Category Archives: Travelogue

Cupcakes and Tea: Gandhi’s Striving

1. Travel, Writing and Silence

I blame my frugality on wrists pains (tendonitis) though on some level the distance away from technology has encouraged more healthy pursuits. Sometimes my entries emerge from needless chattering, sometimes a desire to form art out of words, tell stories, self-reflect. Then at times, silence is always better. They say the American teaches how to express, and the Japanese teaches how to listen, keep silent. Students of life traverse in between, in search for understanding and self-expression.

We have travelled the mountains on backpacks hearing in the fore of the silence, the haunting songs of the native guide sing. Our footsteps are heavy as our heart is light. We strive to ascend the more remote, but know that the sooner ascent arrives, the sooner we begin our descend. We absorb the sunshine we once despised, and let the cold melt at the tip of our noses. These Poets of the antiquity sung lyrical the cloud formations in pink and blue skies, the golden glory of the sunset and in their bewilderment of nature, words have sparked the imaginations of those, like myself, who are far less travelled. We appreciate the silence as an absence of something – absence of chatter, of gossip, of over-thinking, of analysis-paralysis. So we disappear into monasteries and mountains, and seek the guidance of monks and peaceful monotony.

But silence is more than just a pause of thought. It is a clearance of one’s space. It is not the absence of thought, but a presence of space. I once loved a man whose words and thoughts emerged from and sat eloquently on silence. I am not creating poetry, there is no other manner I can find in explaining this odd physical phenomena.

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3. Akhila Kolsetty is a young writer, blogger who uses her intelligence and perspective-shifting to advocate for justice. She has just returned from a volunteer experience from Kabul. Every Friday she features the work of an organization or person. I thoroughly enjoy this element of her website because she brings to the readers to work of countless individuals whose work has not been thoroughly marketed to the rest of the world. I see Akhila as a young activist who is always looking inward whilst looking outward and admire her consistency in updating us with crucial perspectives that go beyond the standard litany of contemporary news. Here is a post on changing the world, she wrote for another site.

4. Take your Daily Cup of Tao here, Zen in Modern Life.

I can’t fight against war – as then I’m at war.

I can’t make rules for politicians – as then I’m being political.

For peace the only action I may make is to be peaceful.

Note that these rules are for conceptual people as the true I is not split so in no position to act at all.

Between Spaces of Emotion and the Physical

What becomes of travel, of reading, of meeting people, when we enter and exit these spaces with pre-determined answers to this world? I always thought of my education as a window to understanding this world, though as I grow older I realize my education too are like shackles around my feet. I think that with my knowledge, I know how to live life, I know the “things” that make happiness. But I love the way life laughs at my polite arrogance and makes a mockery out of my deep-seated views. So I abandon my “knowing”. I am a student of this life. In me is a deep eagerness to learn.

We travel, we read, we meet, not in search of answers, but in search of better questions. All these writings are travel writings. Even those without physical displacement. We are always travelling in and out of spaces. Physical spaces, emotional and psychological spaces. It never is the number of countries travelled, but the interior journey taken into one’s self that merits the exterior journey taken.

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I had once lost everything I had owned, when a bulldozer crashed and flattened my small collection of things in a warehouse. When I received the news, I had an odd paradoxical experience of sadness and lightness all at once. A year ago I had been burgled and suddenly I felt a deep sense of loss. I had memories so cherished I froze them into videos, pictures, writings and art.  They narrated my new life in England, photographs and sketches of the two men I loved most, I had little artefacts we crafted on winter Saturdays, video diaries of the places we went, stories we exchanged, and all the love that was given and taken and given again so unconditionally. I flourished in countryside England with an abundance of love. It was hard not to lock the memories, I say, for my grandchildren and their grandchildren. Somehow after some years of solitude and confusion, I wanted them to see how happiness became natural to me, even in a country without a sun.

The lightness and de-clutter was unbearable. I could not admit to myself how much lightness loss felt. It felt almost like a sin, a sense of careless-ness I could not partake because at one time these sketches, these videos and artefacts were the meticulous cartography of a charmingly odd, care-free, crazy, and saturated life – one I had not expected to live, one I could  not have lived if a chance at a scholarship did not take me out of Singapore and into 14th Century England (my college was housed in an old medieval church).

