The Darkest Evening of the Year

 This is a blog post I should have done a few months ago, but well, better late than never. Here is my first attempt to add a bit of color to my blog with my very own photography:

The Campanile

Lake Laverne, Central Campus

Sir Lancelot and Elaine in all their grace

Angry birds!! >.<

Horse Barn of the Vet School

The sky above Parks Library

My Chamber :)

Loneliness is Punishment

Imagine four walls around you, dirty and smeared with feces. Imagine a ceiling low, pressing the humid, stagnant Summer air on you. Imagine the noises, screams, obscenities and pleas wailing from afar. Imagine you, alone, imprisoned, in solitary confinement, for life.


Loneliness and personal space is something I treasure, but I only came to realize that these very things can be and are being used to punish humans and torture them to insanity after reading this in NYTimes from March 11.

According to this article, in 1831, following his visit to the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where "officials were pioneering a novel rehabilitation method based on the Quaker principles of reflection and penitence...solitary confinement", the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

“Placed alone in view of his crime [the prisoner] learns to hate it, and if his soul be not yet surfeited with crime, and thus have lost all taste for any thing better, it is in solitude, where remorse will come to assail him.”

"Prisoners are humans," reads the mural on the walls of the Welikada Prison, Colombo. This notion, in spite of its simplicity and goddamn obviousness, did not strike me as important until one sunny afternoon somewhere in mid-2010. A leisurely walk down Green Path- before its coronation and renaming by His Infernal Majesty, in the days when Green Path was just that, a green path speckled by the colors of street artists- led me to the Colombo Art Gallery.

The exhibition that day, was by prisoners of Welikada. Posters and paintings, sketches and wood carvings filled a small hall in the east of the building. I remember walking with a group of Catholic nuns from the Rotary Institute, marveling at the depth of feeling these artists had captured in their work. I remember a middle-aged man standing next to me, dressed in a neat white sarong and shirt. My memory might be fooling me, but I remember a bushy black mustache and kind, expressive black eyes beneath a wrinkled forehead. He stood tall, with his arms behind his back, nodding his head to the side to agree with my immature critique of art, and telling me the modest price of each piece. Posters drawn on cheap white Bristol board and detailed sketches made with blue carbon ink on white A4 papers were priced at around a Rs. 100 or so.

"We can't afford art supplies," explained someone who was there. When I was ready to leave, I fell into a conversation with someone who was at the counter, an organizer of the event and a volunteer involved in rehabilitation work. I remember him making my head buzz with the pathetic situation of the prison system, a problem, I now understand, not limited to Sri Lanka but also affecting the US, where budget cuts have started to threaten the living conditions of inmates.

But I need not explain that the situation in Sri Lanka is far worse. When corruption sweeps into overcrowded prisons in a state with an extremely slow judicial system, mayhem is unleashed. Administration is slack and the division between the police and the Dept. of Prisons create more problems than solutions. Disease, abuse and a myriad of other problems are rampant, and saddest of all is that children under the age of 5 live with their offending mothers in these hellholes. But at least, prisoners in Sri Lanka are fortunate in that "solitary" confinement is made impossible.

He also told me of a few programs that his organization had undertaken- separate wards, painted in pink, for pregnant women, a preschool for children, training and classes in sewing, hair cutting and masonry, and religious programs. Even though these may not have the impact of much-needed policy changes, even a small step in the right direction matters.

He also handed me a newsletter- a publication of news, and beautiful poetry and verse by inmates. I recall a poem about a mother, another about waiting for someone, I cannot remember who, but the hopefulness the writer embraced with his words lingers with me.

Another thing he told me remains with me today. He pointed at the man in white, and said, his voice low and serious, "he is a prisoner too." I was shocked. Why did he not run for his life? Where were the shackles, the chains, the guns? Why did I not realize I was speaking to "a criminal"?

When I was preparing to leave, with a beautiful painting of the Aukana Buddha statue in my arms, the man in white led me to the door and said good-bye. He smiled at me with a twinkle in his eyes, and I smiled too as I descended the stairs onto the street, free to roam where my heart desired. I imagined him, waiting there, watching me walk away. A blue prison bus with barred windows must have been waiting for him somewhere, a small cell, a bunk bed, a dented metal dinner plate, not bearing his name, but his number, the code of his punishment. A light afternoon drizzle began to fall upon the streets, but I may be wrong, my memory may be fooling me.

Reading List: Spring 2012

I have promised myself I would spend Spring break efficiently, productively and memorably. I have so many plans, that to fulfill them all I would have to read about a novel or two a day. Yes, my plans mostly revolve around reading, and also writing. Call it wishful thinking.

