I have been thinking about what I wrote in my previous post about beautiful women- ok, it was a bit silly, the lust and resentment showed through quite clearly, burning for an aloof type of beauty. Two words suffice: Catherine Deneuve. Snow maiden supreme, the cultivated object of lust for art film goers everywhere. A quick googling shows her as having played roles as a bisexual vampire in "The Hunger" and an "icy, sexually adventurous housewife" in "Belle de Jour" ( and obtained cult status in both roles).

Once she came to Mauritius and the television journalist interviewing her was actually stammering. The other day I read an interview of Camille Paglia where she said she once saw her in a department store, and she followed her, hiding behind shelves to snoop on her.
So, if a dominatrix like Ms Paglia loses her self control when faced with her, what do you expect from your humble servant, a founder/life member of Save the Nerds ( You Might Need Us to Write Your Love Letters) ? Should they teach courses at school on "How to deal with people radiating a higher form of eroticism than you can bear" ( in her case, you could add " and who personify a certain idea of France, or rather Paris" but that’s another story. Amazing, though, the degree of personification. It’s as if the 16th arrondissement had become a woman. And yes, she was born in Paris).

But really, if we have wine tasting courses, why don’t people give courses in eroticism ? How to differentiate between the different types of erotic impulses, how they correspond to different feelings , Latin hot ( Penelope Cruz, tequila shots, salsa music, brazilian food) , Japanese ( girly and fluffy on the surface, with very sharp desire beneath, like a hidden dagger) black ( in different aspects, the higher forms being Diana Ross singing "Baby Doll", Miles Davis playing "Kind of Blue", almost transcendentally stylish, for more rugged forms, see current rap video clips. Rural black, rough-hewn, teasing and sweating: early blues, sega dance and lyrics ), California look ( athletic, almost breathless kind of blonde girl with body perfectly shaped and tanned by endless swimming and aerobics. Is best expressed in Valspeak , like I mean, it was kind of great, you know, whatever, so that the vapidity of the language matches that of the erotic desire) Indian ( revolves around the sari, and what may be glimpsed underneath, a bit of cleavage, of teasingly twisted bare waist. Hair cut short or kept in a bun can reveal the back and neck to great advantage. A lot of repression involved, due to social convention, which can increase the libido to surprising heights), Celtic misty ( lying with one's head on the lap of a blonde girl , under a bent over Celtic cross, as she sings mournfully with a lyre, dark cliffs in the background – a diffuse eroticism, which can yet morph into gothic mood, cemetery at midnight, ghost of dead love takes possession of the body of one’s distant, conventional wife) Art Nouveau/ fin de siecle ( exquisite beauty, smell of something overripe, and of opium. Figure of Ophelia floating over the water. Eros and Thanatos in close embrace),Chinese ( the qipao, high necked and severe, yet close hugging, conventional yet sensual).
Some rather special atmospheres : the Godfather ( smell of tomato and olive coming from downstairs, sound of a baby crying somewhere in the large house, taut feeling of life and death in the air , making love like they will come and kill you tomorrow, prayer for a son afterwards) ,
Earth Mother Goddess ( making love, very slowly, to Angelina Jolie, on top of a mesa, in the middle of the Grand Canyon, and gazing at the stars afterwards), Versailles ( how did they get out of these things ?) 1960’s ( in the mud, with Jimi Hendrix breaking his Fender to pieces in the background)

More contemporary: pop/ rock ( the fading light from late evening autumn sky dimly lights the darkening bedroom, in which a short haired, flat chested girl delicately places an alight cigarette atop a pile of stubs, in an overflowing ashtray. She then looks at the palm of her hands, on which are tatooed, on the left: "Love" and on the right "Pain". After a moment of reflection, she picks up the cigarette, draws a last smoke out of it, and crushes it on the "o" of the "Love", while a teardrop runs down to the tip of her nose. Shades of metallic blue and grey. Heartbraking beauty in littered alleyways. Early death).

Urban ( office atmosphere, strong coffee, highly strung people , repressed sensuality, exploding in a kiss in the lift) - which brings us to sexual fantasies ( the lascivious secretary, etc). The course would not advocate indulgence. It would be a mental exploration of different erotic settings, help people to talk of repressed erotic feelings, and if necessary could lead to therapy, if it lays bare emotional or psychological issues.

