Of funerals and family …

Thank you Tracie, Kim, Mom, Jordan and everybody else who expressed their sympathy on my grandfather passing away – I appreciate your wishes and concern. I must also mention my friends Robin and Deeno who were sweet enough to SMS (text message) me while I was on my way back from the funeral (they would have messaged me sooner but my cellular was out of range at the funeral) and told me that they were sorry that they couldn’t be there with me to lend support. I thank you all and consider myself lucky to have friends and family like you 🙂

It was about two hours by bus to my mother’s village and I left early in the morning and got back only a couple of hours or so ago and actually thought that I might be done for the day since I returned with a splitting headache. However, a small nap seems to have gotten rid of the headache and I’m able to make this entry. The funeral was actually one of the most cheerful ones I’ve been to in a while. Everybody was mostly smiling and talking and catching up since some of these people had not met in ages. I don’t think even my Mom or her sisters cried even though it was their father who’d passed away. Honestly, to me that is how a funeral should be. Why should we be beating our breasts and crying when the person who’s died has just passed on? Of course, according to your faith, you might look at the situation differently but to me, this life is just a tiny precursor to the eternal life that awaits you after the day of judgement and we shouldn’t be sad for anybody who’s free of all the cares and problems of this world. But that’s just me …

The actual burial place was quite beautiful – we had to pass through paddy fields and it was beside a little pond covered in water lilies. As they laid my grandfather in his grave, there were trees around the place and there were birds chirping and flying around in the trees. I remember wondering, with so much life around, why would we mourn death? I remember seeing my grandfather’s body being lowered into the grave and seeing how limp it was and thinking that his body was really a shell, not really him since what made the body *him* had already moved on. I wondered at that moment if he might somehow be looking on at his own funeral and what he might be thinking about all of it from his new perspective. Most of all, I remember thinking how fleeting our life on this earth is and yet, how much baggage we seem to collect in that short time and how many people we piss off or get angry at in our own turn, how much we do wrong when we could have done it better, how many people we leave behind thinking something bad about us. All for what? A six by three plot of land that will eventually be used by somebody else? (Muslims don’t have permanent resting places, we don’t even put up tombstones and stuff …)

Ah well … life’s so short and yet so long as well. I guess the best any of us can do is to live it to the best of our ability so that when we leave, people will remember us fondly since that’s about the only mark we can leave on this world. But *that* might not be as easy a task as you might think …

Of death and debates …

I don’t think I understand people and what drives them at all. I try to put myself in their places and understand their actions but I guess I just am not your typical person because I can never understand why they do most things because I never would do it that way. I can only stand there and mutter "fascinating" like Mr. Spock or debate with myself as to who is abnormal – them or me. To me, I seem normal enough (within bounds of course) but that is because I am the only person whose mind that *I* know well – most of the rest of the people seem to do weird, irrational things that have no sound basis at all but maybe I just am not seeing it from their frame of reference … This inability to understand the motivations of other people drives me insane at times because I keep on wondering about how, what, why etc. like a dog chasing its tail and keep on going round and round and round in circles till I drive myself to a frenzy. Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time since I my usual rule is to live and let live. But of course, there are exceptions to each rule and sometimes I end up wondering about a particular action by some person and that’s when things start getting really crazy. Of course, after a while, I come to the realization that it doesn’t matter what somebody else does, that it should be my own actions and my perceptions that I should allow to influence my course in life and then things calm down again but unfortunately, in this particular scenario, I never seem to learn by experience and I repeat the same pattern again and again and again … Sometimes I wonder if all they say about experience is true :p

My grandfather has passed away … My parents left in the afternoon since they heard that his condition was serious. I was supposed to follow tomorrow. I got home and was just praying that his last moments be peaceful and that he pass away without too much pain when I received a call saying that he’d just passed away (and no, I’m not suggesting that my prayers had anything to do one way or another with his passing away but that’s how the events occurred). Calls have been coming in since then – here everybody wants to tell you when a death has occurred. So far I’ve received three calls since the original call – my parents and two of my cousins – Muslims are buried within 24 hours and so the funeral will probably be tomorrow and I intend to leave early tomorrow morning. It’s such a strange thing life – one moment we are here and the next we are not … but where do we go then? That is what I’d like to know …

