I wonder if Pol Pot felt satiated as he watched Cambodia devour itself? His appetite for blood was certainly boundless - once he acquired that brackish taste he couldn’t get enough. The Khmer Rouge anthem was already a dreadful omen: a national hymn awash in bloody fixation...
I am now in Cambodia for a month doing research on the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979. Probably about a million and a half people were killed during this period but it’s hard to say. I guess at some point people just stop counting. A few days ago I visited Tuol Sleng – a notorious Khmer Rouge prison facility where 21 000 people were tortured and then sent to their death. They died alone, in the dark, in the nearby Choeung Ek killing field – a single blow to the back of the neck if they were lucky. Can there be a more profound aloneness then being cast apart from all of humankind? Can there be a more woeful death than the death of hope itself?
Tuol Sleng is a Khmer word that can be roughly translated as “poison-tree hill”. It was an abyss of cruelty, penitence without the promise of redemption. Guards wandered the filthy corridors between the tightly-packed cells; beasts in the form of men. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were men in the form of beasts, their humanity sublimated. They toiled with tools born of sadistic inventiveness, their spirits consumed by breathtakingly rootless spite.
Their headmaster was a former teacher known as Duch. He seemed the embodiment of the totalitarian espirit des corps: slavishly devoted to slavish devotion. Of course he was a mathematician: a formula for every human problem; formalism and legalism as the only true forms of perfection and beauty. The utopian ideal could be realised! This was nothing less than the consummation of every anal-retentive impulse. Squeeze a little harder Herr Eichmann and soon you’ll be shitting solid gold bricks - enough wealth to sustain the Reich for a thousand glorious years!
I tried to interview Duch but he’s off-limits (he is currently, finally, on trial at an international tribunal). Duch found Jesus sometime in the 80’s (I wonder if Jesus ever bothered to find him). Within days, I should be interviewing a former senior guard at Tuol Sleng - Him Huy. This should be fascinating and I’m not quite sure what to expect.
Today I’m heading to the far north of the country, into the mountains along the Thai border in search of Khmer Rouge cadres who might be willing to talk to me. Pol Pot lived and died in those mountains and his restless spirit still stalks the people there.
Kjell
Ps. Next time I will write more about the positive (contemporary) things in this beautiful country.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Kjell Likes Short Shorts
The battle for Bangladesh has begun. What started as a country with a secular constitution in 1971 is now under siege from Islamic fundamentalists. I recently visited Bangladesh to do research on the mass killing of 1.5 million people in the Independence struggle of 1971 and found myself unwittingly in the company of communist rabble-rousers, and whisky-swilling opposition politicians.
Bangladesh seems a country of sour provenance – the grind of desperate poverty periodically interrupted by cataclysmic disaster. It is a small country packed with a hundred fifty million people. These are largely the same people as in Calcutta (Bengalis) but these ones drink even less. In fact, Bangladesh is in a state of national prohibition. On Eid (the most important Islamic holiday of the year) I sat in the office of a prominent Awami League poobah and sipped aged scotch (which he slid into his desk every time someone came into the room).
Fundamentalism is no doubt the ideology that fun forgot[1] and all of this can be really traced back to 1971 when East Pakistan (Bangladesh) decided to leave behind the neo-colonial domination of West Pakistan (Pakistan). The West Pakistanis didn’t much like this idea and a massive killing of Bengalis in East Pakistan begun. All told about one and a half million people were murdered, largely in the name of fundamentalist Islam – a worldview originating in the Middle East that fetishises a fantastical version of medieval Islam where women are chattel and the rule of law is vengeful divinity. In search of identity, West Pakistanis increasingly gravitated towards Islamic fundamentalism while the Bengalis in East Pakistan were the same mellow Bengalis they had always been. When Bangladesh struggled to separate from Pakistan the fundamentalists sided with the West Pakistanis in the slaughter. It was literally a slaughter as scores of (mostly Muslim) Bengalis had their throats slit in a perverse twist on Halal butchery. I met one such man at a killing site sinisterly known as the “butcher’s den”. His tormentors held him over a cess pool and tried to cut his throat but the blade was miraculously dull (from over-use) and he was able to escape.
