Movies and other miscellanea

What do you do when you watch a movie and it leaves you wanting to twirl and flip around in the air like in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"? :p I’d had the "Coyote Ugly" DVD for at least a couple of years but for some reason or other, never got around to watching it. I really felt in need of some good, light-hearted entertainment today after watching a couple of intense movies – first a Tamil movie and then "Carlito’s Way" – and so gave "Coyote Ugly" a try. For some reason or other, Piper Perabo reminds me so much of Jennifer Garner of "Alias" fame and while I enjoyed the movie and the soundtrack even more, I couldn’t totally get into it … OK, Piper Perabo’s appearance had no relation to my enjoyment of the movie – pardon my sentence structure :p It did however leave me thinking about a few things.

The first thing was basically related to the story line – "Coyote Ugly" is about a songwriter who goes to New York in search of her dreams. I’d just heard a couple of days back from my friend Meraash who’s also in New York currently and following his dream – to be a film maker. He worked here with me in Sri Lanka and always wanted to make movies and now he tells me that he actually might get to work on "Spiderman 2" and I was really happy for him and proud of him since he went after his dreams and made it happen. However, watching "Coyote Ugly" and the conditions under which Violet, the protagonist in the movie, lives under, I was thinking that maybe Meraash had to live the same way and that I could never do that. That also made me realize that I could never go after my dreams the way that Meraash and Violet did – that I would always hold back either because I was too afraid, too lazy or just didn’t have a goal that I wanted to reach that bad … makes me (or rather, my life) feel so pointless all of a sudden. I’m doing what I love – I love coding and I am in computers, I love movies and do watch a lot, I love writing and do write all over the place, I enjoy music and do listen to music from time to time … but where is the big dream? The big ambition? I guess the only thing that would qualify in that category was me wanting to be a successful writer. But would I drop everything, risk failure and a life of doing part-time jobs while looking for my big break? I don’t think so. So maybe I don’t have the vision or the commitment. I don’t know …

The other thing that struck me is totally unrelated but also something I’ve been thinking for a while now – do television and movie writers write women the way they perceive them to be or are these really women as they are? The reason I wonder is more so because of a couple of my favourite TV shows than because of how women are portrayed in "Coyote Ugly" though there were a few instances even in the movie which made me wonder. The two shows I’m talking about are "Gilmore Girls" and "Nikki" – I liked both the shows and the characters in them when I originally started watching them but recently (these might not coincide with the US episodes since we get them really late – just a note :p) some of the characters have been getting on my nerves because of the way they behave and since all the characters are women, I was wondering if this is just some man’s interpretation of how a woman would behave or if this was actually written by a woman and if it’s the latter, then why are so many women being portrayed as being so bitchy all of a sudden? Yes, I know, it’s just TV shows and none of these people are real but their actions still bug me … yeah, maybe I’m weird :p

Take Lorelei Gilmore for instance – she dumps her fiance the day before she is to be married, gives the guy no explanation and takes off for parts unknown. Then she keeps on leading this other guy who obviously has feeling for her on – yes, the guy could simply tell her how he feels but just as obviously, she should be able to tell that he feels something for her out of the ordinary since he behaves completely differently with her than he normally does. Then there’s her daughter who does not seem to realize what she’s doing or her own mind since she’s got a boyfriend but also is dallying with this other guy, while claiming that it is "just a friendship" whereas some of her actions seem to indicate that it is not. Or take Nikki from "Nikki" who dumps her husband who can’t dance and gets another partner just to win a dance competition and then thinks she can make it all better by being all sweet and lovey dovey and her husband who actually falls for it. Ok, I’ll stop now :p I know all this is just make believe but the actions of each of these characters bothers me and it bothers me even more as to who conceived these particular actions and if they really think that this is how women normally behave and I do wonder if this is *actually* how a majority of women feel/act …