Of ills and pills …

I am not too well again – according to my parents, this is seasonal since the sun is right overhead (which is true – I mean that the sun is right overhead …) and also according to them, this would not happen if I cut my hair <g> – which I’m not so sure about since they’d blame an earthquake in the Kashmir on my hair if they thought they can make it stick and it would do some good in convincing me :p Anyway, I indeed am sick but this has prompted a couple of questions for me. The first came about when my Dad said that I was in a lot of pain/discomfort but I wasn’t showing it. Now I really don’t think I’m in that much discomfort but the question is how do you know? What is a lot of discomfort to my Dad might not be a great deal to me since I believe that it’s no big deal if you can bear it. So how do you know what’s a bad pain/ache and what’s not? Isn’t it all subjective? Not that that question has any relevance to anything else but it just popped into my head since I’m always left wondering as to what yardstick other people use to measure stuff like this that they cannot really know personally … I might ask somebody if they were in a lot of pain but I don’t think I’d look at them and say that they are in a lot of pain unless they are screaming their heads off :p Or something like that …

The other question was about medicine. I usually hate to take pharmaceutical drugs (or Western medicine as we call it here) for a variety of reasons – the main two being that I believe in letting the body fight whatever it is that ails you first and that I don’t like to take pain killers for everything since I believe that they become less and less effective as time goes on if you take them for every little pain. Or maybe I’m just a masochist :p Anyway, I usually prefer to take herbal remedies unless it’s really bad and I need to go to a doctor and then s/he prescribes something for me. Even then, I usually get off the medicine as soon as I start feeling better 🙂

Now the thing was, that there was an article in yesterday’s paper about how one of Australia’s leading pharmaceutical companies was in trouble due to poor production practices – it said that they even collected powder on the floor and put it back into the production line regularly. And this is a company which made over the counter pain killers like Panadol, Paracetemol, Panadine etc. Not that I’m saying the herbal stuff is any better since they are basically off the floor anyway – they dry the stuff on the ground and then collect it and package it but it’s not usually in pill form – so you can wash the stuff, clean it up and make a tea that you use instead of taking a pill with all the dirt off the factory floor. What I’m beginning to wonder though is how safe are any of these medicines or remedies if the people who are producing them are so careless? I know there are regulations in place to prevent such things but this Australian company has been charged with regularly misleading the regulators as well. So I guess it doesn’t always work.

Should we resort to growing our own herbs and making our own medicine? But that probably would also mean that we are also safer growing our own food as well since you don’t know what sort of chemicals go into anything we eat. Sometimes I begin to wonder if technology is such a good thing if this is what we’ve come to but then again, this is not the fault of technology but rather of those who wield it – they’ve lost sight of the human factor … that it is human beings who’ll ultimately use the contaminated stuff that they produce to make a quick buck. That it can indeed be themselves or their loved ones buying the stuff they produce and subsequently falling ill. Why is it that we never think of these things? I don’t know …

Dilemmas for dawdlers

My grandfather is on his deathbed – or so my mothers says. Of course she told me the same thing last week or rather, the week before. So what has this got to do with anything? Well, it’s got to do with a war of principles. My mother wants me to go see my grandfather before he passes away. Now normally, I would have no problem with this except for the fact that there is some hypocrisy involved here. My grandfather is not exactly the nicest of men – he believed that money ruled everything and spent his life in the pursuit of money, he tried to control his family by way of his wealth and even during the last few years, while he was bed-ridden, one of his chief topics of conversation was money – who made how much and so on.