The Bengalis won that battle but it seems they are losing the war. Those very same fanatics that brought innocents to their knees are now running the country, radicalising the madrasas, and pushing for Wahabi-style sharia law. The perpetrators of the 1971 genocide were never prosecuted and the result is that now Bangladesh is no longer in the vanguard of secular Islam (like Turkey).
Dhaka itself is a vast city – a developing world metropolis filled with garment factories (a polite word for sweat-shops). The rural poor make the journey to the big city to scrape together a few Thakas to survive. You can find reborn rural villages in the heart of Dhaka with houses built on stilts, a dirty reservoir acting as stand-in for the mighty, mystical Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka is noticeably poorer than Calcutta and even main thoroughfares are filled with bicycle rickshaws with their brilliantly decorated canopies and sinewy drivers. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the rickshaw was surrounded by beggars in myriad forms: men with deformed legs scampering crab-like across the pavement, women holding their babies with imploring eyes, well-rehearsed children tugging at your pangs of guilt. I never know whether I should give money to beggars. I have been warned by several people not to give money to children as sometimes you are feeding a drug habit (glue-sniffing) or worse perpetuating a begging bondage system where children are sent out to beg by ‘pimps’ and are held as virtual slaves by these pimps in service of profit. I take it on a case by case basis but I’m not really sure what the right thing to do is.
I don’t want to paint an overly negative picture of Bangladesh. Bangladeshis themselves are boundlessly friendly and generous. They are the inheritors of a richly cosmopolitan and humanist cultural tradition. This is a country that definitely has something useful to offer to the world if it is allowed to stay worldly. It must not be hijacked by those who render divinity divisive.
[1] I thought regrowing my beard might have won them over but no such luck. I guess my short shorts threw them off. I borrowed them from Axl Rose.
Bangladesh seems a country of sour provenance – the grind of desperate poverty periodically interrupted by cataclysmic disaster. It is a small country packed with a hundred fifty million people. These are largely the same people as in Calcutta (Bengalis) but these ones drink even less. In fact, Bangladesh is in a state of national prohibition. On Eid (the most important Islamic holiday of the year) I sat in the office of a prominent Awami League poobah and sipped aged scotch (which he slid into his desk every time someone came into the room).
Fundamentalism is no doubt the ideology that fun forgot[1] and all of this can be really traced back to 1971 when East Pakistan (Bangladesh) decided to leave behind the neo-colonial domination of West Pakistan (Pakistan). The West Pakistanis didn’t much like this idea and a massive killing of Bengalis in East Pakistan begun. All told about one and a half million people were murdered, largely in the name of fundamentalist Islam – a worldview originating in the Middle East that fetishises a fantastical version of medieval Islam where women are chattel and the rule of law is vengeful divinity. In search of identity, West Pakistanis increasingly gravitated towards Islamic fundamentalism while the Bengalis in East Pakistan were the same mellow Bengalis they had always been. When Bangladesh struggled to separate from Pakistan the fundamentalists sided with the West Pakistanis in the slaughter. It was literally a slaughter as scores of (mostly Muslim) Bengalis had their throats slit in a perverse twist on Halal butchery. I met one such man at a killing site sinisterly known as the “butcher’s den”. His tormentors held him over a cess pool and tried to cut his throat but the blade was miraculously dull (from over-use) and he was able to escape.
The Bengalis won that battle but it seems they are losing the war. Those very same fanatics that brought innocents to their knees are now running the country, radicalising the madrasas, and pushing for Wahabi-style sharia law. The perpetrators of the 1971 genocide were never prosecuted and the result is that now Bangladesh is no longer in the vanguard of secular Islam (like Turkey).
