“You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people’s privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveller is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveller’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption, and mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveller’s worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveller.”
Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (via aprilyee)
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
This is a good song, and I’m seeing it live on Wednesday!
(Wide Eyes by Local Natives)
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My dad used to sing this Indian lullaby to us as kids, and my sister just stumbled upon it on YouTube. A-mazing.
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A Kid's Book Worth Reading
Children’s book 14 Cows for America could probably teach us all a lesson or two. An excerpt from Kristof’s review in the NYT:
“Instead of an earnest tale about Americans helping an impoverished people far away, it opens with a Kenyan named Kimeli returning to his village from New York City in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
‘A child asks if he has brought any stories,’ Carmen Agra Deedy writes. ‘Kimeli nods. He has brought with him one story. It has burned a hole in his heart.’ Kimeli tells the people gathered around him about the destruction of the twin towers, and they are stunned. They cannot imagine buildings so tall they touch the sky, let alone fires so hot they melt steel. The villagers scarcely fathom what happened, but they are touched and want to help. ‘What can we do for these poor people?’ one elder asks.
… Kimeli declares that he wishes to give his cow — he has only one — to the suffering Americans, and asks for the elders’ blessing. They not only approve but add 13 more cows to the gift. Later, the American ambassador comes to the village, and the Masai solemnly present him with 14 cows, as the book puts it, ‘because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.’”
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View from my window over the course of 20 minutes yesterday evening.
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Big Fish!
Taken by Papa Sinha at the aquarium in Okinawa, Japan.
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Bombay in Words
Though I’m not entirely sold on Roberts’ Shantaram yet (the story is fascinating but the narrator’s voice is a little too self-congratulatory and sentimental for me), there are certain passages that strike a chord by putting into words a country that’s often impossible to describe. For example, Roberts recounts his initial reaction to Bombay as follows:
“The first thing I noticed about Bombay, on that first day, was the smell of the different air … I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it’s the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It’s the smell of gods, demons, empires, and civilisations in resurrection and decay. It’s the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the Island City, and the blood-metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and loves that produce our courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches, and mosques, and of a hundred bazaars devoted exclusively to perfumes, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. Karla once called it the worst good smell in the world … But whenever I return to Bombay, now, it’s my first sense of the city - that smell, above all things - that welcomes me and tells me I’ve come home.”
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Moral Courage
Irshad Manji is doing some interesting work in the areas of human rights and leadership development. Her initiative, the Moral Courage Project, aims to support human dignity through internal social change. The project is housed at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.
From the Moral Courage Project website:
“How did apartheid come to an end in South Africa? How has racial segregation been challenged in America? Through ‘moral courage’ — the willingness to speak truth to power and risk backlash for a greater good. As Robert F. Kennedy told students at the University of Cape Town: ‘Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet is it the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.’ Those words are even more true today. The dream of diversity is increasingly twisted by the politics of identity, which puts us in boxes that we’re afraid to bust open. This is why Irshad Manji has founded the Moral Courage Project.”
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
… And speaking of remixes with harps, another one I love.
Song: Joanna Newsom’s Bridges & Balloons Pocket Remix
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[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I’ve been on The XX bandwagon for awhile, and this remix makes me like their sound even more.
Song: You’ve Got the Love (XX Remix) by Florence + The Machine
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