It would also be interesting to explore the connections between the atmospheres. How celtic misty leads to art nouveau/fin de siecle ( early romanticism leading to symbolism and art decadent), and how both lead to pop/ rock: the figure of the brooding mysterious rock star ( Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison) goes back, through Baudelaire ( fin de siecle) to Byron, first pop icon of the modern era ( women literally threw themselves in his arms). Also explore sexual fantasies about people of other cultures ( and how they fantasise on us, and their own sexual fantasies within their culture). It would be a good prop for cultural studies.

But beyond that it would be a celebration of life, of the beauty of men and women. It could also lead to a higher awareness of death, the sister of eroticism. We always make love on the edge of a cliff. After all, exclaimed Sanskrit poet Bhartrhari:

"What is the use of many idle speeches !

Only two things are worth a man's attention-

the youth of full-breasted women, prone to fresh pleasures,

and the forest (*)"

(*) meaning, the life of the hermit

It could also lead to awareness of the flight of time, because , inevitably, to plunge in erotic fantasies involves bringing back memories of the first pangs of desire, towards a certain girl ( now fat, husband is a regular bonehead) and later towards other women ( where can they be, now ?) . "Ungrateful lover" exclaimed Prakrit poet Hala, 2000 years ago

" (...) still I see the mud

in the village street,

which, on a rainy night,

I trod for your sake, shameless one !"

Our mind has not yet digested the fact that the earth is round. We feel thrilled by Nehru’s statement, in his independence speech: "Tonight, when the world sleeps, India shall awake to its destiny", awed by a French travel writer’s imagining, while passing by Mecca at prayer time, of being " at the center of a vast corolla, spreading all over the world, of kneeling and rising figures", charmed by the title of a J.J. Goldman song : "Un dimanche soir sur la terre", with its evocation of a world plunged in the melancholy atmosphere of a Sunday evening.
How annoying, upon further thought, to have to acknowledge the fatal flaw at the heart of each of these statements. How annoying too, are time zones, removing our beloved ones from us not only in space, but in the time of daily life ( when we wake up, they are not doing the same, there).
The Copernican revolution was the first of the great mental revolutions. It is probably also the most disturbing in our idea of the world. The next one, in chronological order, was the Darwinian revolution. It is profoundly annoying to religious persons, but not all of us are like that. It can be very amusing to compare our manners with those of the great apes ( how fortunate, by the way, that the "violent ape" theory, which states that we are violent and militaristic apes, like the chimpanzees, is being challenged by observations of the bonobos, also our close cousins, yet peaceful and immensely fond of sex). Moreover, we do not often go to the zoo and hence rarely see our cousins, but we often lift our heads to gaze at the stars, and feel awed, yet a bit forlorn.
The next revolution, the Freudian one, has entered our daily language, yet it lacks the immediate appeal of the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions. With it, one enters the phase where conceptual revolutions become like great monuments that everyone passes by, but most people have only a vague figure of to whom they are dedicated to.
Thos becomes more obvious with the Einsteinian revolution, around which there floats the myth that only twelve people in the world understand what it is about. Everyone has heard of E= MC2, but even to go on Wikipedia to try to know more about it smacks of presumption. It is like a remote, frozen planet in our cultural universe, understood only by some specialists, and the stories they tell are so fantastic – of a particle passing through two points in space at the same time, of a phenomenon being influenced by the fact of beng observed – that one cannot help shrugging one’s shoulders. It is as if scientists had taken leave of their common sense.
But this is precisely the pattern made by scientific revolutions through time : as human beings, we seem to be predisposed to believe that the earth is flat, that the sun and other stars move around it, that there is a God, who created us in his image, that we are the wisest creatures in the universe, and that the objects around us obey to certain laws, like they cannot go through two doors at the same time. This is the way the world should be. And this is exactly what the scientific revolutions have been dismantling through history.
Like an animal keeper in a zoo who feeds and cleans a chimpanzee, but torments him by forever changing his cage, with each one more uncomfortable than the other, Science has given us running water and antibiotics, but it keeps givng us a less and less human-friendly vision of the world and, like the chimpanzee, we have grown silently resentful of it while still being dependent of it.
The coming scientific revolutions ( for now is no longer the time of the solitary geniuses, when the world can be thrown out of kelter by an Einstein scribbing an equation on the back of an envelope; nowadays scientific research is undertaken by large well funded teams, their every progress made known to the world by specialised reporters) are anticipated by something approaching dread, like the knowledge that next autumn one will be sent to a renowned, yet particularly awful boarding school, and after this, one shall no longer be a child. Yet the simile is not appropriate: a little boy wants to grow up, even as he dreads the moment of leaving his childhood, for he knows, by observation of older children, that they have become strong, beautiful and full of knowledge. What the future scientific revolutions promise to offer has the feeling of gifts meant to improve one, yet that could go horribly wrong: genetic manipulation , artifical intelligence. One wishes one’s parents didn’t try so hard to give one the very best there is on the market.