Dhaka itself is a vast city – a developing world metropolis filled with garment factories (a polite word for sweat-shops). The rural poor make the journey to the big city to scrape together a few Thakas to survive. You can find reborn rural villages in the heart of Dhaka with houses built on stilts, a dirty reservoir acting as stand-in for the mighty, mystical Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Dhaka is noticeably poorer than Calcutta and even main thoroughfares are filled with bicycle rickshaws with their brilliantly decorated canopies and sinewy drivers. Every time we stopped at a traffic light the rickshaw was surrounded by beggars in myriad forms: men with deformed legs scampering crab-like across the pavement, women holding their babies with imploring eyes, well-rehearsed children tugging at your pangs of guilt. I never know whether I should give money to beggars. I have been warned by several people not to give money to children as sometimes you are feeding a drug habit (glue-sniffing) or worse perpetuating a begging bondage system where children are sent out to beg by ‘pimps’ and are held as virtual slaves by these pimps in service of profit. I take it on a case by case basis but I’m not really sure what the right thing to do is.
I don’t want to paint an overly negative picture of Bangladesh. Bangladeshis themselves are boundlessly friendly and generous. They are the inheritors of a richly cosmopolitan and humanist cultural tradition. This is a country that definitely has something useful to offer to the world if it is allowed to stay worldly. It must not be hijacked by those who render divinity divisive.
[1] I thought regrowing my beard might have won them over but no such luck. I guess my short shorts threw them off. I borrowed them from Axl Rose.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Himalaya
On this, the day of devotion to the god of all machines great and small, combustion propels us up Himalayan slopes; forever ascending in our iron box, we roll through villages clinging tenaciously to the mountainside. I’m with Ramona and Ginny – two friends visiting from The Netherlands – traveling from Darjeeling into Sikkim.
Darjeeling is the land of the Ghorkas (Ghurkas). The Ghorkas are, of course, famous Indo-Nepali soldiers fighting in the service of the British Empire. Ghorka identity is now firmly anchored to this martial myth and Ghorkas are one of the only groups in India who have the constitutional right to carry concealed weapons (in this case the wickedly curved dagger known as the Khukiri). I visited a “Ghorka accessory” shop in Darjeeling decorated with a poster proclaiming “A Ghorka and his Khukiri: A Fatal Combination”. Darjeeling, a former British hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas is most famous for its tea, grown in verdant green terraced gardens on the hillsides. Now there is a Ghorka nationalist movement seeking statehood for “Ghorkaland”. Darjeeling is a world apart from the rest of India – the people speak Nepalese, wear fez hats, eat momos (Tibetan dumplings), and have the sun-wizened look of other Himalayan peoples. It’s a stunningly beautiful town, wrapped in the four directions by soaring mountains. When the liquid-pearl clouds clear, Kanchenjunga rises before you – the celestial mass of the third highest mountain on earth.
On the drive from Darjeeling to Sikkim we traverse roaring mountain rivers and mossy green forests alive with acrobatic monkeys. Our driver stops at a roadside stand to buy bunches of radishes, the most striking shade of violet – the twilight edge of an incandescent sunset. Later, we drift through a village and are immersed into a burst of colour and commotion as children celebrating the Vishwakarma Puja surround our jeep laughing, passing out sweet snacks, and smearing purple rice paste onto our foreheads.
Sikkim is a Himalayan kingdom that was independent until it acceded to India in 1975. It retains much of its old character and the landscape is dotted with Buddhist monasteries and Stupas.
