ഈ കഴിഞ്ഞ രണ്ടു വര്ഷത്തോളം ബ്രിട്ടനില് (യു.കെ) താമസമാക്കു സ്വന്തം നാടിനൊപ്പം കരുതുകയും, ഇവിടുത്തെ നാട്ടുകാരുടെ ഓപ്പം തന്നെ ഭാഷാവൈപുണ്യം ഉള്ളതിനാലും, ബ്രിട്ടീഷ് ദ്വീപുകളുടെ കുറുകെയും ഇതുപോലെ നടന്നാല് എന്താണ് എന്നൊരു വ്യാമോഹം. രണ്ടു മൂന്നു കാരണങ്ങള്ക്കു വേണ്ടി ഇതു ചെയുവാന് കഴിയും:

- ഏതെങ്കിലും ഒരു നല്ല കാര്യത്തിനായി നടക്കുക

- പ്രാദേശിക കൃഷി ഭലങ്ങള് മാത്രം ഭക്ഷിക്കുക

- സാംസ്കാരിക അവബോധത്തിനായി നടക്കുക: ഉദാഹരണത്തിനു മുണ്ടു ഉടുത്തുകൊണ്ട് നടക്കുക, അത്യാഹിതം ഒഴിച്ചാല് മലയാളം മാത്രം സംസാരിക്കുക

കൂടുതല് ആശയങ്ങള് സ്വാഗതം.

നിര്ഭാഗ്യവശാല്, ഞാന് ഈ രാജ്യം വിടുകയാണ്. എങ്കിലും ഞാന് ഈ വര്ഷം പുറകെ ഇട്ടിട്ടു വരുന്ന വസന്തകാലം പോലെ തന്നെ പല വസന്ത കാലങ്ങളും ഭാവിയില് ഉണ്ടാകും എന്നു ആശിക്കാം.

In English:

A couple of months ago, a couple of friends and I walked [1] about 1200 kilometres along the length of Keralam, the southern state in the Republic of India, where I was grew up. While the walk itself was formally organised and had a stated objective, my private motivations had selfish aspects to it. I wanted to see my country, to meet my culture and background face to face, and to understand why I am the way I am. In the course of our walk which spanned about 44 days, we met with extraordinary hospitality, and extraordinary hostility.

Having lived in the United Kingdom for about two years now, and being fluent in the local language sufficiently to masquerade myself as being British, I’m tempted to think what it would be like to try walking across the British Isles in an attempt to understand this country that I have called home. A couple of options come to mind.

- Go on a walk for a cause:

- Buy and eat from local produce; ie; no supermarkets/imports.

- Walk to spread cultural awareness, for eg: wear a sarong/dhoti during the walk. Speak only malayalam, unless in an emergency.

Further ideas welcome.

Unfortunately, I’m leaving the country soon, but hopefully, there will be many pretty Spring seasons as the one I’m leaving behind.

[1] http://www.freedomwalk.in/

An afternoon serving lunch at the local orphanage is well advised as an effective antidote to self pity. It makes me wince with shame and embarrassment at the thought that my middle class mind has even considered complaining about the privileged life I have had so far. Some of these kids have been literally rescued from the clutches of cruel relatives and mafias, who have, more often than not, mutilated their bodies, in order to make “effective” child beggars. It is a cruel and illegal industry in child trafficking, that needs desperately, for the sake of those vulnerable angels, to be stopped.

But how can an ingrown and selfish society such as mine do this ? Is it even possible ? This is a society that is hypocritical enough to “protest” when australian cricketer Steve Waugh visited the orphanage in question, to donate money. Assuming that the rumours were right, and there were misappropriation of donor funds, one would presume that protesters would be worried about the effect this would have on the children resident at the orphanage ? Or perhaps some of the protesters were in fact regular donors ? I don’t have the facts, but  from hearsay, and having grown up here enough to guess, I daresay not! Do we have the altruism to even empathise to the slightest degree ? Or are our selfish, racist minds seared so much by religion and the rat race, to not even care, perhaps even scorn people trying to make a difference ?

I believe that the internet is going to make a huge impact, when the haves meet the have nots. Visual media is powerful enough to shock and shame us. P’haps jolt us enough to do something about the injustice and disparity to which we have become blinded. But maybe, just maybe, impressionable young minds, in young India, will see and question the older folks just ever so slightly before they are brainwashed into their caste and creed, and perhaps one in a million would survive and do something about it ? That would be a thousand people! I see change already

But having decided to immerse myself in this culture, I’ve recently
had the topic thrown at me in jest, mostly by a single friend, who
seems insecure, at best, about his own social situation.