Now I won’t try to judge him, he is entitled to live his life his own way – as we all should be able to do. He did what he did and I have no problems with that nor do I hate him. In fact, I’ve gone to see him during the last few years whenever I could when my brother and my father wouldn’t for their own reasons – I have no idea what the reasons are, I never asked them since I figured that their reasons were their own, who am I to question them? My mother did visit him from time to time while he was sick but I don’t know how many of her sisters did or how many of my cousins did. However, now that he’s on his deathbed (or at least seriously ill …) I suddenly get asked (or rather, *almost* told …) by mother to go see him. Again, I can’t say for certain that *is* the reason – but it smacks to me as if trying to make me conform with what’s *expected*. Here, everybody gathers at somebody’s deathbed when they are near death because otherwise "people" would think that they abandoned their relatives and didn’t care for them.

This to me is total hypocrisy! If you don’t care enough to see somebody and to talk to them and to be with them while they are alive, why would you suddenly change your actions when they are dead or ready to die? I don’t agree with that sort of action and will actively change my behaviour to not do that sort of thing. If my grandfather wanted to see me, I guess I would go but I know he couldn’t care less. Plus, "seeing him one last time before he dies" makes no sense to me – I’d rather remember him as he was in his prime – shouting, laughing, being who he was, rather than the way he is now – bed-ridden and in pain. Am I just justifying my own refusal to be at my grandfather’s side when he’s passing away? Maybe I am – I can’t say for certainty that I’m not making excuses – in fact, this is what I’ll probably be told by my parents and others – that I’m merely making excuses. But to me, I’m doing what I think is right.

In the end, this is all any of us can do – be true to ourselves since we cannot please all the people in the world anyway. My two cardinal rules are: be true to yourself and don’t hurt others if you can help it. In this case, I think I am abiding by those as far as I can though I am not so sure that I might not be hurting my parents by my actions … Ah well … nothing is ever easy, is it?

Raving rant ….

Sometimes things just keep on getting weirder – or maybe I am paranoid and imagine that they are weird to begin with :p I usually do my blogging in the morning before I leave for work but for the last couple of days, I can’t dial-in to my ISP at all from home in the mornings. Enemy action? Probably not – but I immediately start thinking that it’s weird that I have no dial-up in the mornings now but things are fine in the evening – at least it was yesterday. Maybe the guy in charge just sleeps through the night and does not get up till about 8 o’clock or so and by that time, I’m already at work. Another mystery to be solved … one of these days :p

I use BlogMan to make these posts since it gives me the familiar interface of Blog and provides spell-check and a thesaurus while letting me post to my Movable Type installation on my server. However, I discovered yesterday that I can’t retrieve older posts from the server (posts that I did not make from this machine – otherwise the post would be in BlogMan of course …) because the latest release of Movable Type has changed some of the API functions. Argh! Why can’t they make up their freaking minds in the first place so that I don’t have to keep on updating the code? Now I’ll have to figure out which version of MT is on the server and depending on that, call a different version of the API function – if that is even possible that is!! Sorry, I’m calm now …. and barely frothing at the mouth :p Oh well, another bit of code to do and I just don’t feel like coding. I’d like to roll into a ball and just lie there dreaming and thinking … but oh well, we can’t always have what we want :p

Of Mohameds and moronic measures …

I don’t know if I should be talking about this since it’s second, or even third, hand information but it’s something which seemed in step with the times and so I thought I’d mention it here. An acquaintance of mine at work told me that her aunt had gone to the US embassy here in Colombo to get her visa and that there had been this Muslim guy in the next cubicle being interviewed by a visa officer. The guy had won the greencard lottery and was there to get his visa and had been told by the officer that "We don’t let Mohameds into our country any longer!" If true, this can only be one of most stupid and paranoid remarks I’ve heard but then again, I guess it is just a sign of the times.