-II-

Sometimes writers make broad sweeping statements in a striking and beautiful manner, leaving us with an odd mixture of feelings. It has to do with the mood in which we are reading . When we plunge in a novel, we go back to that eager we had as children listening to a bed time story – we recreate the dim lights, the way the words rang in the room, how one’s parent’s hands flew about, throwing stark shadows on the walls. We are thrilled to let our imagination to take over control of our mind. It wants to rest from reality. Fiction is fuzzy, warm and ordered. Reality is cold, blurred and incoherent – after jogging, having reached the place where the footpath meets the highway, one’s mind was clean and sharp from the physical exercice, taking in things with sharpness – and what it saw in the dimming light was cars zipping by, the tangled bush atop the pile of rocks, and the unlovely sugarcane, a bland, metallic taste to things, like when, as a child, one stuck a spoon in one’s mouth to see how it tastes. One suddenly has a recollection of passing by a clerk’s office in a hospital one day – the horror of administrative blandness , the world of file drawers and memoranda, piled upon the blank, one dimensional world of the hospital, in which everything is exactly what it is, and nothing else, a chair is a chair, a bed is a bed, you are a body about to undergo an operation.
Fiction is respite from this blandness of the world, it is a sweet overgrowing of ivy over the ugly concrete wall. Going beyond the cozy feeling of listening to a bedtime story, it can obtain the vividness of the dream state, where a special atmosphere pervades everything, and the most banal actions we do, or objects we see, seem imbued with a profound meaning,. Natasha dancing with Prince Andre, in War and Peace, or Joseph K… waking up in the first line of The Trial , to find that he is going to be arrested ( Kafka’s novels are especially strong in creating this dream atmosphere).
In the middle of this, suddenly drops in the authorial voice, like, in the middle of a dream one hears the newscaster telling us good morning at seven o’clock as the radio alarm goes on. Normally, it wakes one up, breaking the pleasant feeling. But sometimes, the voice of the newscaster blends in the dream which goes on for a few more moments. The newscaster is talking of serious worldly events and we are interpreting them within the world of the dream.
I felt this the other day when, while reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s autobiography ( "Living to tell the tale") I came by his statement, while describing how he grew among women , of how "this gave me the strong feeling that it is women who run the world, endlessly tending and repairing it while we men always destroy it by our brutality". Coming as it did, steeped in a magic atmosphere ( he had, before, given a moving description of his elder aunt in the room next to his, of her eyes, her smell and her clumsy gait, only to reveal that at the last line that, according to his mother, he could not possibly have known so much about her, as she had died before his birth), I took it as uncovering a profoundly buried truth. Later, I poked holes in it – it was only true in so far as we would see the world as a sort of house, which women keep neat and tidy, and in which men are naughty boys forever breaking the vase in the living room. There was something inert about this vision. Yet something of the flavour of an occult secret revealed, still clings to it.
Another authorial statement I once heard, puzzled me –and I guess, shall do so to the end of my days, for it is an unsolvable mystery. I forget which author it was, and he ( I think it was a man) said : " She was very beautiful, and like all great beauties, unhappy, for such women attract only the worst kind of men. The others feel unworthy". What mixed feelings this hit me with ! First of all, glee: serves them right ! Followed by envy towards the author: how many beautiful women does he know, that he can say this with such confidence ? I know nothing about very beautiful women. There are not so many of them, and they are rarely alone. I have never gone to talk to one. Ha ! This proves the author’s point, then: I feel shy towards them, and I am a good man ( I am sure I am). Therefore, good men do avert their gaze from very beautiful women, these overbright suns which end up clouded by a nebula of bitchy girlfriends and medallion men.
As they drive their sports cars, gifts of shark toothed lawyer boyfriends and sugardaddies, little can they guess how, like the Chorus in a Greek tragedy, their Fate- like crochety aunts are already prophesying their doom at Sunday reunions, while their spider like, cardigan –knitting fingers undo a loop with vicious ease. Soon, the overdone wedding with a loudmouthed property developer, too soon, the lonely evenings as he spends more and more time with mistresses – on the king size bed, her tears, melting on the linen sheets, join those of her sister souls in time, the dancing girls in the palaces of the kings of before, to form a river of sorrowful beauty.
Yet doubt persists. How can the author be so sure ? How many beautiful women can he know, anyway ? After all, he is only a writer, not a casino tycoon. What kind of world would it be, in which Angelina Jolie married the scriptwriter of Mr and Mrs Smith, instead of marrying Brad Pitt ? Marilyn Monroe doesn’t count, the proof of her being crazy was that she married Arthur Miller and tried to become a geek too. Ok, this is too nasty. Let us count, then. Marilyn Monroe makes one. Juliette Recamier counts two, although Chateaubriand was noble and glamorous apart from being a writer. Graham Greene also had an affair with a beautiful woman, whose name I cannot remember. That’s three. This is a catch 22 situation: if I can make this list long enough, it means that beautiful glamorous women can go out with writers, which means the guy who wrote the lines above would have known enough to write these lines. If I do not get enough, it means that they do not, and that the writer is right in his estimation that beauty is an exile on a lonely island, in which one ends up mating with gorillas. But wait a minute, if I do get enough names, in the list, how come the writer would still have written those lines, unless writers themselves also counted as "the worst of men". Ach, what an annoyance his statement has proved to be.