Nevertheless, I decided to think about this for a bit. Have I been
attracted to people of the same sex as I ? Yes. Mostly in admiration
of some quality they posses. I’d like to be as well built as that guy,
or possess the same sense of justice or forgiveness as the other one,
or be a natural leader as yet another guy, etc. I’ve also had close
relationships with a very few trusted male friends, who I see as
mentors and sounding boards, than potential mates to live a life
with. On occasion, as older brothers ( I don’t have an immediate older
brother, and someone in that fictitious role catches my fancy on
occassion.) or alpha males, many times and as I grow older, as younger
brothers or even children.

A few naive thoughts that ran through my mind as a man are: What sort
of private role do members of gay couples play ? How do they, or do
they have sex at all ? ( the obvious answer is anal “sex” for male gay
couples, (which sounds a bit disgusting to me ) or some sort of sex
toy assisted stimulation for female gay couples. ) More importantly,
is there room for a “family” dynamic, where there is mutual nurture of
some sort ( emotional and financial ) ? Since, even with biotechnology
and human ethics at its current state of the art, having biological
offspring is naturally impossible, what do these couples have to look
forward to in the future ? Would family in the conventional sense even
be possible for them ? My feeble imagination can only see some sort of
commune type environment, with few or no consanguine connections, much
like the “Hejidas” of India.

Clearly, given that people can think for themselves, and “coming out”
involves grappling with these issues, at the very least at a personal
level, and then at family and societal leve, I imagine that gay people
have given them a fair bit of grave thought before taking the leap -
even with their presumably “natural” sexual inclinations.

I count myself privileged that my natural inclination is towards
women, ( and at the moment towards a particular woman ) and I feel a
lot of empathy for people with unnatural ( in the biological sense )
instinct of this sort – much as I would be empathetic towards someone
in a wheelchair, or a transgendered person – that they’re unable to
enjoy their inclinations in a biologically meaningful manner. If
compassion is a word that I can use to describe my feeling towards
such individuals, I would certainly not patronise them.

I believe, that unfortunately, religion and contemporary culture is
headed from persecuting them, to patronising them.

a) A sense of false privacy: Although we think our photographs (primarily) are only visible to friends, the actual terms of license does not prevent facebook from publishing these pictures without your permission. Ever wondered about celebrity pictures popping up on Newspapers, with the caption, “Facebook picture” etc ? This is why they can get away with it. There’s some excellent rants on this topic. http://blogs.onenw.org/jon/archives/2007/11/18/photos-on-facebook-some-intellectual-property-concerns/ is an interesting one that showed up via a google search.

I’m choosing to use flickr.com to put my pictures up for public consumption. This way, I am under no illusion about the privacy of these pictures, and will think twice before I put them up.

b) Facebook takes up a lot of my time, and despite my good faith efforts, I seem to be logged in an inordinate amount of time. This is a waste of network resources and more importantly, my time.

c) The internet worked quite well for a few decades before these web based shims showed up. While I appreciate the graphics functionality of web2.0 technology, I think I would be more productive if I returned to a text based email medium for communication.

d) I have invested some time and energy into my own website, where I intend to move this blog, and a lot of my facebook information. Its meant to act as a central point of contact for friends, family and business associates. Unfortunately, a lot of this information was on a laptop which died recently, and is inaccessible until I fix it. This shouldn’t take too long though, since I have its innards strewn all over the dinner table of my sister, as I write this.

Its been fun, poking and voyeuring and walling and so on, on facebook. But all good things must come to an end.

To my friends on facebook: Please keep in touch via email ( I shall leave the profile information intact ). I shall try to get all your email addresses, either from your profile information, or my sending private messages. I shall also try somehow to move a lot of the private message conversations we’ve had to my email ( I’m sure someone’s written a tool for all this stuff somewhere and open sourced it. ). Until I fix it, do have an occassional peek at this blog. When I have things in place, I shall point the profile info to the entire website, etc.

Happy facebooking!

Evidently, I am new to Tokyo. Now now I can safely say, I’ve seen it all. And its time to depart in a couple of days! Wow.

The strongest myth of the modern age, I believe, is the myth of “race”. A quick glance at the wikipedia page on race [1] shows how even a (debatable) balanced attempt at classifying physical human features under simplified stereotypes requires tenuous creativity, in order to bias. ( Doesn’t that look like a great bear [2]? Look carefully! There, thats the head, the tail and body… no ? its got an unusually long tail. you can’t see ? c’mon, try harder! ). Scientifically, there is only one human race. Every healthy human being of reproductive age is capable of producing human offspring with the opposite sex. That which defines the human body has been scientifically studied for many year now. [3] And yet most of the press of the supposedly modern world can’t seem to let old habits die. I have had a growing suspicion of the propaganda value of the use of terms such as “white” and “black” and “middle eastern” and “asian” in articles on the bbc website. A recent article proved to me beyond doubt, that the bbc is becoming obsessed with a pitiful attempt at re-enforceing “racial” stereotypes [4] (“Thirdly, and perhaps most crucially, they are white.”). If the tasmanian press were to go on the same vein and pull out all stops to talk about “Why immigration is no longer a taboo”… hang on, tasmanians ? What Tasmanians ?!!

