Virgin Suicide
by Theena Kumaragurunathan 2005
Beheld by the Good Mother,
Five in all - Seeds of wonder;
Yet her Dogma lied,
When the pentad of her winter.
Started with a summer of snow,
As she built a house - And forgot her home;
Some are happy, others go for the ride.
‘Goodbye’, the youngest said, ‘I am off for my virgin suicide’.
Inspired by the movie of the same title.
Indian cricket fans are back to their idiotic best. See for yourself.
This section is dedicated to my current study of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. All commentry, critique (with proper credits), personal appreciation and rants will be here. I began studying Book I yesterday.
I will be playing around with the templates and HTML code to get a more personalized look for my blog. You might see the site looking different everytime you visit - if indeed you do visit at all. Bear with me for my HTML know-how isn’t the greatest; right now its a case of trial and error.
Thanks.
The Ashes brought home the realization that test cricket is the greatest sport in the world. Too bad Bangladesh and Zimbabwe have to go ahead and spoil it.
By: Theena Kumaragurunathan
Yesterday, Sri Lanka completed a two-nil series win against Bangladesh while India did the same against Zimbabwe. The ‘test series’ - and I use the term loosely – between Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe lasted all but four days and two sessions in total; Irfan Pathan, playing for India against Zimbabwe, got the man of series award for his haul of 21 wickets – in two matches.
Were these contests of incompetent Davids against Golaiths really necessary? The captains of India and Sri Lanka seem to think so. Sri Lankan captain, Marvan Attapathu has repeatedly said that he has the highest respect for his opposition. Likewise, Saurav Ganguly, his counterpart in the Indian side, has gone on record saying that the minnow nations need more time.
More time? You have to wonder if this diplomacy at work or if they are so naïve as to believe what they are saying. Consider the fact that Bangladesh – Habibul Bashar and Mohammad Ashraful aside - is nothing more than a bunch of club cricketers who would struggle to get into any domestic team of most countries. Consider the fact that the team representing Zimbabwe is not really the best team out there - Mugabe’s cronies in the Zimbabwe Cricket Union (ZCU) did a wonderful job of throwing them out for reasons ranging from political to financial. While you are at it, consider the figures provided by S Rajesh from Cricinfo on the glorious art of minnow-bashing.
Sri Lanka’s test schedule is, for reasons unknown to all except the ICC, heavily in favour of playing against these minnows. Since 2002, they’ve played 34 tests, eight of which were against one of the two minnows – a percentage of 23.53%; one in four matches. On the opposite end of the spectrum lies Australia: since 2002, they’ve played 46 test matches, four of which were against the minnows – a percentage of 8.70%; one in 11 matches.
And here in Sri Lanka, we wonder why attendances at test matches resemble the legendary screenings of Jennifer Lopez / Ben Affleck flick ‘Gigli’?
The ICC has argued on several occasions that their vision is to globalize – the cliché of our time – the game. Now that is all and well and good. Four years ago, it was perhaps the naivety – hindsight suggest that it was plain stupidity instead - of youth that made me believe that cricket could become a global sport: we’d have our own Manchester United; a World Cup that would have the entire world enthralled; a David Beckham-type cricketer-celebrity-nutjob-cultural icon, who would get married to……..
Perish the thought.
The ICC’s vision and experiment, opening the doors to new comers into the closed world of test cricket will damage cricket. It is that simple. The effects are already visible: mention Zimbabwe and Bangladesh as opponents for the next match – or God forbid, an entire series– and you are guaranteed to get groans from cricket lovers all over the world.
Can you blame us? Should we muster interest in gruesome contests where one team keeps pummelling the other over and over again, until you start hoping for an upset? To let go of our loyalties in the hope that the underdog – a term that seems more appropriate – sends one unexpected upper-hook to floor our team? You must be mad.