-II-

The other day I had an interesting discussion with some friends regarding an article entitled "Are we Indians mediocre?" at the link below :

http://www.desijournal.com/article_print.asp?ArticleId=243

What my friends said, to sum up a long discussion, was that Indian creativity is handicapped by two factors, one cultural and the other socio-economic.
Most Indians, they argued, do not really understand Western culture. The intellectuals do, but not the normal middle class Indians. The latter are very good at learning the technical skills of Western technology. They are also very fond, in their youth, of the trashy entertainments of pop culture, both the Indian and the Western type – pop music, television, computer games and chat. If they go to Europe, they will be happy to visit museums, shopping malls and amusement parks. But the philosophical basis of Western culture remains foreign to them – its trust in man’s reason and wisdom, its emphasis on the development of man’s analytical and creative faculties, as well as his physical faculties through sports. Its strong sense of curiosity and wonder at the world. Unfortunately, even when doing very well at learning science, such Indians do not understand the other leg upon which rests Western culture, which is the humanities. Yet the humanities are crucial to appreciating the world, for they give one three great skills in this respect: character, proportion and background.

Character – a sense of individuality and energy in any idea
Proportion – it can be the sense of ethical proportion ( justice) or the sense of aesthetic proportion ( beauty). There is a dialectic between character and proportion. Character is an active principle, a breaking out into the world. Any strong personality starts by being biased, opiniated. Proportion is a static principle. A great work of art is in a state of equilibrium, its strong lines of force finely balanced.
Background – is, simply, the background : a great mass of cultural and historical knowledge. The background feeds the foreground, knowing more tends to strengthen one’s appreciation of things, provided one has character and proportion.

The problem with ignoring the humanities is that one tends to fall in the divinities. As our Indian grows in age, and that the allure of pop culture fades, he withdraws into a life of arranged marriage, work and puja, with maybe watching some Bollywood movie by way of spicying up his life. He even starts to dislike Western culture as being hedonistic and materialistic. But he never realises that beyond this vulgar aspect of Western culture, there exists a noble philosophy, which is the source of all the West’s wealth, greatness and sophistication: a culture of questioning ( "sapere aude", have the courage to know, was how Kant defined the Age of Enlightenment) and exploration.
As long as the average Indian ignores these fundamental aspects of Western culture, it will be difficult for India to be as brillant and creative as the West. It can be a great factory of medium quality goods, and a great outsourcing destination, but it cannot match the love of life which makes the West shine in sports, culture and science. India will prefer to wrap itself in the routine of work, ritual, and some Bollywood dreaming on the side.