Since I am in a Buddhist homeland, and because I’m trying to escape thesis world if only for a few blissful moments, I will afford my wandering mind a wide pasture and allegorically illustrate three of the central tenets of Buddhism - impermanence, duality, and mindfulness. I make no claim on eloquence or clarity but my Mefloquine mind needs to breathe deeply every once and a while…
Impermanence:
Beginning with the ubiquitous end, let us take a moment, or a minute, to consider the tragically short lives of mayflies and snails. Allow me to introduce Ephemeroptera (“short-lived wing”). On one sunny day, not unlike any other sunny day, the Mayfly nymph emerges from her abyssal cradle under the smooth stones of an icy stream. She takes flight for the first time on delicate, luminescent, spun glass wings, lofting into the azure sky higher and higher. The warm spring air carries her into a sweeping spiral of her companions; the beating of their wings reverberates in her chest. What indescribable liberation! Finally there is a great joining and then it is over. The ephemeral mayfly emerges and falls into deathly slumber in a single day. Does the mayfly’s life proceed with the same rhythm as ours as it only glimpses one sunset, one spin of the earth on its axis? Assuming that the sum of the mayfly’s life is equal, we live in parallel worlds of time and experience. To the mayfly every moment is at once the most joyous and the most melancholy ever.
On that same spring evening, the rain tumbles to the earth, washing away the carapace carcass of the mayfly. The cool rain cleanses the smooth concrete pavement. Sensing an opportunity unlike any other a snail emerges from underneath a mossy stone wall and slips across the path, her flesh drinking in the life-giving water. She glides along in contentment, feelers twitching in the night air. And suddenly it’s over, her beautiful spiral shell reduced to fragments, trodden by an artless foot…
It was a sickening feeling. I was remorseful at having destroyed such modest, yet magnificent, ambition. But nothing lasts forever. Even the destroyer will one day be destroyed.
Duality:
India is full. There’s no more room. Don’t even think of coming here, please. I’m crammed into a jeep with eleven other people. Beside me is a jovial and fleshy Buddhist monk - we break up the monotony by trying to coax a smile out of the baby in front of us. There are people on top of me, people behind me and also in front of me. I have a feeling there might also be somebody underneath me – poor bastard. As my landlady appraised: “you have height…you’re tall…no, super-tall!” I shift as I think I feel a hand on my ass. It’s not often I get a hand on my ass (certainly not for a lack of trying) but sometimes in India I feel as though my arse might as well have a hand magnet on it. There’s just no room so physical contact happens. Our limbs are entwined, tangled. This jeep stinks. I’m trying to hold my breath. Get me out of this jeep! I’m tired; I’m hot - just as tired and hot as all the other bodies around me. In fact, they are probably thinking similar things (with the exception of the guy below who is thinking: “get this giant blonde nerd off of me”).
Is it possible to forget myself in this crowded jeep, to extinguish my egoism and just merge seamlessly into the steel blue sea? No problem. But first, I need to get that hand off my ass!
Mindfulness:
Stars sparkle in the midnight velvet sky
Morphine spiders crawl under paper skin
The streets of Kolkata feel vacant as a dream, yet still they shudder
Rivulets of water dance in the glow of a kerosene lamp
Underneath the smouldering orange moon,
Maya seeks redemption in Nita’s wearied arms
Stolen from sanctuary so many restless nights ago
Used roughly by strangers with their foul breath and fouler temperament
Used until her body was numb, her mind was numb, her soul was numb.
Only brown sugar softened the hard edge
An opiate to make them go away,
To slip into the grey
In this moment, on this concrete curb, the brown sugar was fading
And that old ache was creeping back,
A pain so real
A stone would cry out
Her body twitching,
Like Arjuna after the battle
she fell to her knees,
heartsick
She can feel Nita’s soft lips brushing against her ear as she points to the sky and whispers,
“maybe we’re just the lucky ones.”
Through the red haze of her pain she finds that moon
and senses opportunity,
a returning…
As I’m drifting along, lost in my own thoughts, I glance to my right and there is Ramona - a friend from my days in the Netherlands. I spent a month in Jamaica where we (along with our friend Marcel) spent days laying on the beach and nights listening to the sounds of “The Cool Ruler” and other reggae stars (everybody in Jamaica thinks they’re a reggae star – my personal favourite was the appropriately named Brushy One String). We ate escovitchied fish, rundown chicken and Johnny cakes, and chased it with dragon stout. That is Ramona as I know her. How odd that we now find ourselves together in the Himalayas.