H.G.Wells displays his firm knowledge of modern evolutionary biology when he candidly admitted: “And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.” [5]

The most widely accepted scientific theory for genuine diversification of a species is by a mechanism called “speciation” (see the ample references under the wikipedia article [6] on the topic for further info ). The only way this can happen to the human species is by forming non interbreeding groups of people in critical numbers, for a critical period of time. At our current technological level, the only possilibities I can see are:

a) Emigration to distant planets leading to isolated human populations, which could “speciate” with respect to the others. This requires a bit of a stretch of the imagination, given the technical difficulties involved in transporting, alive, any significant numbers of human beings to distant, isolated planets.

b) Deliberate non-breeding between people groups based on arbitrary criteria. Given our natural sexual curiosity ( for a little taste of it in our current mood, see [7]), this is extremely difficult to achieve. Yet it is technically possible.

Sadly, the modern myth of “race” seems to be taking us to b). Homo sapiens seem to have culturally evolved to a point where they have stopped eating each other [8] and only eat other species anymore. Would the fitter of the new species perhaps deem it fit to finish off homo sapiens by eating them all, I wonder ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28classification_of_human_beings%29

[2] http://www.souledout.org/nightsky/ursamajorandminor.html

[3] http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/home.shtml

[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7353601.stm

[5] From Chapter 1, “The War of the worlds”. Online archive(Gutenberg project): http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36/36-h/36-h.htm

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation

[7] http://www.gwu.edu/~e73afram/jc-cc-ks.html

[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism

പിന്നീടാണു അമേരിക്കയും യൂറോപ്പുമൊക്കെ സന്ദറ്ശിക്കുവാന് ഇടയായതു. സമ്കാരം ഇല്ല, പുതുരാഷ്ട്രം, എന്നൊക്കെ പറഞ്ഞു ആക്ഷേപിക്കുന്ന അമേരുക്കയിലും കണ്ടു പതിനെട്ടാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടിനെ്റ്റ തുടക്കത്തില് പണിതിട്ടുള്ള മാളികകള്. യൂറോപ്പില് പന്ത്രണ്ടാം നൂറ്റാണ്ടില് പണിത ദേവാലയം.

മനസ്സിന്റ്റെ അടിത്തട്ടില് എവിടയോ ഒളിഞ്ഞു കിടറ്ന്ന ചോദ്യങ്ങള്കു സ്വരം കൂടി. ഭാരതത്തിനു പുറത്തും ഇതാ പഴക്കത്തിനും ഗാംഭീര്യത്തിനും തെല്ലും കിറവില്ലാത്ത സമ്സ്കാരത്തിന്റ്റെ ഭലിതങ്ങള്!

ഒരു കാര്യം എന്തായാലും ഉറപ്പായി.സംസ്കാരം എന്നാല്, പൂറ്വ്വ കാലങ്ങളിലെ ഏതോ എത്തിപ്പെടാന് കഴിയാത്ത നില, അത്ഥവാ നശ്ടപ്പെട്ട അന്ദസത്തയോ മറ്റും മാത്രം അല്ല. ദൈനം ദിനത്തിലെ ഇടപഴകുകളില് ഉത്ഭവിച്ചുകൊണ്ടിരിക്കുന്ന പുതു ആശയങ്ങള്കും രീതികള്ക്കും ഉള്ള കളരി കൂടെയാണ് സംസ്കാരം.

And then, something interesting happened. Local law suddenly became pliable and lenient. The perpetrators were given full amnesty and freed. [5] How did this happen ?

The Oxford dictionary defines the verb “bribe” as to “dishonestly persuade (someone) to act in one’s favour by paying them or giving other inducement” [6]

Let us for a moment assume that this was a local case, say, in a country notorious for corruption, such as, say Chad, which is seventh from the bottom of the corruption perception index [7]. Let us again, for a moment, assume that an immensely wealthy individual were accused of the crime of kidnapping a child from a family of modest means. The child is rescued by the police, and the family goes to court with the accusation of kidnap. The accused are found guilty, and sentenced according to local law. If, then, after a while, the guilty were suddenly released from prison and provided amnesty, what is to be inferred about the accused (or his or her supporters) and local law ? What is the message that the general public were to take away ? That justice may be bought for a price ?

A sad day indeed, for Human Rights.