The socio- economic aspect is linked to the caste system. The latter tends to be seen as a cultural phenomenon, but it is also pretty much a socio-economic system, whereby the Dalits ( untouchables) are landless labourers, who work for intermediate farmers ( of the Shudra caste) and large landlords ( usually upper caste). Such a feudal agrarian system demands that the Dalits be kept ignorant and docile, and India’s elitist education system serves it well, with its emphasis on elite universities, and its neglect of primary education, especially in the rural areas. Illiteracy in India is of more than 30 %, with far greater proportions among the Dalits.
Seeing things from the point of view of its landlords, India’s feudal agrarian system is working well. If it comes to having a modern industrial economy ( 19th century- 1950’s type), dependent on a moderately educated workforce, the waste in human resources is quite huge. If one thinks of "high modernity", the high technology industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, which need a highly educated workforce and a nexus of universities and research institutes like bubbling cauldrons of innovation, clearly the set up is not ideal. Yet India is doing well in the new technologies. Because of its size, even its elite population is big enough to create a dynamic in this respect. Also, the boom has been mostly in the south, where the society seems to be less feudal than in the north. India is large enough to contain both a booming IT sector, and Dalits for whom access to the village water tap is but a distant dream.
Apart from its enormous human suffering and waste of talent, the caste system also clogs up the politics and administration of India with its caste based politics, and its quotas for entry in the service. It distorts the life of most Indians by influencing their love life and their careers. It is clearly a great poison, like the pestilence which came from the sea of nectar during its churning by the gods and demons– and there is no Shivji to drink it.

About my friends' arguments: I guess many people will find the statement "Most Indians do not understand Western culture" quite infuriating and patronising. They could point out, for example, that many Westerners, especally the young are crassly ignorant of Western culture, and indeed of any culture, and end up as conformists and religious extremists. They could also point out that one does not need to be immersed in Werstern humanities to understand the concepts of character, proportion and background as these will also operate in non Western literatures. Therefore, someone could be immersed in Hindi literature and be greatly elegant and creative in thought.

I guess that what my friends are trying to say is that while they see India forgeing ahead in science and culture, and producing many brillant writers and thinkers at the top end, such as Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Pankaj Mishra, Amartya Sen, yet middle class India remains profoundly conformist in their eye. They believe this stifles India's creative energies.

Anyway, I found the argumentation interesting, so I decided to post it here. I guess it could bring in it strong reactions, but then the whole debate is a pretty challenging one.

(about my previous post) I guess the situation of our character, wandering in the lobby in the five star hotel, hesitant to join the ranks of the rich, would feel very odd to an American audience, if one goes by stereotypes about them. It is said that for Americans, wealth is the natural reward of hard work. Besides material enjoyment, wealth enables you to meet other hard working and intelligent persons like yourself, and the higher you go, the better the company gets. After all, at the very top, there sits Bill Gates, Steve Jobbs and other really really clever and good people. Whereas at the bottom, you'll have drug addicts and all the nasty boys who tripped and pinched you in the school courtyard.

I can't help feel attracted to a country that has produced such a philosophy, even when I have read about how in fact, the dices are loaded there as much as everywhere, the schools in the poor areas are decrepit, and the wealthy make it to Yale with awful high school grades, leaving the rest of us on the roadside, looking on, jaws agape. Yet there is such energy and optimism in such an outlook.

I guess one great charm of the US, on social matters, must be that, given the size and diversity of the country, there are countless ways there of being rich, or middle class ( I am not so sure about being poor, it looks like it's got two broad categories, either you're poor in the countryside, or you're poor in town, and that's it ). Even in a relatively smaller country like France, with a more rigid social system, you get interesting variations, subjects for social comedies. A small town doctor and a lecturer in a university town - the doctor is into full contact thai boxing, and has stuffed his head with all kind of supermarket buddhism ( " it's all got to do with inner strength, in the middle of the fight, in your moment of greatest danger, you can feel it rising, the energy pouring out , it's the satori, your chakras are opening, yes, yes, my master used to say...") . The lecturer is the sandal wearing type, tousled hair and beard, dirty pullover; a fossilised marxist, he still sends half his salary to finance the sandinistas in nicaragua. He, in a way, has also stuffed his head with marxism and cannot renounce it.