Driving through the Himalayas, through Sikkim, it’s hard not to notice the bizarrely whimsical road signs. Ramona called it “fortune cookie wisdom” and that pretty much sums it up. A few examples:
- The rule of the road, quite the paradox: left is always right
- If married, divorce speed
- Sinking zone: a trouble spot since 1975.
- Go with the bend my friend.
We were stuck in one such “trouble spot” for three hours as a landslide had to be cleared by an army bulldozer. Because of its privileged (cursed) geographical position, wedged between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, Sikkim is full of military bases.
The heights of the Himalayas are defined by the sky. Clouds flow around you and the ever-present icy wind animates and, with time, tatters the Buddhist prayer flags. Stupas - monuments to the dead - are surrounded by expanses of fluttering white flags covered in swirling Tibetan script. The chants of Tibetan monks are an elemental rumble tumbling like waterfalls down the cold mountains. The people themselves belong to the landscape – they are often extremely short like alpine trees growing on the edge of possibility. Places like Sikkim and Tibet themselves exist on the edge of possibility; their very remoteness imbues them with their power as carriers of the spiritual imagination.
I’m now back in Calcutta witnessing the City of Joy in its most joyous moment: the Durga Puja. I don’t know what all of you are doing but I’m going out into the sound and the lights to have some fun!
Darjeeling is the land of the Ghorkas (Ghurkas). The Ghorkas are, of course, famous Indo-Nepali soldiers fighting in the service of the British Empire. Ghorka identity is now firmly anchored to this martial myth and Ghorkas are one of the only groups in India who have the constitutional right to carry concealed weapons (in this case the wickedly curved dagger known as the Khukiri). I visited a “Ghorka accessory” shop in Darjeeling decorated with a poster proclaiming “A Ghorka and his Khukiri: A Fatal Combination”. Darjeeling, a former British hill station in the foothills of the Himalayas is most famous for its tea, grown in verdant green terraced gardens on the hillsides. Now there is a Ghorka nationalist movement seeking statehood for “Ghorkaland”. Darjeeling is a world apart from the rest of India – the people speak Nepalese, wear fez hats, eat momos (Tibetan dumplings), and have the sun-wizened look of other Himalayan peoples. It’s a stunningly beautiful town, wrapped in the four directions by soaring mountains. When the liquid-pearl clouds clear, Kanchenjunga rises before you – the celestial mass of the third highest mountain on earth.
On the drive from Darjeeling to Sikkim we traverse roaring mountain rivers and mossy green forests alive with acrobatic monkeys. Our driver stops at a roadside stand to buy bunches of radishes, the most striking shade of violet – the twilight edge of an incandescent sunset. Later, we drift through a village and are immersed into a burst of colour and commotion as children celebrating the Vishwakarma Puja surround our jeep laughing, passing out sweet snacks, and smearing purple rice paste onto our foreheads.
Sikkim is a Himalayan kingdom that was independent until it acceded to India in 1975. It retains much of its old character and the landscape is dotted with Buddhist monasteries and Stupas.