My days of blasphemous thoughts, of cricket becoming hip, are behind me. Cricket, and test cricket in particular, is not meant for the world as a whole. It is for those of us who prefer to watch drama unfold over the course of five days, where the lines separating courage and skill become increasingly blurred, where substance and style go hand in hand, where ninety minutes means only three quarters of one session – not the entire game.
It is not for the world. If the world wants it, then have them prove that they can withstand five days of pressure and drama of the highest degree. Else have them flee to the pyjama parades of one day cricket and 20/20.
Don’t make test cricket a Gigli.
I am not sure how many have come across the spech Steve Job delivered to a group of Stanford University students, so I’ll post it. Regardless it is a fantastic speech.
“I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky that I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me that I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything that all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.” - Steve Jobs - June 2005
Micheal Ondaatje’s follow-up novel to the highly successful English Patient is a work of fiction. Keep repeating that line in your head, as I did; this tale of discoveries – archaeological, forensic and, most importantly, discovering one’s self in relation to a world that has seemingly gone mad – will leave the reader with more questions than answers.
There is Anil - a Sri Lankan born forensic anthropologist based in America, returning to the island after 15 years on a human rights fact-finding mission; Sarath – an archaeologist assigned to assist Anil whose political connections and loyalties are questioned throughout; and there is Gamini – a brilliant doctor, benevolent human being and one of society’s dropouts. These three form the emotional nucleus of the novel, guiding us through their creator’s retelling of madness that was best ignored.
Sarath and Anil discover what they believe to be a contemporary skeleton – they decide to call him ‘Sailor’ – in a historic site. The implications of government sponsored murder campaigns are obvious, but both Anil and Sarath have to proceed carefully: evidence had to be gathered, analysed, second opinions sought for, and received, before it can be made public.
It is a background of fear and paranoia.
And having set his novel on this intriguing premise, Ondaatje sets off on his own exploration – that of the characters and their lives. Using frequent shifts in time and interweaving the past and present of characters’ lives, Ondaatje creates a rich tapestry of a seemingly eternal search for identity.
For those who are unfamiliar with Ondaatje’s technique, the initial chapters can be a very disorienting experience, not unlike Mark Danielewski’s in House of Leaves (only in essence; definitely not in execution). I found myself going back and forth to familiarize myself with his narrative, although I hardly complained - Ondaatje’s prose is too good for that.
While in the midst of reading the novel, I discussed the novel with a few online friends (Yep, I am that geeky). One of them was of the view that the novel’s potential to move, to shock, to stay was relative – it would, he said, make a bigger impression on a Sri Lankan than an outsider.
I disagree. In my point of view, the novel does have universal appeal; suggesting otherwise is to merely scratch the surface of the novel. Dig deeper and readers will be faced with the all too familiar theme of searching for one’s identity. The quest to discover the identity of Sailor is a perfect metaphor for the characters’ attempt to find their own identities; in this day and age when identity crisis is a problem of almost epidemic levels, Anil’s Ghost is a sincere and brilliant attempt to capture our plight.
At the end of the recent Ashes, I was compelled to blog away in delight after having witnessed – well followed….sigh – one of the finest test series in history. However, seeing as Sambit Bal at Cricinfo has done a better job, and because he has captured my exact feelings, I will post a small extract of his article instead. Click here for the full article.
The revival of the beautiful game
Sambit Bal
September 16, 2005
First, a warm thank you to England and Australia. For close to two months, they have touched us and moved us, roused our senses and stirred our souls, made us live through their joy and despair and feel good about ourselves. Sport at its best is high art, and as escapism, it is higher than cinema for nothing is make-believe. For so many hours in the last three months, these two teams drew us in to their world, away from our worldly strife and drudgery. A pity that it had to end.
Welcome to a new episode of ‘Theena’s continued obsession with creating new blogs instead of maintaining old ones’. Lengthy title that. Here’s hoping that I stick to this blog through thick and thin; through good times and bad; through good health and bad……..blah blah
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