Another possibility: the lecturer earns a miserable living teaching sanskrit and writes poems in ancient greek on the side, as well as a historical novel taking place in 15 th century Dordogne, inspired by the correspondence left by an ancestor, which he has happened on ( he comes from countryside noblesse de robe, members of the old provincial Parlements ). However, as he writes the novel, he cannot help feeling that he could improve it if he twists it in a certain manner, by which his ancestor would turn out to be the villain. Should he sacrifice his ancestor’s reputation, for the sake of a good novel ? His passion for the past becomes a burden on him.

The doctor also comes from good, through not well off, gentry. He owns a vineyard, an expensive and time consuming passion. He and his wife are pillars of the local Catholic church, his daughter plays the piano. He earns a good income, yet barely enough to meet his commitments - the vineyard, the daughter's Catholic school – all of which are for the sake of keeping the family standards. He knows he should sacrifice the vineyard, yet hesitates – he himself disliked the Catholic school he went at. He feels the desire to take revenge on it, and to please himself, by keeping the vineyard and sacrificing the school seat.

In a society where food, shelter and clothing are cheap, people have greater leisure to create a persona. In a medieval society this was the priviledge of the rich, hence also their gorgeous clothes, while the poor were in uniform grey and brown rags.

To come back to our character, maybe this is what he intuitively realises, while sipping a daiqiri in the hotel's beach cafe. Money gives you the leisure to create yourself a personality. " I should be passionately into something. It will make me happy and I'll meet like minded people and make friends" Problem is, he was always the average Joe. He would come back from work, heat something in the microwave, watch something on television, or play a computer game, or chat on internet. He used to have a collection of matchbox cars. "I'm not going to set up the world's largest matchbox car museum. That would be ridiculous, it would be just like what I suspected, rich people are maniacs. Anyway I don't like matchbox cars to that extent. So, what is I really like ?" he wonders.

A possible story: a middleclass fellow goes on a trip, at vertiginous speed through the social classes, crashing through the glass ceilings within a few months. Joe , average Joe, travelling salesman for an insurance company loses his job one day when the said company goes bankrupt . Most of his savings were in a fund held by his company, so he has just enough money left to move to a rougher part of town and take up a job as a milkman. His/her friends trying to persuade him and themselves that they still value him for his personality, but they rapidly stop going to see him because they don't like the area he now lives in, so unsafe, and they don't invite him out either because he can't afford to buy a drink at the pub they usually go to. Suddenly, for some reason, another fall down one crucial level, from being working poor to being a handout receiver (that terrible dip below the surface of society . Those above you - that is all almost everyone, even the working poor - now don't talk to you anymore, they only give, or refuse to give. What is terrible is the silence, like being very deep under the water. He starts to understand why the bums living in cardboards keep shouting nonsense at themselves, and other bums, to create an illusion of dialogue. There is food and warm beds in the charity homes, but the handout receiver is an exile far away from humanity. Even a murderer, fresh out of jail, could get some grudging respect, out of fear. But to have old ladies reading the Bible to you, and lecturing you about the importance of cleanliness. Even a poodle gets affection - you are less than that. Most of the bums are half mad. From there, after a few months, a sudden tug of the cord, and he goes up, up, up, crashing the glass ceilings from the bottom this time: he has picked up a lottery ticket with the big prize. A daze, a blur: he can barely breathe. Suddenly, he feels afraid: after these months of loneliness at the very bottom, would not being at the very top another sort of loneliness ? Maybe the very rich are also monomaniacs. He craves for familiar ground. So, he moves to another town, buys a nice middle class flat, clothes, car, and eventually gets back a nice middle class job like the one he used to have. And starts making friends who feel pretty much like the ones he used to have. However, various feelings start to nag him. A vague kind of guilt. Since I 've known poverty, shouldn't I, sort of, do something for them" Where to start ? The poor need friends, advice, but he's scared of going back there. Especially afraid of the bums. They live in the past, while their bodies are stuck in an eternal present, every day being like yesterday and the day before. Another irritant: having to pretend being middle class. One day he dates a woman, and brings her to an expensive french restaurant, and she thinks it is for a special occasion, - he's giong to ask her to marry him - in fact he just wanted to try the food. He hates going to that kind of place by himself - he is very afraid of being alone now, and dreads the thought of sitting by himself in that half lit restaurant, waiting for the snobbish waiter to bring the next course, feeling that everyone is watching him. And he does not want to date a rich woman either; he feels he would never really be at ease in that milieu , because he was not born into it, and came into it too late - and just after having been a bum. Taking a holiday, he stays in a five star hotel in the caribbeans, and realises that he still hates being in a hotel room at night as much as he used to, when he was a travelling salesman, and it makes no difference that this one is in a five star hotel. Who to talk to, either, during the day ? Ach, poor guy. Shall he have to resign himself to being rich ? Should he go into philantropy ? For which cause , how does one start redoing the world ? The poor children, the environment, AIDS. The bums he knew, they were out there for so many reasons - family quarrels, lost job ( just like him)... how to tackle this - go into politics ? This is a story that could on to many pages ! A possible twist: there then appears a government spokesman who tells him : "We know that you have won this lottery of many million dollars, though you insisted on keeping your anonymity. It is your patriotic duty to spend this money - we have a small economy , which has been languishing lately. Private vice, public virtue- spend, build yourself a palace, it shall stimulate the construction industry. Take up a chauffeur, cooks, gardeners, create jobs. Make yourself rich friends abroad, and then bring them home, good for our tourism industry, organise charity balls, our mundane life is moribund. The world needs rich people. If they did like you, that would bring the world economy crashing down".