Of love and other matters of the heart

I just finished watching a Tamil (Indian language, also one of the three major languages used in Sri Lanka) movie that moved me and also made me travel back in time. It was about this guy named Hari who is loved by a girl – Sapna – and who rejects her because he doesn’t love her but is in turn rejected by the girl he loves – Raji – because she doesn’t love him in return. Sapna is bitter and wants revenge but Hari is not bitter at Raji but instead wants to continue his life but says that he will always love Raji and want to see her happy. Added to this mix is Raji’s childhood friend (I forget his name) who also loved a girl but was rejected and is now slowly wasting his life away thinking about her. Hari advices this guy and tells him that the best respect he can show his love is for him to live his life with his head held high but the guy commits suicide because he can’t face the fact that the girl he loved is getting married. (Yes, committing suicide on the failure of your love, or even because your parents oppose your love, is fairly common in this part of the world …) Hari says that he cannot respect that guy because he took the coward’s way out. And of course, this being the movies, Hari finally does win the love of Raji but that’s another story …

The movie evoked a lot of feeling in me because I was in Hari’s position at one time in my life and I do understand his stand and agree with him. I loved a girl once for around ten years but in my case she loved somebody else. I did tell her that I loved her (after ten years), or I think I did but am not too sure since I wasn’t very coherent :p Anyway, she and I continued to be friends since I felt the way that Hari did but maybe I wasn’t as strong as Hari and so needed an excuse to blame the girl anyway or maybe it really was so (I can’t be objective since I am involved in it ..) but I felt that the girl took advantage of the fact that she knew that I loved her and would do anything for her still. Be as it may be, I left the country and lost all touch with her and so don’t know how things are with her anymore, even after my return.

I’ve loved others since then but have yet to find the kind of love I seek. I often wonder if this is because I expect too much from love – I expect it to be the way it is portrayed in books and the movies (at least some of the movies – probably not the Hollywood ones <g>) where love is not a passing infatuation and an excuse to jump into bed but is rather a strong bond, a true understanding between two individuals. Almost a linking of minds you could say. A union between two individuals who understand each other totally and want to spend their lives together because they can’t imagine living life apart from each other.

Of course, that does beg the question of what would I do if I found such a person but she didn’t love me? I guess the only thing I could do would be to cherish that love and go on, maybe things will change in the future and she might love me or maybe she won’t. Either way, there is always the memory of what you had and if you stay friends, you at least have a good friend even if you might not have a lover. Of course, I just have no idea if such love exists or if I’m just chasing a pipe dream. I know that such love exists from my end but is it just limited to me? Or are there others who feel like me? Others who search for such a love? Or is the rest of the world just jaded people who know that all such things are just fine confections woven for our entertainment and I am the only naive fool around? :p I don’t know and to be honest, I don’t think I care either. What I feel and what I dream of will always be real to me and even if I don’t find the kind of love that I look for, there is at least the hope of finding such a love to keep me going …

Of terror, war and incipient madness

I’ve been rather reluctant to write in my journals these days both because of lack of time and also because I’ve been feeling the need to distance myself from the rest of humanity lest all its dishonesty, greed, war-mongering and plain lack of care for its fellow members drives me over the edge to join their ranks. Harsh? Yes, perhaps so but that’s how I feel.

A couple of weeks ago, we had a huge explosion here one evening. Our whole house shook and some of the neighbours had the glass on their windows break due to the force of the explosion. Everybody came out of their houses (it was evening) and began speculating about what it must be. It turned out later that a fireworks factory close by had caught fire and that the explosion was a result of that. But at the time I thought, the people in Iraq must be feeling a hundred times more than what we felt due to one single explosion. Yes, this is going to be about the war since it seems to be dominating everything else and I wanted to remind myself of a few things lest I too forget as time goes on like most others of the human race.