America, which prided itself in being the melting pot of the Western civilization, has suddenly become a closed country. And looking at the world, it is ironic that many of the countries that originated with Britain are closed to some extent or another, whether it is Britain itself, America or Australia. Maybe it’s the whole immigrants-take-away-the-jobs-of-honest-hardworking-citizens bit or maybe it is just that we live in strange and convoluted times. There are arguments for and against both sides – I was too simplistic in my maybes in the previous sentence but I’m kinda just not in the right frame of mind to make a valid and reasoned argument for either side at the moment. Who knows any longer anyway? At least not me .. I am lost in this sea of human stupidity, ignorance, prejudice and basic lack of understanding …

Life, she ain’t simple …

Life – it just threw me another curveball. Totally unexpected, totally out of the blue and as I mentioned a couple of days ago, totally in opposition to a certain course of action I was beginning to follow up on. I don’t know if it is wish fulfillment or just some sort of a mystic reaction to my actions but there it is – but the thing is that this time there is a certain rightness to it, a certain this-is-the-moment-you’ve-been-waiting-for, feel to it. So I’m going with it again. Anyway, when life throws a curveball at you what do you do? I guess my baseball analogy fails me at this point and I must jump to cricket – you must either hit out or get out :p I’ve decided to hit out since getting out is not even an option at the moment – I hope it never will be 🙂 Yes, I know, none of the above made an darn sense whatsoever. Sorry, I’m just writing for myself today. Putting down my thoughts and feelings and reactions and whatnot down so that I can read it later and both savour this moment and be able to think back a bit more objectively on the situation.

Sometimes you get stuck in this really strange spot half-way between dream and reality where your dreams are real and all you have to do is reach out and touch to have your dream but it seems almost impossible to raise your arm because your arm suddenly seems to have grown so utterly, impossibly heavy. Have you ever been in a situation like that? My thoughts are very chaotic right now, I don’t think I’m even thinking completely lucidly, I’ve just gotten up a little while ago, had a fairly strange night of dreams and am actually rambling just now, get reality settled in again and also getting ready for another day of work after a week of idleness. I am sure today will be full of its share of drama at work – I don’t even want to think about it since I’d like to just not be bothered about all these nitty gritty details of life right at this moment …. (yes, I’m rambling and just trailed off …)

Of net outages, holidays and life

We had no Net access for almost the whole day yesterday. From what I can discover based on application logs at work, I think the outage occurred during the early hours of the morning and the first time I knew that we were back online was around 9 o’clock at night. I still have no idea what happened but such a long outage usually means problems with the trans-Atlantic cable but then again, since were are on a long holiday weekend, it might be just that they had nobody to look into the problem yesterday.

Of course, that’s as good a segue into talking about the holidays as any :p It’s the Sinhala and Tamil New Year (which is based on the sun moving from a particular zodiac sign to another) over here, or at least, it will be soon. I believe the New Year festivities begin tomorrow and the day after will be a holiday as well. So it’s going to be a long four days all by myself since my parents have gone to the other house and they might not come back till next week anyway. I spent four or more years mostly by myself in the US and did all that was necessary on a day to day basis – cooking, cleaning etc. Of course, I always did the minimum necessary but I still did it :p I find myself too lazy to even make a cup of tea here since usually I know that my parents would be back in a day or two … This time however, since they might be gone for longer, I seem to have put myself in a pattern where I once again do the minimum necessary – OK, I guess I’m just plain lazy :p

Anyway, though we are supposed to get back to work on Wednesday, there might not be many at work and we might not even have any work till next Monday since I believe Friday is again a holiday and most people would simply take the extra two days in between off as well to make it a really long weekend. The only problem is going to be that most of the shops and restaurants are going to be closed as well. So I’d better start cooking at home or stock up on pre-cooked stuff :p I guess it’ll be a good break for most people, I don’t know how it will be for me. I probably should be coding during this time since I’ll have lots of free time, but I just don’t feel like coding at the moment. I just want to sit back and relax – I spent most of yesterday watching movies, I’ll probably spend a little time at work today setting up downloads and stuff which got interrupted due to the Net outage and then it’s probably back to the movies and maybe a little bit of PS2 gaming later on. I also have a lot of stuff going through my head that I want to write about here … So I guess I’ll stay occupied even though I might not be doing any coding :p

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