I have been reading about feminism on the net, and have come across the idea , popular among some feminists, that more women should be at the head of governments because this will lead to a more peaceful world, given men's brutal instincts. I guess the people behind this idea have never been near a history book, or have never been in charge of any group of people. It is true that there is an agressive instinct among men, which will lead to fights and competition. But to imagine that the president of a country reacts to news of a border incident - a clash between two patrols - or to a report that country X is conducting trade dumping policy towards his own country, by an immediate macho let's crush their balls posture , is to betray a shocking ignorance of the power games inside states.

Suppose there is a border incident - "our " fishing boat was caught by "their" coast guard for fishing into their waters. The area in question is actually disputed. Immediately, everyone within the system starts shouting at the top of their voice. The tabloids go bersek. The fishermen communities ask for navy protection against this type of harassment. The industry guy says we must bear in mind the valuable cross border trade and investment opportunities in "their" country. The political advisor says that in view of coming partial elections in a conservative constituency, it may be good to look tough, within a certain limit. The diplomacy guy advises that the delivery of a note of protest, followed by a phone call to their president would be sufficient. After all, talks are still ongoing on the area under question, and should not be allowed to derail because of an isolated incident. And so on, every one chips in, defending his own turf. The president himself, is torn. His better angels tell him that the diplomat may be right. But a dark voice is also whispering that it may not be bad if relations with their country goes sour for some time, that would cancel the proposed investment trip to be led by the minister of finance and the minister of industry - these two have lately grown a bit uppity, have been making jokes in party circles about the old man losing his grip, that it is time for a change at the top.. it would be nice to clip their wings - the relations can always be repaired in good time... this is how politics work - everyone wants something from you, you also want something, at the same time, you are supposed to work for the benefit of others, not for yourself. There is the political cunning, but there is also what President Bush senior called "the vision thing" which means you must have (i) a vision (ii) the ability to realise the latter (iii) the ability to articulate this vision to the people. All this has nothing to do about being a man or a woman. Some people have the "political instinct". It is a fine balance: to be able to relate to the people, and to listen to advisors, yet without becoming fuzzy. To have political cunning, yet not become a Machiavillean figure. To have a vision, yet not become the preacher type.

Even in the premodern world, where things were supposedly more rough, where a king could simply order his armies to conquer other countries for the sake of his personal glory, things look pretty complex when you examine them closely. From the 15th century onwards, two great powers in Europe were in competition - the Habsurgs and France ( "the rivalry of a family and of a nation" as a historian put it) . Had there been only two such powers in Europe, maybe they would have reached balance. But of course, there were smaller states, and their internal problems would lead to wider conflicts. When Milan called for the assistance of France against Naples in 1494, this started a long war in Italy between the two powers. Similarly, the failure of the Spanish royal family to produce male heirs would produce repeated European wars, for both the Habsburgs and the Bourbons had valid claims to the succession, and none could afford the other having Spain as its ally, for this would strongly upset the balance. On top of it, Europe was not a stagnant entity. New religious currents, mixed up with the resistance of local nobility to the centralising tendencies of both Bourbons and Habsburgs would lead the French civil war, and the Thirty Years War. Then come economic developments- the struggle for the mastery of the seas and of commerce, both the Baltic sea route, and the Atlantic trade with the new world. In the middle of all this, one sees women rulers doing their bit of warfare just as much as their male counterparts - Elizabeth the First, Isabella of Castile, Bloody Mary, Catherine the Great.