I had decided not to write anymore about the war when war started since there seemed to be no way to achieve peace and so it looked as if we just had to wait till things came to their inevitable conclusions. However, I since then feel the need to document some of the events/feelings from the current moment since I have a feeling that certain events are going to play out over and over again – just as they did when the US wanted to go to war in Afghanistan. I’ve been thinking about things and it seems to me that the US is running scared – they lived a peaceful life as the top dog of the pack and suddenly they wake up to the fact that no matter how powerful you might be as a nation, there are individuals crazy enough to attack you. So the US (and here I mean the government rather than the people of the US as a whole) decides that it’s time to show the world that you don’t mess with the US and go unscathed. So they come up with all this hoopla about how they are going to get Osama and attack Afghanistan. Months later and many civilian deaths later, Bin Laden still roams free and everybody has forgotten what originally happened and what the US originally claimed.

Now the pattern repeats again in Iraq. The US claims that they want to get Saddam out of Iraq and go in. Again saying that civilian deaths will be avoided and how they have smart bombs etc. but the results are the same. Many civilian deaths later, the latest stand from the US government seems to be that it doesn’t matter if they get Saddam or not, as long as he’s out of power, they’ve achieved their objectives. Not quite what they said when they started this whole war. And what of these elusive weapons of mass destruction? Now they say that Saddam might actually have spirited them out of the country and so they might not find any – thus actually saying that the fact they don’t exist is proof that they do exist. Ah the tangled mess we create in politics!

I sit here wondering who America will attack next in its fear and the need to show that it is still top dog. Maybe North Korea? Iran? Syria? I don’t know but if the pattern continues, I can only hope that the world wakes up to the fact that they might have to unite against a tyrant such as Germany led by Hitler during the second World War. Yes, I’m saying a tyrant and I’m comparing the US to Nazi Germany. Most Americans probably are going to be outraged, say that America is nothing like Germany under Hitler. But *if* America continues its aggressive behaviour, that’s exactly what America will be and I sincerely hope I am wrong because I don’t want another global conflict to take place – there’s been way too much blood shed already.

Sometimes I wish that I can take Bush, Blair and all these other pro-war leaders and their families and put them in a house which is under heavy shelling and then see how they like war and all this "collateral damage" that they are so casual about. I really am beginning to despise rich and privileged leaders who are totally sheltered from the effects of war and who’ve never had to face war in their own lives, so casually ordering a war that affects the lives of thousands and hundreds of thousands. Maybe its time that we went back to the era when the leaders had to be at the forefront of the battle instead of hiding in some bunker thousands of miles away. Maybe *that* will prevent the slaughter of more innocents but I doubt even that …

Of edits, creativity and bosses …

Things were extremely hectic last week and while I thought of writing something here several times, I just didn’t seem to find the time to do so. So what was I so busy with? It was the edit for the shoot that I’d gone on the week before – the one about the Sinhalese family living in a Muslim village. Though I’d planned to do the story in a particular way – by exposing the inconsistencies in the stories of both sides and showing (or at least trying to …) that in a conflict like this, people lose their perspectives – the actualities of editing and time constraints forced me to do it as a straight story. Basically, the story that we’re supposed to broadcast is only five minutes long and I just couldn’t fit all that into five minutes and had to be content with just a retelling of the incidents that led up to the problem.

Even with all of that, I was happy with the final result but then my bosses decided to come in and rape it in their infinite wisdom :p One of my bosses is the managing director and the other is the editor-in-chief. Now the editor-in-chief (EC) has many years of experience and I can’t claim to be anywhere close to her as far as being a television producer/director goes but I do believe that each person has their own vision for a story and that you should be wise enough to let things be unless there is something so dramatically wrong that it cannot be broadcast at all. But not so with my boss the EC – she believes that all the shots should be the way that *she* thinks they should be and so she sits down after I’d done the edit and changed all the shots. Now I’d heard complaints from other people along this line saying that there was no need for creativity (and no room for it either) since the EC always changes your shots but this was the first time it happened to me.

Then the managing director (MD) comes in and he wants to change the wording of the narration since he thinks that Muslims are being portrayed badly. I had a big argument about what he wanted to do since he basically wanted to point fingers and say specific things about the Sinhalese and the Muslims in this incident. I didn’t think that was right, the incident was over and I didn’t want to stir up more trouble … plus, I was sure that the MD was being influenced by the fact that he himself is a Muslim – which is something a lot of Muslim’s in Sri Lanka (or for that matter anywhere else in the world …) can’t seem to get away from. They can’t seem to realize that first and foremost thing to being a Muslim is to realize that you are part of the human race – instead, they cling to this false identity of being a part of a subset of the race called "the Muslims" and seem to think that others don’t matter as much. To me, this automatically makes all these people non-Muslims.