Since I am in a Buddhist homeland, and because I’m trying to escape thesis world if only for a few blissful moments, I will afford my wandering mind a wide pasture and allegorically illustrate three of the central tenets of Buddhism - impermanence, duality, and mindfulness. I make no claim on eloquence or clarity but my Mefloquine mind needs to breathe deeply every once and a while…
Impermanence:
Beginning with the ubiquitous end, let us take a moment, or a minute, to consider the tragically short lives of mayflies and snails. Allow me to introduce Ephemeroptera (“short-lived wing”). On one sunny day, not unlike any other sunny day, the Mayfly nymph emerges from her abyssal cradle under the smooth stones of an icy stream. She takes flight for the first time on delicate, luminescent, spun glass wings, lofting into the azure sky higher and higher. The warm spring air carries her into a sweeping spiral of her companions; the beating of their wings reverberates in her chest. What indescribable liberation! Finally there is a great joining and then it is over. The ephemeral mayfly emerges and falls into deathly slumber in a single day. Does the mayfly’s life proceed with the same rhythm as ours as it only glimpses one sunset, one spin of the earth on its axis? Assuming that the sum of the mayfly’s life is equal, we live in parallel worlds of time and experience. To the mayfly every moment is at once the most joyous and the most melancholy ever.
On that same spring evening, the rain tumbles to the earth, washing away the carapace carcass of the mayfly. The cool rain cleanses the smooth concrete pavement. Sensing an opportunity unlike any other a snail emerges from underneath a mossy stone wall and slips across the path, her flesh drinking in the life-giving water. She glides along in contentment, feelers twitching in the night air. And suddenly it’s over, her beautiful spiral shell reduced to fragments, trodden by an artless foot…
It was a sickening feeling. I was remorseful at having destroyed such modest, yet magnificent, ambition. But nothing lasts forever. Even the destroyer will one day be destroyed.
Duality:
India is full. There’s no more room. Don’t even think of coming here, please. I’m crammed into a jeep with eleven other people. Beside me is a jovial and fleshy Buddhist monk - we break up the monotony by trying to coax a smile out of the baby in front of us. There are people on top of me, people behind me and also in front of me. I have a feeling there might also be somebody underneath me – poor bastard. As my landlady appraised: “you have height…you’re tall…no, super-tall!” I shift as I think I feel a hand on my ass. It’s not often I get a hand on my ass (certainly not for a lack of trying) but sometimes in India I feel as though my arse might as well have a hand magnet on it. There’s just no room so physical contact happens. Our limbs are entwined, tangled. This jeep stinks. I’m trying to hold my breath. Get me out of this jeep! I’m tired; I’m hot - just as tired and hot as all the other bodies around me. In fact, they are probably thinking similar things (with the exception of the guy below who is thinking: “get this giant blonde nerd off of me”).
Is it possible to forget myself in this crowded jeep, to extinguish my egoism and just merge seamlessly into the steel blue sea? No problem. But first, I need to get that hand off my ass!
Mindfulness:
Stars sparkle in the midnight velvet sky
Morphine spiders crawl under paper skin
The streets of Kolkata feel vacant as a dream, yet still they shudder
Rivulets of water dance in the glow of a kerosene lamp
Underneath the smouldering orange moon,
Maya seeks redemption in Nita’s wearied arms
Stolen from sanctuary so many restless nights ago
Used roughly by strangers with their foul breath and fouler temperament
Used until her body was numb, her mind was numb, her soul was numb.
Only brown sugar softened the hard edge
An opiate to make them go away,
To slip into the grey
In this moment, on this concrete curb, the brown sugar was fading
And that old ache was creeping back,
A pain so real
A stone would cry out
Her body twitching,
Like Arjuna after the battle
she fell to her knees,
heartsick
She can feel Nita’s soft lips brushing against her ear as she points to the sky and whispers,
“maybe we’re just the lucky ones.”
Through the red haze of her pain she finds that moon
and senses opportunity,
a returning…
As I’m drifting along, lost in my own thoughts, I glance to my right and there is Ramona - a friend from my days in the Netherlands. I spent a month in Jamaica where we (along with our friend Marcel) spent days laying on the beach and nights listening to the sounds of “The Cool Ruler” and other reggae stars (everybody in Jamaica thinks they’re a reggae star – my personal favourite was the appropriately named Brushy One String). We ate escovitchied fish, rundown chicken and Johnny cakes, and chased it with dragon stout. That is Ramona as I know her. How odd that we now find ourselves together in the Himalayas.
