Happy Monday!
Music I’m listening to —
Raag Yaman Tarana (Jugalbandi): This piece by Tejas Vinchurkar on the flute and Mitali Tejas Vinchurkar on the tabla is both beautiful and soothing. It is kind of stuck in my head now. I listened to it to relax, but somehow it made my mind more active and engaged. I l love how the video is shot. Does anyone know where this place is? It was definitely a pleasure to watch Mitali thoroughly engrossed in the music and enjoying her session with her positive energy and body language. Looking at her face, I think she would be exactly this way, positive and radiant, on and off camera.
A quote I’m pondering —
“Liberty and love
These two I must have.
For my love I’ll sacrifice My life.
For liberty I’ll sacrifice My love.”
― Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
A short film I’m watching —
Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon): This 34-minutes long, short French movie, written, produced, and directed by Albert Lamorisse in 1956, tells the story of a red balloon. A little boy gets a balloon one day and wants to take it to school with him. But the bus conductor refuses to let him board the bus with it. So the boy leaves the bus and runs all the way to school instead.
What happens next is unexpected. The balloon plays with him. Runs from him. Hides from him. Returns to him. Just follows him everywhere. The movie is about their friendship. The boy faces many challenges and so does the balloon. They save each other. And take care of each other. I think imagination is an amazing gift we are born with. For all of us, just closing our eyes and we can create a story out of thin air. This too is a brilliant execution of a simple, creative, imaginary thought. There is drama and there is comedy in the life of that shiny, red balloon.
The film won many awards, including an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay (only short film to win an Oscar for this category) and the Palme d’Or for short films at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was also very popular with children and educators.
An essay I’m reading —
Documents: This is an essay by Charles D’Ambrosio, an American essayist and short story writer. The words are understated. Sentences are bursting at the seam with emotion. Conversations are uncomfortable and some are incomplete. There is turbulence. But there is also calm. There is a man who has lost so much but he is okay. And when you read it, you know you too will be okay.
I felt like I was with Charles through the entire journey. I was with him when his father handed him that poem in 1972. I was with him on that rainy day at the café in downtown Seattle. I watched his brother Mike leave too that day. I felt overwhelmed but okay. I wanted him to stay longer but I also wanted him to be okay. I’ve read the suicide note with him every time and I might even remember its contents if I tried hard enough. And I’ve walked a hundred miles with him across the snow-covered hills till my mind was thoughtless and my body cold as ice.
He shared such delicate and personal details of love, loss and pain but somehow shielded me from breaking down. It felt like staring at a massive scar on my body after a traumatic accident and though there is no more physical pain, and no more recoveries to be made, but I know that exact moment, I carry the pain and I carry the burden.
A book I’m reading —
Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick: I’ve been fascinated by countries including Japan, Russia, China and most recently North Korea (not for the same reasons, each of them are unique and mysterious and ignite extreme curiosity about their history, culture, values, and lifestyle). However, it was only after I recently heard Park Yeon-mi on The Joe Rogan Experience that I went ahead to look for and grab a book that would give me a better background of how North Korea evolved into its current, horrendous, tyrannical state. I left Yeon-mi’s book, In Order to Live, for later since I’ve already heard about her experiences and traumatic stories in her interviews with Joe Rogan (episode 1691) and Jordan Peterson (Season 4, Episode 26).
Of all the people and their stories in this book, the story of Mi-ran, a rebellious girl from a poor and downtrodden family, and Jun-sang, a boy from a comparatively privileged family with social connections, resonated the most with me. He had access to education, books, knowledge, and opportunities. She had her own set of cruel challenges and senseless chores. He had dreams, she had restrictions. He had a present, a stomach full of food, and a promising future. She was barely able to escape the shadows of her family’s past that stained all her prospects. The beauty of this next sentence, sums up their entire relationship, their equation, their balance (or the lack of it). The depth, the anger, and the regret:
“What an idiot he had been. He hated himself; he had been every inch the indecisive intellectual, weighing every move until it was too late. It had taken him so long to ask her to marry him that she was gone. In truth, he had wanted to ask her to run away with him to South Korea, but didn’t have the courage. Throughout their relationship, he imagined himself as the one in charge. He was the man, he was two years older, he had a university degree. He brought her poems from Pyongyang and told her about books and movies she’d never heard of. But in the end she was the brave one and he was a coward. Nobody knew for sure, but he could feel it in his heart — she was in South Korea.”
What is also interesting is that when I think of this story, I am reminded of The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak. There too, amidst all the world’s chaos, violence, cruelty and hatred, was a subtle story of love between Liesel Meminger and Rudy Steiner. And you wonder how humans are programmed. One might be lonely, hungry, broken and beaten, but they find time to fall in love, to talk and connect. To understand and be understood. To share and receive. To hope. And to dream. In great tragedies, there is longing and an imagination of what could’ve been. People, no matter how lost, want to be found. They want to be heard. To be spoken to. To belong. This realisation made me smile.
The differences between a flourishing, functioning, and dysfunctional nation (like a family, tribe or the rest) are so minor at the beginning that you won’t know the unit is drifting towards murky, muddy waters. Before you know it, everything cascades into insanity and mayhem. And you’re left wondering how and when did the paradise transform into a hellhole.
When you read this book and any other book on history, humans, power, kingdoms and nations, you realise that no one or no country is safe from any of these very real, very possible outcomes. Cruelty and selfishness are just as real as humanity and selflessness.
Depending on the time, day and situation, every one of us is Satan or a saint.
Add certain motivations — corruption, starvation, execution, power, fear, ego and greed — the world changes quickly. We change quickly. What made us weep or cringe yesterday, doesn’t gnaw at our souls anymore. We are desensitised and dehumanised. We become the average and stay that way until something new shocks us. And then either that shock snaps us out or we experience it enough times to accept it as the new normal.
Most of us feel lucky we are not in North Korea, but when I put myself under the microscope, I too am trapped in one very real variant of the same ideologies and mindset.
I added this here because I was reminded of it. The words seem to aptly summarize the world we are in. And sadly, it summarizes my attitude towards this world:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.