Be that as may be, we argued back and forth and I finally agreed to change the narration slightly but still without going into specifics. I later understood what set the MD off but I still think that he really is not looking at this correctly. In my closing narration, I said something along the lines of "this kind of situation is going to continue to happen when a majority and a minority are involved. It can only be resolved when the majority realizes that they have certain responsibilities and the minority realizes that they have to make certain compromises in order to live in harmony". Now I was simply thinking in terms of majorities and minorities and in this specific case, the majority were actually the Muslims but my boss kept on saying that I was saying that the Muslims have to compromise and I kept on arguing that wasn’t what I said. I later realized that to him, the Muslims would always be the minority because he thinks in such terms, so to him what I said simply meant that the Muslims must compromise irrespective of the situation :p Ah well, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to change his opinion but I told him that I’d put in some wording to show that what I said applied in general rather than specifically and he seemed to be mollified but I don’t think he’d still be happy if he saw how I changed the narration :p

Emigrations part deux

Sometimes I think that there really must be somebody who’s monitoring my life and pulling the strings :p No sooner had I posted my entry yesterday about my thoughts of emigrating to Canada (incidentally, a great big thank you to all my Canadian friends who warmly welcomed even the idea of me coming over :p) than I received an e-mail from the consultancy firm which had originally got me started thinking about the whole Canadian thing … and they said that I wasn’t eligible to apply for permanent residency and that I could try for entry on a student visa if I wanted to. Bummer!

However, Kim was kind enough to point me in the direction of the Canadian immigration web site and I realized that the consultancy firm had simply taken my information to do the self-assessment test that the Canadian immigration site had to see if you qualified to enter the country under the skilled worker category. So, I did the test myself and found that I … failed :p I got 67 whereas you needed 75 to pass. I found out that my score would go up to 72 if I had family in Canada – I actually do in that there are some people related to my mother who are there but I’ve never even met them … The point at which I really failed was the employment part since if I had an offer of employment from a Canadian firm, I would have hit the 75 marks necessary to pass. Of course, this was just an online test and passing it would not guarantee that I’d really be allowed to enter Canada and I guess the converse is true too though I have a feeling that would be more unlikely :p

However, all of this has set me thinking and I am indeed considering Canada and thinking of looking at employment opportunities there too in the hope that I will actually find some employer who is willing to give me a chance if I am able to get to Canada. I’ve also decided to look at the immigration web sites for a few other countries that I’m interested in and see if they too have such self-assessment tests and stuff so that I can see if there is some other country which might be more amenable towards me being a permanent resident there. Guess it all helps to pass the time if nothing else :p

Of emigrations and migrations …

I’ve been considering emigrating to Canada recently 🙂 Like all things that I do, it was based on a sudden impulse – I saw this advertisement in a Sunday paper by an organization in Canada which was supposed to assist you to emigrate to Canada and would even do a free assessment to see if you qualify for emigration. They had a Sri Lankan address as well but since I am not too happy with people helping you to emigrate in Sri Lanka (there are way too many scam artists here), I decided to try their web site and fill in their emigration assessment form.

I filled in the form and a few hours later received an automated response which was (surprise, surprise) from a Sri Lankan who seemed to be the president of this particularly consultancy service. I was told that I would hear from them in a couple of days but that was it – I’ve heard nothing since then but my interest in Canada as a possible destination for me to go to has been aroused. I’ve simply been toying with the idea till now but the resolve is beginning to solidify due to certain other incidents which have taken place around the same time. I guess I should really do some research on my own and see what is involved in emigrating to Canada, what needs to be done, what’s the process etc. and I eventually will do that since I’ve started thinking about it but for that I need to be online and I’m not online now. So I guess I’ll put it off till later and see how it goes.