I would also love to do a little exploring now that the weather is getting warmer. Today I spotted a few green saplings on trees. (I did see them about a month ago as well, but those were killed by the return of the snow.) Unfortunately I do not own a camera. Thinking of which I should probably add some Winter landscape photos I managed to shoot about a month ago.

Like a boss, today I added another few credits to my already tight schedule, bringing the whole to a staggering- Mother of God- 18! Yes, I am insane like that. In an ideal universe I would spend the next few days catching up with schoolwork. But we know that is not the case, the universe may be metaphysically deterministic but it is inherently chaotic in nature- blah! So yeah.

Just to make my expectations seem a little realistic and to turn me off the desire to 9gag from morning till night, I thought I would make a list of books that I hope to read (sans ugly textbooks). If I actually manage to digest them all, you can expect reviews.

Here goes nothing, in no particular order:

Fiction:

• Cather in the Rye- J D Salinger
• Gamperaliya- M. Wickramasinghe
• Yuganthaya- M. Wickramasinghe
• Catch 22- Joseph Heller
• Tropic of Capricorn- Miller
• Memoirs of a Geisha- Arthur Golden

Non-fiction

• White Power, White Pride- Dobratz
• Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail
• The Blind Watchmaker- Dawkins
• I also want to get my paws on some Brian Greene... Insha'Allah!

I also have a Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson!

If I actually manage to finish all these AND a decent amount of writing, should the world end in December I will die happy.

Oh, I almost forgot- I also plan on treating myself to some proper homemade food and an overdose of fabulous music, which, if I remember right, I promised to share on my blog. The music I mean, not food. I don't share food.

Toilet Walls

"Oh hey, you pee too?
Sweet, me too!
Now we have something in common."
~ Author unknown, Parks Library Toilet

Emily Dickinson embraced a sense of loneliness in her poetry that  injects into us deep and powerful emotions through the fragments of beauty she left behind more than a century ago.

But what today's loners, our generation of children of broken homes and broken hearts that carry individualism on our shoulders, express ourselves through is not only drastically different but also rather ludicrous. We make friends on Facebook, make our say on Twitter and bond on toilet walls.

On the door of the same toilet cubicle that had the above rather unpoetic verse, was scribbled an optimistic say about Christmas being around the corner. Someone had cut it out and written "the birth death of Jesus." Below that "Resurrection," someone else had piped in enthusiastically. Perhaps a while later, "Spring Break" was brought up by another toilet user. On this cue, yet another person had expressed their excitement about Beltane. "Yeah, Wicca," someone had said. "Pagan, actually" another person had corrected. And this ramble of opinions and voices had come to a climax when a toilet user asked why you simply cannot accept the existence of other religions? From there on things deviate into a rather philosophical debate on theology, all on the door of a toilet.

I understand that a university is a boiling pot of intellectualism fueled by freedom of expression and youth hormones. But to take philosophy of religion with you to the toilet seems obscene to me. "Do something that will make you orgasm," was a helpful suggestion on the very same door. Now that seemed at least more appropriate, given that this was in the library, (for the lack of euphemism) a place that gets any bibliophile's juices flowing.

In another corner there was a lettering not scribbled, but strongly etched into the door, something that made me smile, and restored my hope in humanity. It simply read "KONY 2012."

On Fears...

If this blog is to be truly confessional, my abode of secrets, the place I come to to share all that is in me, then I should start with my fears. The biggest, most perverse fear I have is not the thought of dying alone, not the danger of a global nuclear annihilation, nor the horror of watching your own children grow up listening to haraam music. It is unemployment.

I agree, I may never be un-employed. I will find a job, somewhere. If worse comes to worst, I will scrub toilet seats, or may be even become a newspaper columnist in the obituary section. Because we all know, no matter what happens to the economy, there are always obituaries to be written.

But honestly, the fear of not knowing where you are going can be crippling at times. I made a promise to myself long ago, so long ago that I cannot recall when, that I would follow my heart. I was born a dreamer.
I was also born naive. Groping in the dark, I stubbornly believe that I can make a difference. I do not know what it is that I want to change. There is so much in this world I would rather do away with, "as housewives do a fly." I want to rid the world of hunger, teach every child to read and write, legalize cannabis.
My struggle today is small- feeding myself off canned vegetarian vegetable soup, teaching myself out of borrowed textbooks and waiting for spring blossoms.

The above mentioned fear and the resulting rant was inspired by a performance by Avenue Q!