, clownish GOPs in the united states.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

A man sets himself the task of making a plan of the universe. After many years, he fills a whole space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and people. On the threshold of death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines has traced the likeness of his own face.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

GirlCrush No. 2 - Umaimah Mendhro

Once in a while, a figure arises from the ashes and the choking dust of corporate America and makes you believe in the possibility, viability and plausibility of business for social good.

I know. I snorted in disbelief too. It's not so much that I'm cynical as it is that I've long since come to recognize (thanks to some really eye-opening lecturers and thinkers) the jargon, ideology and basic incapability of free market enterprises in practice - whether in its neoclassical origins or its current day neoliberal, post-industrial incarnation.

But there is something to be said for an individual who is able to harness the power in business enterprise, reigning in only those parts which have the potential for liberation and emancipation - in short, for good - while ripping away the mask of greed that business has become.

For those of us busy trying to navigate our day to day lives as women while creating and forging some kind of legacy that hopes to achieve some kind of good - not as a means to an end, but an end in itself - I give you Umaimah Mendhro.

Or, rather, Umaimah gives of herself to the world and demonstrates a committment to praxis - to theory and practice.

Graduate though she is from one of the world's foremost and competitive (read: cutthroat/keener) business schools, Umaimah breaks any preconceived notions one might have when trying to assemble a picture of the Class of 2009 in one's head. Amidst all the soon-to-be Wall Street executives, already-recruited accountants and prissy economists, Umaimah's unique idea for the world - and her place in it - set her miles apart from - and above - her cohort.

To onlookers and her proud family members, she might have been just another bright young professional with potential. But Umaimah's vision for a business ethic that breaks through profit and greed and actually serves to solve conflict rather than to perpetuate and rely upon it shaded her a just little brighter than the rest.

Umaimah's dream translated into dreamfly.org. Working on the template of ethical business, Umaimah took a handful memories of her home village of Akri, Pakistan and her "exile" in Makkhah, Saudi Arabia, erected upon a structure of business savvy and created a non-profit that works to build bridges and borders between communities in conflict.

Pertinent, especially considering the India-Pakistan divide and escalating tensions post the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Pertinent, considering that Muslims in India live out a strange divide: accepted and loved in private spheres and eyed conspicuously in public ones.

Though she serves as a consultant for Microsoft Corp, bringing communities in conflict together around common causes and on common ground is the way Umaimah lives her own words:

I want to live a life that compels people who do not seem to share a common thread to see if, at a raw human level, we really are that different. A life that gives people reason to reason for themselves... to pause and question the comfortable assumptions. To form and inform beliefs. And never give up common sense for common opinion.

via HBS

Her concerns are guilded in the earth she lives on and the essential human that she is. She dreams of being relevant and making her mark upon the world but doing so in a way that contributes to the dreams, the hopes and the improvement of the lives of others.

I really don't know what else is more inspiring and a thing of beauty to behold than a woman living the empire she builds.

Past being beautiful to the point of radiant and sharp to the point of cutting, Umaimah is compassionate and passionate to the point of being able to setup four simultaneous projects in each of India, Pakistan, Rwanda and Afghanistan.

Not dogged by dogmas, Umaimah is more than willing to humble herself and her opinion against aphorisms that she might have once held as absolute truth. Her musings on the "sorry" world leads her to question her basic business values and the forlorn look she casts upon the beliefs she formerly held true reminded me of the disillusioned child looking upon Shoeless Joe Jackson, pleading, "Say it ain't so, Joe".

Finding that so it is, however, Umaimah is filled with fire and it is and in a moment of praxis and reconciliation, she tries to work through what business has become in contrast to what it could be. Business, like Joe exiting the courthouse, does not respond but Umaimah is unwilling to take silence for an answer. Her legacy will no doubt create its own din, compensating for businesses' lack and perhaps even soliciting change.

And, perhaps, this is what the dream is - to be able to be an individual unafraid of shedding beliefs, of modifying truths, of being able to understand that pain is the legacy of humanity but violence doesn't have to be.