I really am not sure what I’m going to do at the moment – I feel aimless. I don’t think I want to be in Sri Lanka since there just is too much social pressure here to conform. While I don’t particularly care about the social pressures (I’ve always lived by my own rules), the fact that I am a non-conformist seems to affect my parents since at least some seem to feel that my parents are responsible for me being who I am and so my parents start feeling guilty and then trying to change me. I hate all of that. I just like to live in peace and attend to my own stuff. Since I had a life where I was perfectly content in the US, I’ve been thinking about returning there but then again, there are several problems with that at the moment – the looming war (and the eventual conditions in the US if a war comes to pass) being one of them. Canada (and Canadians) seem to be much more reasonable in certain respects than Americans and so the idea has slowly been germinating in my mind that that is where I should go 🙂 Yes, there are downsides to Canada too – the cold for one (yes, I know there are areas which are extremely pleasant but where I want to be or have to be will be cold <g>) and the higher taxes but I guess there are disadvantages to living almost anywhere :p So we’ll see …

When philosophies wage war …

I was sent for a workshop on peaceful co-existence by work day before yesterday. I was sent not because I was involved in any project about peaceful co-existence but because my boss had been invited but had to leave early whereas they wanted the participants to be there till the end of the day – so I was the chosen one to provide cover for my boss when she left :p I think I did a pretty good job since I infused my own brand of philosophy in to the discussion and was so in their face, questioning their methods that they probably will specifically ask my boss not to send me there again in the future <vbg> Be that as may be, there were some interesting points of note to the whole experience.

They started the workshop by telling each one of us to write down four words that came to our mind when you said peaceful co-existence. Then they had us get into pairs and combine our two sets of four words and come up with a list of four words that we felt best described peaceful co-existence. The first person I was paired with was a girl who believed that non-threatened (her word) was a better choice than understanding (my word). We had a fairly long discussion on this and in the interests of peace, I agreed to combine non-threatened, understanding and another word which I can’t remember to come up with non-threatened. However, by this time it was dawning on me that this exercise was a better way to discourage peaceful co-existence than to foster it :p Everybody gets hung up on "their" words and it becomes contentious – at least, it was so with all the groups I was involved with … so maybe I was the negative link in all of these but I believed that I was trying to compromise as much as I could – so maybe it’s an aura around me or something :p

Anyway, they had the groups of two then combine into groups of four and again combine the words to come up with four again. This time, the other group had understanding and we were back to the impasse about understanding and non-threatened. Honestly, I felt that understanding describes peaceful co-existence better than non-threatened but to simply trample all over the other person even though there was now a majority of three speaking for understanding, didn’t seem right to me. So I proposed a compromise again where we kept both understanding and non-threatened. They then made up groups of eight to again come up with a list of four words. We were put with my boss’s group this time and she’d noticed that our group took a long time to deliberate over matters and she’d decided to show her leadership skills – or maybe she was just tired of all the arguing. So she just got very bossy, challenged people and basically bullied everybody into agreement quickly <g> But understanding still survived.

Now they combined the four words from three different groups of eight people each to come up with one final four word list. Understanding still was there (why do I keep on repeating that? Because to me understanding is very important for peaceful co-existence but that is something for another day again …) and then we had this huge argument for "tolerance". A lot of people seemed to think that tolerance was alright but I felt that tolerance implied some negativity – that you didn’t really agree with the other person but were willing to tolerate them for the sake of harmony – like I’d done with "non-threatened" <g> and that really is not healthy since you do have some (maybe a very minute amount but yet some) amount of resentment which can over time grow into a problem. We finally agreed to drop tolerance and came up with our list of words – which I now totally forget except for understanding and harmony.