Loss of my physical contraptions of frozen memories somehow danced tango with the end of my very beautiful relationship. Tango was not made for three. Somehow life wanted me simpler. I find my distate for shopping malls, presents, clothes, shoes, and things a little amiable to the simplicity of displacement. I had once in Afghanistan wandered to and from 6 different homes with only two sets of clothing. There is nothing more beautiful than the mountains, not even my imagination, not even pandora can take my fervour and fascination away. So the little things become nothing. Loss was never a loss. Sometimes loss is a gain if one finds the perspective to notice this. Life always achieves a balance our human self cannot sometimes comprehend. I do wistfully play back those photographs of love, the artefacts we created to historicize a beautiful love that England had given space to grow in spite of its fallen leaves and bickering weather. There is so much in life to fall in love with…

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The Dalai Lama has always two questions: What can I learn?, and What can I give?

 

When Mazar burns, it is Kabol who hurts too

Excerpts from diary entries

I am here writhing with quiet laughter in one, crying the next. There is no originality in thinking, no questioning of systems.  How does the soul of this country survive in the heart’s idealism, the standards of cultural refinement and intellectual excellence, thinking there is more to scholarly contribution than merely the exegesis of exegesis. When Mazar burns, it is Kabol who hurts too. Then as the Prophet says, but like the wayfarer or the horseman who stops under the shade of a tree for a time, he too eventually moves on.

Gustavo Santaolalla, We play till the morning, till the muezzin calls. There is enough pain in this city to abandon the laws of God. Come play my disheveled state.

~~

I was shocked when I saw Aisha – she was only 22 years old. I expected her to be a lot older but She was my age….and I thought why should any mother be put through the insecurity of having her child taken away. Her eyes were red, she did not stop to say anything to anyone, but quickly covered her child with her scarf and huddled against the end of her seat. Her eyes kept darting to the sides as though anticipating that anytime someone would attack her. I did not want to intrude upon her barrier, so I stood some distance away. Her suspicion of everyone (apart from L who she knew) was somewhat disturbing and I too felt awkward about my surroundings.

I was told later that Aisha’s term is over. They extended her term for a lack of place for her to stay. She refused to return to her village saying they would all kill her.

Now she will live at the hospice with her child who has a name in Pashto sounding like “the name-less one”.

She has left me her eyes — those that distrust, her innocent nature once stolen and this world is her enemy. I am reminded immediately of where I really am.

Laughing Backwards, Malady and the Life of Art

I am laughing backwards to swallow meaningless words, with a sense of humour. On my knees I am asking questions. I am searching for possibilities that a man has bitten an apple without renouncing paradise.

~~

It is a common malady to see the composure of a refined soul break at the crack of a soft poem.

It is the fatal leap of a dancer who bends herself back to fly as a feather.

The poem recites through the perfect clash of instruments, and the feather buoyant, is time standing still in slow motion.

That moment is the malady, when a lady is no more a lady, but an open soul, mal-.

Then she is triumphant, like the ending of a Ghalib poem.

(In Urdu poetry, often the author addresses himself by his name to make a point of something, the closing line is often powerful. Ghalib also means triumphant)

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There is an Islamic Sufi poem written by Rumi to Shams of Tabriz. The last line beautifully reads:

I have known pigeons who fly in a nowhere,
and birds that eat grainlessness,

And a tailor who sewed beautiful clothes
by tearing them to pieces

The body, with nature in nature, – is a beautiful story. I don’t want to perish one day and later discover when God played a reel of my life that he discovered I had spent less than a millionth of my life amongst nature’s beauty. Truly I find myself torn between my wanderlust (irresponsibility, free-thinking and idleness) and my ambitious career plans and charity projects. I once contemplated being a nomad. I still do. I know how to and can live in discomfort and yet build a palace out of it.

The Life of Art [I wrote this in Afghanistan]

My teacher said once to me ‘A life in Art is always a push and pull’ and that at some point I will have to discover a harmony between the two. Ying and Yang is not so much about balance as it is about two absolute opposite forces operating simultaneously. One has to be an artist; i.e creative enough to find a possibility that allows a life of art (of passion, of aesthetics, of romance) without necessarily being an ascetic in that field. I had thought once to give up dance. A dancer has no place in Allah’s world (Afghanistan), even though the Muslim Sufi Afghan poets once danced to worship him. But it is possible to dance, to write, to work for gender solidarity, to love children and to always be in love. I ask for no more.