[npr]

Bhangra funk band @RedBaraat performing a #tinydesk concert this afternoon. (Taken with Instagram at National Public Radio)

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

  An Australian's REBUTTAL to TIME Magazine's story on Karachi. The Editor, Time Magazine Dear Editor, I recently returned from a charitable trip to Pakistan, whereby I visited both Karachi and Islamabad. I spoke with several universities, key businesses, prominent business leaders and several religious people from all generations…. On the day I returned to the office, someone had placed your magazine (January 16, 2012), on my desk. I read with interest your article on Karachi and the city in doom. For a person to have just returned from the very same place that your magazine described was somewhat bizarre, so I read with great detail your writer (Andrew Marshall’s) account. Let me begin by saying that I often flick through your magazine and find the articles of great interest, but on this particular day and this particular article, I found certain comments to be both one sided and indeed very negative. I say that because I saw a different Pakistan to what was portrayed in your article. I do not and will not comment on the political or religious problems that the country faces, but I will go so far as to say that not everything is as bad as the image that your magazine paints. Sure there are deaths in the cities. Please show me a city in the world that is free from political fighting and unrest. Sure there are differences in the political party opinions. Please show me a country in the world where the political parties agree. Sure the innocent are suffering. Please show me a country in the world where wealth and power is equal and the innocent don’t suffer. Sure corruption is in Pakistan. Please show me a country in the world that is corruption free. My list could go on, but my point is that Pakistan does have problems…but so does every other country in the world in some way or another. However, in the case of ALL other nations, there are often good things to report and the media goes out of its way to promote these good things across the globe, whenever possible. The ridiculous amount of shootings in the USA is balanced off by the success of Google, Microsoft and Apple. The financial dilemmas of Greece are lost in the marketing of the Greek Islands as a holiday destination of choice. The child slave industry of India, is brushed under the carpet in favour of the nation’s growth in the global software boom. What I am trying to say, is that someone needs to look further into Pakistan and see that there are millions of great stories to write about, which would portray the country in a different light, to that what is being portrayed by your article. When I was in Pakistan, I visited a towel manufacturing company (Alkaram Towels). They produced some $60million in export in 2011 and are aiming at $85million in 2012. A substantial increase in sales…in a recession I would remind you. The company was started by the current Chairman, Mr. Mehtab Chawla, at the tender age of nine, after his father passed away. Today the very man employs 3000 staff. Now that’s a story. I visited universities of NED, Hamdard, Karachi, Szabist and NUST. The students are unbelievably intelligent. They spend their spare time developing APPS for android and apple. They are involved in cutting edge technology and no one in the world knows this. Why not send a reporter to Pakistan to look into this. Why not research good things in this nation, rather than just the bad things. At NUST (National Institution for Science and Technology – Islamabad)) there were 38,000 applications for medicine. There are only 83 seats for the medicine course on offer. The competition is unbelievable. In short it pushes the best to be even better. But the world doesn’t know this. Why? Because no one wants to report on it, or no one knows about it…or both!! Please do not get me wrong. I understand that news is news, but it is high time that the western world stopped promoting these terrorists and political wars in Pakistan and started to write something that would help the nation. Something positive. If we really care about global partnerships and economic growth, then I suggest we try and give Pakistan a helping hand. There are 180 million people in Pakistan, 65% are under the age of 25. The youth of Pakistan is its strength.. it is like a sleeping giant. If you think that India is a booming nation. I suggest you stop a second and look at Pakistan. Given a little help from the western world, Pakistan can become a dominant economy. She doesn’t want aid and she doesn’t need money… she just wants the chance to be seen in a different light. I believe we have a fundamental obligation to assist. The only question is, who will reach out first. Warmest regards, Tony Lazaro Managing Director Rising Stars Management Group Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone]

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Sex is - by necessity - a political animal.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

What fills the adolescent with distress is, above all, his dim and confused realization of the close connection or near-identity of reason, self, domination and nature. He feels the gap between the ideals taught to him and the expectations that they arouse in him on the one hand, and the reality principle to which he is compelled to submit on the other. His ensuing rebellion is directed against the circumstance that the air of godliness, of aloofness from nature, of infinite superiority, conceals the rule of the stronger or of the smarter. This discovery may add either one of two imporant elements to the character of the individual who makes it: resistance or submission. The resistant individual will oppose any pragmatic attempt to reconcile the demands of truth and the irrationalities of existence. Rather than to sacrifice truth by conforming to prevailing standards, he will insist on expressing in his life as much truth as he can, both in theory an in practice. His will be a life of conflict; he must be ready to run the risk of utter loneliness. The irrational hostility that would incline him to project his inner difficulties upon the world is overcome by a passion to realize what his father represented in his childish imagination, namely, truth. This type of youth - if it is a type - takes seriously what he has been taught. He at least is successul in the process of internalization to the extent of turning against outside authority and the blind cult of so-called reality. He does not shrink from persistently confronting reality with truth, from unveiling the antagonism between ideals and actualities. His criticism itself, theoretical and practical, is a negative reassertion of the positive faith he had as a child.

- from "The Revolt of Nature", The Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer

[bookish--belle]

Corinne Bailey Rae

[reflectqblak]

I PROMISE TO RE-LEARN THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PLAYING THE GUITAR

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Moments when fundamentalism comes to mean a perfecting, a return to one's roots, a dedication to improvement, a promise and a committment.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Every reader's dream. And sneaking suspicion.