Another exercise that they had us do provoked even stronger emotions from me. They had us divide into ethnic groups and come up with stereotypes for other ethnic groups as well as stereotypes that the other groups had for us. Now I was the only Muslim there and while the following might sound like a cop-out, it wasn’t – I basically did what I believed in :p I’ve always believed that our basic problem here in Sri Lanka is that we cling to our ethnic, racial, religious differences than to embrace the fact that we are all Sri Lankans. I wanted to represent the Sri Lankans and not the Muslims but since I also have this strong urge to follow rules (not the implied ones of society but rather the rules laid out in a classroom situation or basically any rule that is explicitly laid down I guess :p), I decided not to. However, one of the others at the workshop had joined the Muslim group – her name is Veronique and she changed my mind for me. She said that I should do what I was comfortable with and not what was forced upon me and I saw that this was right and so simply wrote down stereotypes about Sri Lankans. It was interesting to note the comments of some of the others at the stage when they didn’t know what I was doing but only saw this long list I had – they would say things like "you are a single person and yet you have such a long list about *our* group?" It was very much evident that group feelings were pretty much at the forefront and I was beginning to dislike this particular exercise very much because it seemed to engender hostilities rather than to foster peace.

I remarked on this later when we’d read out all our lists of stereotypes and was told that we had to see the differences before we can understand each other. While I subsided at that point, later reflection has shown me that this was wrong. We already *know* the differences, that’s why we have conflict. The point is to let us *understand* the differences and to learn that we are not really that different after all. I really don’t think that the workshop did anything towards that – it was so busy highlighting differences that they forgot that what they had to do was to let people reconcile these differences. In fact, when I spoke in support certain people in another group, I was told that I was to remain silent while that group sorted it out themselves. This to me sounds like segregation and demarcation and that’s basically what brought us to the present crisis! Ah well … even the teachers sometimes need teaching methinks …

Of Life, philosophy, idealism and other asbstracts …

I’ve not been at my computer much the last few days – the day before because it was one of the two festivals of the Muslims – the Haj festival – and I was with my family in Kurunegala and yesterday because I was at a workshop about peaceful co-existence for work. Both days provided me a lot of fodder for thought and obviously, I’ll be sharing some of that here :p

The day before yesterday, quite a bit of our family gathered together for the Haj festival and as is usual we had a group discussion going on various topics ranging from politics to cricket. Eventually of course, the talk turned to the current situation with Iraq and one of my cousins made a comment that set me off <g> He said that the world fears the Muslims and that’s why they are persecuted – incidentally, I should mention that a lot of Muslims believe/fear that they are being persecuted by the rest of the world because of their religion – and I said that the only reason the world fears the Muslims is because we are fanatics and that that is our own fault because some of our people kill others in the name of God when just that act proves that they are not Muslims nor have they understood the teachings of Islam. So the fault lies with us to a great extent – not the rest of the world. Then my cousin said something to the effect "but look at Israel and the Palestine. Israel gets everybody’s support".

Somewhere around this point I had an epiphany – well, maybe not really an epiphany since I think I’ve known this before but it suddenly became crystal clear to me as a fact and has since become part of my philosophy about the world and humanity. My response to my cousin was based on this insight – I said that most of the conflicts in this world are not based on religion but on politics. America does not attack Iraq because they are Muslims – it attacks Iraq for various political reasons, the fact that they have oil not being the least of them. Israel and Palestine are not engaged in a religious struggle – it’s purely political. Man is a political animal and while we would like to put the tag of "religious struggle" on a conflict, it is almost certainly not about religion but about politics. The Islamic fundamentalists who claim to wage a war in the name of God are also not in it because of God but because they want power – again politics.