Power is not some playgroundwhich enables one to indulge in some fancy games of toy soldiers. It is a crushing burden involving enormously complex decision making. The problem is that when it comes to history, most people are only familiar with the second world war, which is such an exception in history, because it involved a good side and a bad side, and thoroughly bizzare characters, Hitler and Mussolini, mad bloodthirsty clowns driven by strange dreams. Not to mention Stalin. They were brought to power by bad poetry: the obscene poetry of fascism and the dangerous naivete of communism. Unfortunately the world is not yet done with dangerously naive ideas, if now they tell you that's just a question of putting women at the top, and we will have a peaceful world.

Yesterday a friend was telling me about a visit he made a few years ago to a Buddhist temple in Peshawar. It was run by a former Muslim who had converted to Buddhism. He was together with some Africans and he said everyone felt dazed by the surreal quality of this visit. Here they were, in the heart of Pashtun territory, in Bin Laden land. Just round the corner was that famous bazaar where you can buy an armoured division and get a few Stinger missiles as small change, and they were sitting under a Buddha statue, listening to a sermon on right conduct. One of the Africans, a Sudanese and a devout muslim, was looking in utter amazement at the Buddha idols, the first he had ever seen in Pakistan.
I told my friend that maybe if someone asked this Sudanese about this visit, he would not at first remember having made it - he would need some prodding for his memory to bring it back. When something is too unforgettable, it becomes actually forgettable, because our sense of reality cannot deal with it, and puts it in a corner, under the item "Forteana".
In his foreword to "The Crucible" Arthur Miller says that we do not remember fear, maybe because to do so would be harmful to the brain. Hence, he says, he has difficulty remember remembering the exactly quality of the fear he felt during the Mc Carthy years, except that he knows it was it was there all the time.
Memory has a gland which secretes nostalgia. It is the oil in which float the pickles of memories – most memories, at least. It is a pretty mysterious human faculty. In one of Borges’s stories, a character is not surprised to come across a person able to predict the future. " After all" he reflects " That we possess memory – the capacity to retain the past- is already miraculous. Why not, then, be able to foresee the future ?" True, especially that precognition seems to be as capricious – or , maybe , obeys to laws as obscure as – memory.
There is a story about a tribe in Latin America, which lived on the coast. Once a European three mast dropped anchor well in sight of the village. It stayed there for a few weeks. Nobody in the village noticed it, because it was so beyond their expectation of normality – its size, its fantastic shape – that they could not really "see" it. It is probably a false story, and, like many false stories, has a seductive aspect to it. What if it was really possible that our brain filtered our perception of reality ?
One thing society does, to tame reality, is to put names to things. Actually, names started as generalisations. Tree englobes both pine trees and banana trees. Later, science told us that a banana tree is actually not a tree but a kind of giant grass, but even when we did not know it, banana "tree" worked as a fine and convenient way of naming the thing. Apart from the functionality, names have a reassuring quality. Walking among trees in a silent forest, or watching the leafless silhouette of one against the night sky, it is good to tell oneself that these are trees, it dispels the somewhat menacing air they could have, if not. When Gandalf and the Balrog fall through the mines of Moria, they pass by "nameless things" deep in the bowels of the earth.
Religion is, of course, the Great Explainer of reality. Fortunately, it has suffered some reversals in the past centuries, and new philosophies have been able to germinate, giving us alternative views of reality. Problem is, at the same time, we are suffering a serious problem in another front, which is that of memory. Gone are the days when children would recite whole chapters of Paradise Lost at one go. Not only do we not train our memories like before, but we stuff it with junk. In our year, the average televisionwatcher ingests as much fiction as the people before used to in a whole lifetime. Where does it all go, I wonder ? What if, one day, the walls holding our "remembering fiction" faculty burst, and the stuff overflowed in our memories of life ? Imagine having flashbacks of the day you killed JR, or of the night you left Ingrid Bergman on an airport runway. Unless, in that case, the "selective memory" function still worked, so that you would forget about what you did to JR, and remember everything about Ingrid.