- via George Strombolopolous/CBC

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Nayan Tarse

Everything will be fine.

Then, one day, I'll wake up to a vague ache in my heart, an echo in my ears - merely an incoherent sound that has yet to be born and borne. It is not any language that I've heard before. Indeed, it's not a language at all. It's more of a cry. The woody, hollow lilt of a pan flute. Onomatopoeia.

Slowly. Surely. Slowly, but surely, it takes form. It twists and turns, ravaging internal musculature, organs with every move it takes. This is not a dormant child. It's conception was not immaculate. Each movement thrums a chord of loss. Every breath threatens to rip the entire scaffolding of body, nerves, tendons, systems - apart.

It leaves me bereft.

Then, suddenly, everything is not so fine.

There is white noise. Radio waves, frequencies travelled, hurtling through space. The dial moves on, relentlessly and takes me with it and I'm going back and forth, back and forth, waiting. Waiting for that voice, waiting for what I know lies in wait for me.

By the fourth day, it has a body. It has form made primarily by scavenging the busy highways of my veins, scraping the walls of my mind and memories, collecting visions from eyes in little glass vials, sweeping dust from the hidden corners of my heart. In these, it sheathes itself, the homeless wanderer wearing another shroud.

Small images is what it feeds on. Sounds. Words.

Images of dirty, scruffy, hungry children accosting people at traffic lights. Sounds of ghalib set to sitar. The words of Tagore. Then the more ugly realities: mass amounts of smog, pollution, corruption, bureaucracy, inequality, religious politics, a crumbling infrastructure. And all these supported by an absurd notion that somehow culture withstands and corrects all.

Culture - honour, respect, piety, shame and other half-baked, mythical constructs - will save them all.

Sometimes, I hate it all. Sometimes, I feel so much anger, I cannot believe it to be real. Those are the times everything is fine.

But then, the ache becomes real and the echo becomes coherent. Both are born, despite my protest, beyond my acknowledgement. Whether I take them in or not, whether I name them or not, whether I hold their helpless and feeble bodies in my hands or not, they are there. To stay.

I have a choice. I can deny. Or I can accept.

I cannot help but be beguiled by the land, even if it lives like a painted frame, mostly in my head. I cannot believe this land that I have dreamed about for so long must be real. Somehow, Google maps alienates me even further. Somehow, the slums that occupy such a vast majority of the physical land - so much so, that it is visible from space - cannot be real. There cannot be millions upon millions of little barefoot children scavenging those heaps of rubbish. There cannot be women being trafficked. There cannot be computers being built and cars solds on EMIs.

What the hell is an EMI?

Some days are worse than others. I'll outwardly scoff at a conversation on the bus - but I'll internally take a small inane kind of pleasure at the language I both know and don't know so well. I'll drown myself in arthouse movies from the 60s knowing this can never be enough.

Knowing, always, I must return. Knowing that it is inevitable that I -

Someday -

Somehow -

Somewhen -

Somewhy -

Go back.

Try and understand why it was home to so many before me. Uncover the pain of a relative trapped by her father. Unearth the roots of illogic and discover why mostly everyone in the family is stark raving mad.

This is only the face of the Beast in the Jungle. Only one aspect of its being. As it stalks out, carefully, from the underbrush into the full sunlight over the years, revealing itself more fully, I will come to see it and meet it head-on.

Inevitable is not only my demise but my return to that country. Equally as unquenchable is my thirst to know the self through the selves of others, the ghosts of past. Inextinguishable is the hope that somehow I will return to being human on this sub-continent. Real is the fear that it will be the exact opposite of that. Strong is the connection, the unbridled passion that pushes me forward, towards something - whether better or not, it remains to be seen.

Not flee.

But - Go, I must.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

Aphorisms

I'm a little immovable.

How to write? What to say? What is riveting? What is genuine, imaginable, complex and yet simple?

See, I only feel comfortable writing about things I know.

I feel that it is only right to have experienced the things that you attempt to extend into imagination. Only after experience is it - not, ethical per se - authentic to stretch reality into fiction.

Then again, what's the difference? Is there, can there be a difference?

Mmm, debateable. But how to unstick? How to become movable? The fear is not implicating oneself in the struggle to write.

The fear is misrepresenting a peoples/place/thing - being - through lack of experience, when already capturing through the tricky medium of words.

The fear is being arrogant enough or complacent enough - or just plain lazy - to think that whatever one needs to know about these "others", outside of one's own personal, intimate experience, in order to allow imagination to take over - all these truths and observations can be learned from books.

Certainly, books are a source of knowledge.

Certainly, one must read - or we're all screwed.