Driving through the Himalayas, through Sikkim, it’s hard not to notice the bizarrely whimsical road signs. Ramona called it “fortune cookie wisdom” and that pretty much sums it up. A few examples:
- The rule of the road, quite the paradox: left is always right
- If married, divorce speed
- Sinking zone: a trouble spot since 1975.
- Go with the bend my friend.
We were stuck in one such “trouble spot” for three hours as a landslide had to be cleared by an army bulldozer. Because of its privileged (cursed) geographical position, wedged between Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan, Sikkim is full of military bases.
The heights of the Himalayas are defined by the sky. Clouds flow around you and the ever-present icy wind animates and, with time, tatters the Buddhist prayer flags. Stupas - monuments to the dead - are surrounded by expanses of fluttering white flags covered in swirling Tibetan script. The chants of Tibetan monks are an elemental rumble tumbling like waterfalls down the cold mountains. The people themselves belong to the landscape – they are often extremely short like alpine trees growing on the edge of possibility. Places like Sikkim and Tibet themselves exist on the edge of possibility; their very remoteness imbues them with their power as carriers of the spiritual imagination.
I’m now back in Calcutta witnessing the City of Joy in its most joyous moment: the Durga Puja. I don’t know what all of you are doing but I’m going out into the sound and the lights to have some fun!
Monday, October 6, 2008
The Hardening of the Heart
Faced with the ordinary, human disappointments of life there have been moments where I have resolved to immunise myself by forging my heart into a harder instrument. But, I ask myself, does the hardening of the heart serve a constructive purpose? The hard hearts have strength but it is brittle and hollow – self-defence born of the denial of self-awareness. In the age of rationalism and technological mastery is humanity best served by feeling less? It is easy to profane the humane. Yet, if we disconnect ourselves from our own suffering are we not also disconnecting ourselves from the suffering of others?
I have wondered about the human cost of the kind of work that I do: when you become habituated to the suffering of others are you losing some of what it means to be human? Is that ever a reasonable price to pay?
In the everyday of Calcutta I sometimes lift my legs and step right over human suffering as I’m going about my important business of looking for books or shopping for cheap sandals. Empathy is wonderful, just so long as it doesn’t throw me off balance. Recently I stopped on the street over an old, grey-haired woman who was begging in the darkness with her child in her arms. I stooped over and emptied the change out of my pocket into her outstretched, wrinkled, russet hand. She glanced down at the small change (a few rupees) and briefly looked up at me, her face showing naked, desperate disappointment. It was not the look of an imposter, but an honest look of destroyed hope born from the wasting disease of poverty. It made me feel terribly ashamed. How could I put such a look on anybody’s face? I passed her again a few minutes later and this time slipped a ten rupee note into her hand (about 25 cents). I didn’t stop to look at her face. I couldn’t bear to see that look again. When does cool indifference become cruel indifference? I don’t know.
I have wondered about the human cost of the kind of work that I do: when you become habituated to the suffering of others are you losing some of what it means to be human? Is that ever a reasonable price to pay?
In the everyday of Calcutta I sometimes lift my legs and step right over human suffering as I’m going about my important business of looking for books or shopping for cheap sandals. Empathy is wonderful, just so long as it doesn’t throw me off balance. Recently I stopped on the street over an old, grey-haired woman who was begging in the darkness with her child in her arms. I stooped over and emptied the change out of my pocket into her outstretched, wrinkled, russet hand. She glanced down at the small change (a few rupees) and briefly looked up at me, her face showing naked, desperate disappointment. It was not the look of an imposter, but an honest look of destroyed hope born from the wasting disease of poverty. It made me feel terribly ashamed. How could I put such a look on anybody’s face? I passed her again a few minutes later and this time slipped a ten rupee note into her hand (about 25 cents). I didn’t stop to look at her face. I couldn’t bear to see that look again. When does cool indifference become cruel indifference? I don’t know.
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