I’ve been thinking about this after the fact and I realized that we find it easier to talk about religious struggles or to feel as if we are being persecuted due to our religion than to realize that it is all politics – so we turn a blind eye to the facts. We feel comfort in a way in thinking that all insert-racial-or-ethnic-grouping-here are persecuted because then we belong to a group and can feel safe and secure while we think about the persecution we face. It also makes sense from the other side. Would many people support the US government if it simply said, "we need Iraq’s oil. So we are going to war"? Hardly likely. But you say "we are going to war against terror. Support us" – can anybody refuse? Of course, the Muslims perceive this as a direct threat on "their" religion and that sparks a new wave of fundamentalist terrorists and so the business of politics keeps on rolling … sad …

I think I got a little bit carried away there and since the stuff about the peaceful co-existence workshop would probably take just as much space as this, I’ll reserve that for tomorrow 🙂

For I am a jealous people …

I finished Lester Del Rey’s collection of short novels a couple of days ago but I didn’t get a chance to write about his story that I was talking about in my previous entry yesterday because I got caught up in too many other things :p So I thought I might as well talk about it today since I still feel strongly about that story. As I surmised, the story indeed was about God siding with the aliens but it God takes a more active role than I had envisioned at the beginning of the story – God appears to the alien priests as he did to Moses and tells them directly that they have been chosen to inherit the universe and that they must wipe humankind off the face of the Earth. Setting aside the whole argument as to whether the story is blasphemous or not (since I have the feeling that some might consider it to be so), what interested me was the question as to what I would do if I was put in the place of Del Rey’s protagonist, the priest.

The story ends with the priest holding a mass where he tells everybody "God has decided to side against us, I can only say that he’s chosen a worth adversary" or words to that effect. The point of the whole story is that Man is the only creature that would fight against his own maker. I keep on thinking what I would do if I was in that position. Granted, in the story the aliens are made out to be totally inhuman beings who torture animals and people for fun and then eat them for food and even eat their own kind. So the humans seem noble to rise up against them but that just means Del Rey stacked the decks a bit.

I believe in a merciful God – a God who can understand the failings of humanity. While I’d be the first to understand if God were to decide to wipe out humanity because of our greed, stupidity, prejudice and the worst qualities in humanity that we seem to show more and more these days, I don’t accept it that God would choose a race that is essentially even worse than humanity to be our successors. So if God were to decide that humanity was just not worth salvation, I’d probably understand looking at the world of today but then again, I also believe that humanity has the potential to be so much more than we are because sometimes we show such courage, honesty, compassion, feeling and humanity that it makes me realize all over again what we as humans are capable of ….

Books and such …

I’m reading a collection of five short novels (they used to be called novella or novelettes depending on length those days but now there are only long novels and really long series :p) by Lester Del Rey and I keep on having this weird feeling that I have read them before 🙂 Be that as it may, I know that the latest story that I’m reading is going to end up making me think a lot. It’s called "For I am a Jealous People!" and starts off by introducing and earth which is being invaded by aliens and the main character is a preacher who is trying to hang on to his faith in God in these trying times. Earth seems to be at the losing end as the story starts and most of Earth’s setbacks in the war seem to be due to strange accidents such as a meteorite striking the stockpile of all of Earth’s missiles on the moon and burying it under a pile of debris, a tornado taking out the defence garrison in a city when the aliens land etc.

I have a strange feeling that the story is going to turn out to be about how God actually intends the aliens to take over the world (hence the "freak accidents" that help the aliens) but then again, maybe I *have* read the story before … I don’t know. I just know that it is going to bring up an interesting philosophical debate within myself as to whether we can ever really know God’s purpose and also as to whether we can understand what happens to us in the context of God’s great plan for all of us. Yes, I know that treads dangerously close to religious evangelism – and I don’t want to do that :p – I believe in God and there are certain things in life and in what I read which makes me think about it but that doesn’t mean that I should go around telling others to believe in God – to me religion is a personal thing between myself and God. But I do like to talk about the dilemmas and conundrums my faith brings up 🙂

I’d like to discuss how I see religion (not *my* religion or *your* religion but simply religion) and God one of these days but I just don’t feel like putting forth the effort just now. I’m still not feeling totally fit and this illness (if it runs true to course) will probably last for a week or two yet. The good thing is that this week is going to be full of holidays here in Sri Lanka. Today is a holiday because it is a Tamil festival and then Friday is going to be a holiday since it’s the full moon and we have every full moon off since it’s a Buddhist holy day. So I’ll have to work only one more day and that’s tomorrow and that’s fine by me 🙂