Certain, too, is it that one learns the art of writing through the skill of reading. This can be extended into: everything is a mimicry, style is a fallacy, reality is illusory, fiction and life are equally as much performances.

But one cannot confine onself to a room of one's own. No, one must have a room of one's own to retire to when the live-long day has sunk its teeth into night's flesh. One must have a room of one's own to come back to after the month-long adventure of torment and pain and breathtaking beauty, of conversations with real people, of experiences past words - to then be birthed through words.

One should be able to retire to a room of one's own as a fertile place to coagulate and form stories of the fantastic mundane.

But confinement - no.

So the scratching of head, and the multiple narrative exercises and the distant trepid journeys into character formation are as unecessary as a lamp being turned on in the daylight.

To throw off this confinement - that is the remedy.

The fear is that one may never be able to write of the beauty of this world and translate precisely the magnitude and weight of that feeling of intense pressure crushing your heart when you look at it - but I would play at the word "humbling" to describe it.

The fear is no longer that this confinement cannot be thrown off. It will be. It is going to be. Whatever agency or power that is vested in the limits of a human being - with that power, I will violently shake off confinement.

Or maybe I will be polite and tell it that the tea in its cup is finished, the cookies on the plate have been consumed by it and now it is time for it to leave - and then usher it out with all the ppoise of gentility but also all it's double-faced venom.

To cure this immovability. That is what is at stake. To create. That too.

I will know and I will travel and I will see. I will incorporate these thoughts into the depths of my mind and let my imagination take over when I finally retire to the room of my own.

But neither before nor after that. I propose to read even more. I propose to see even more. I propose to undertake only the moment. I propose jumping while looking. I propose unfolding open a map, looking up backroads of the north and gullys and alleys and then traipsing them on a motorbike.

I propose experiencing and only then dreaming. Experiencing to dream.

Not dreaming to experience. That has been the last chunk of life.

This be the now chunk of life.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

This be 2012.

[therevolutionist-blog-blog]

GirlCrush No. 1 - Radhika Jones

It occurred to me, through a recent discussion with a friend at brunch that brunches are very sexy. Brunches in Paris are even sexier. In my mind, they all take place in the late 20th Century, in cafes and saloons filled with cigars and smoke (ostensibly), four-tiered platters filled with a wide assortment of delicate (read overly rich) pastries and espressos - oh, and crepes.

Whether it was the shade of her lipstick or the general buzz around the restaurant that did it, our discussion eventually meandered (thanks to our third cup of coffee) onto women.

Inevitably and invariably, I decided that I really love women. I realized that women are sparkling and spectacular and looking back on it (as those hovering dangerously close to New Years are wont to do), my actions and my thoughts usually surround the inspirations of women.

And I don't mean those insipid creatures that dumb themselves down or shut themselves off or hem the edge of a lounge like one of a thousand stitches. I mean Women, real Women, women like my friend whom I looked at then, who returned my gaze with a full, throaty laugh: witty, Amazonian, creatures of intellect and sex, voracious readers, big dreamers, sarcastic jokers, present lovers. In short, the kind of woman Sylvia Plath was talking about.

For better or worse, it is to be that I am most inspired by women and feel most strongly for them. I am most enchanted by them, driven by them, work and push hard for their legacy, look to figures behind me for direction and contemporaries for affirmation. I am incensed by them but mostly I feel tenderly for them. I am intrigued and beguiled by their movements, their stories, their emotions, their cares - both big and small - their machinations and their thoughts. Somehow - and perfectly so - my love for women surfaced in that moment and has come full circle.

So what I decided, as a lovely little going-into-2012 action, is that I would do a monthly feature on a woman who fits just such a description (on paper and in practical life), who inspires me to no end, if only to keep my sanity and keep me going - like a nice, neat little discovery of a style of living, a role, a life path and a personality, a story you never thought you could live or was possible but it is and luckily you can Googlestalk it all you want.

The first is Radhika Jones, executive editor (some sources say assistant managing editor?) of TIME and former managing editor of The Paris Review. She covers culture and society in Time and is a vapid reader of all things cultural (pop and otherwise) - and with a non-snobbish, homey personality to boot.

Radhika catalogs her typified day at Time for a Paris Review blog in two parts. You're not sure whether it's her ability to be an obvious trailblazer with a madcap penchant for getting things done, multiple links to amazing reads, or her impeccable and grammatically proficient prose that gets you (I'll be honest, for me it was this line that was the clincher: of a book she's dying to read she says, "Skippy and I are reunited!") but by the end of it, I found myself enchantedly thinking: I need me one of that.

Cheers, Radhika Jones.

P.S. She also has a longreads list for 2011 HERE