(All urls retrieved on 1st April, 2008 )

[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7067374.stm

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7086177.stm

[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7160790.stm

[4] http://travel.state.gov/law/info/info_639.html

[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7323673.stm

[6] http://www.askoxford.com/concise_oed/bribe?view=uk

[7] http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2007

The literal translation to english would be: “backpacking for going you are who, sayippu ?”. The connotation was clear. You’re not a “sayippu”. “Sayippu” is a non-offensive borrow-word in malayalam, used to describe colonial British people, and today, generally, people of European ethnicity a.k.a “white”. It is a corruption of the word “Sahib” in Hindi, which is a term of respect attributed to someone of power.

So my mum opined that since I’m not of European descent, I shouldn’t travel and see places and people. Let’s get this in context. This was a trip I had organised, with money I had earned through hard work on a job I had gotten with my own effort based on qualifications I had earned paid for by a government scholarship. This was as opposed to the Indian norm, where children would have been educated on borrowed money, and gotten a job from a nepotistic employer and expected to support the family as a return on investment. Clearly, from a malayalee cultural context, money had little to do with this opinion. It was a purely cultural limitation. Indian “boys” don’t travel. Its something they do not do.

It occurred to me that the corollary to my mum’s opinion has been true through most of her lifetime. I was born in free India. My mum was born in colonial India, the soon to be lost jewel in the crown (almost literally: see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor ) of the vast British empire. The minions of the empire needed to travel far and wide to bribe or bully its colonies into submission. I suspect that the stereotype of the “tourist” was sown in this context, at least in India.

Let us look at some facts today:

Number of *AFRICAN* countries British citizens can visit without a visa: 30

Number of *AFRICAN* countries US citizens can visit without a visa: 31

Number of *AFRICAN* countries Nigerian citizens can visit without a visa: 4

Number of *AFRICAN* countries Namibian citizens can visit without a visa: 15

Number of *AFRICAN* countries South African citizens can visit without a visa: 22

(Source wikipedia.org)

In other words, the average African can travel to fewer destinations WITHIN AFRICA than a Briton or US citizen.
More interestingly, an ethnically more “african” country in africa, has less access to other countries WITHIN AFRICA, than a less ethnically african country within africa. Very interesting. Let me re-quote this, replacing Africa with Europe. An ethnically more “european” country in europe, has less access to other countries WITHIN EUROPE, than a less enthnically european country within europe. If this were the situation in Europe, Turks would be able to travel to more European countries than Danes! Sounds ridiculous ? Then it probably is.

This is the world order we live in. It is just a symptom of a world order where people are deliberately divided and kept separate for the profit of a few. Many months ago, I had a conversation with an elderly British friend of mine. He mused over the fact that he met someone of Indian descent, who actually was from Kenya and had never been to India, and how that amazed him. I had to gently point out that if he replaced “indian” with “european” and Kenya with “Australia” it would probably turn his amazement into better perspective. (lets try that in , say, Tokyo: “I’m amazed to have met someone of European descent, who actually was from Australia, and had never been to Europe!” I just had dinner with a chap like that last night. You need to get out more, dude! ).

I dream of a day when people are free to roam to the corners of the world and yet not be branded “immigrant”. I have a dream that one day, ethnicity would be a thing of the past, that one day, (misquoting Martin Luther King Jr. ) “little black boys and black girls will” not “be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as brothers and sisters”, because black or white boys and girls did not exist in that day ( “I say chappie, what on earth does the word ‘pretorian’ mean ?” ).

And properly quoting Dr. King:

“Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow
freedom ring – when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet,
from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when
all of God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics – will be able to join hands and sing in the words
of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty,
we are free at last!” “

A quick google search gives me [1], quoting which: “At the time of Caesar’s assassination, Octavian held no official position. Only after he marched on Rome and forced the senate to name him consul, was he established as a power to be reckoned with.”

Today I read a bbc article with much concern. [2]

Quoting which: “The indictment against him does not mention the Democratic lawmakers who made the trip – Jim McDermott, David Bonior and Mike Thompson.”

Subtle, yet it leaves a strong message. You are not free to challenge the establishment, even if you are a lawmaker.

How do I infer the Senators are on the backfoot here ?

Again quoting [2]: “The trip was to see the plight of the Iraqi children. That’s the only reason we went,”

Of course, this time, there was no mention of who was responsible for the very plight of these poor Iraqi children.

“There is a way to solve this crisis without war,” said Mr Thompson at the time. [2]

Now that I’m fully convinced that the only nation which mentions “In God we trust” on its money, and then loots, pillages, rapes and then condescends to give handouts is turning into an autocracy. Possibly a plutarchy. The question is, when the multiumvirate settles its scores, who will turn out to be Augustus Americanus ?

[1] http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/95sep/augustus.html

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7315752.stm