Yesterday I found myself thinking about ships, as I sat at the very back of a packed lecture hall listening to a professor who happens to be the biggest figure in a major school of literary theory and criticism. I was there both for who he was and for what he was teaching: a course exploring mobility and culture through a literary/historical mapping of three particular oceanic voyages in the mid-17th century. As he made his introductory remarks on this first day of class, the projector screen next to him displayed an array of fascinating visuals, including spatial simulations on Google Earth–an impressive use of technology in the classroom (and this was not even a science class!). At one point, his PowerPoint slides held up a very neat computer-modeled diagram of a ship, marked with labels for every mast, sail, and corner of the deck that has a name in English.
My mind drifted off to a talk by Amitav Ghosh several months ago at a local bookstore, where he was reading from his latest novel, Sea of Poppies. As he discussed the colonial and remarkably cosmopolitan context of 19th century Calcutta, Ghosh described his fascination with sea travel and what he considers a most intricate “machine,” the ship. His interest in language led him to wonder how sailors of diverse cultural/linguistic backgrounds communicated in order to make this machine function. Ghosh talked about cultural contact and the immense hybridity of languages–often to an extent that most native speakers of a language don’t ever realize. Many of us never really think of the influence of Portugese, for instance, on Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, and other Indian languages precisely due to those Iberian ships that brought European commerce to India. I was quite surprised to learn of the Portugese origin of such a mundane word as balti, referring to that ubiquitous bucket that no desi household can do without. But of course, the word balti is now officially an English word, at least in England, thanks to such culinary delights as balti chicken, reportedly the English people’s favorite take-out. And thus language travels, from the buckets on board 15th c. Portugese ships to the cooking-pots of 20th c. Indian restaurants in England. (more…)
Earlier today, a friend and I were feeling rather strange as we left the theater, not knowing how exactly to react to the movie we had just seen: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. My friend suggested that we never again complain about getting older. But if there’s one thing I kept thinking about throughout the movie, it was the question of memory. How can we explain the curious role of memory in a life lived backward in terms of age? Or for that matter, how exactly to explain the role of memory in our own lives?
It is, of course, something that I always think about, perhaps even more so due to my academic interest in history. A few days ago, as I was walking out of another theater after Waltz with Bashir, another friend was asking about the main message of the movie, with respect to the Sabra & Shatila massacre. I responded that for me, even as the film was overtly political, it essentially had to do with memory, since the narrative was structured by the protagonist’s and his fellow Israelis’ efforts to remember their experience as young soldiers at war in Lebanon. I was deeply moved by the movie in many complex ways, but the question that continued to haunt me as I walked home that night was: what does it mean for me to “remember” a massacre that took place exactly two weeks before I was born to life.
These musings on memory were basically what brought me back to this blog today after months of inactivity. I had, of course, been contemplating a return, even as I had consciously put it off until after the end of my Fall semester. But I have often surprised myself with the realization that weeks would go by without me thinking for once about this blog, or even the blogosphere in general: which can only indicate how inessential it is to my life. But that does not mean that I have not remembered it at all or haven’t been reminded of it–as I indeed have been by a couple of friends, both real and virtual. That also brings up the one big change since my last entry on these pages, and that is that I am in school again. As I may have written before on a similar return from hiatus, if our writings on blogs say something about the state of our lives, then our absence from them says just as much. In my case, it’s about the state of being a student: the late nights in the library, the long, often hurried, walks across campus, the meetings with more new people than you can remember the names of, the frantic efforts to finish overdue papers, and of course the worries about food, shelter, and money.
Despite the occasional amnesia, I have never doubted that I will return to blogging. I did, however, question myself. To figure out whether I really wanted this blog to continue to be a part of my life. The answer is yes, and for various reasons that don’t need attention now. But there is one that I could mention, and that has to do with the many interesting people and their writings that I have discovered through the blogosphere. I wanted to acknowledge that, because I often recall how much I have learned from here. I could not possibly recount the number of times that, in the course of a serious discussion with friends or even professors, I have referred to something I read in a blog or learned from a discussion inspired by a post either on my own or someone else’s blog. These citations can sometimes get rather awkward, when I don’t want to out the fact that I blog–anonymously, sort of.
In any case, I do hope I don’t disappear again. With school starting again in just a couple of days, that may be more just wishful thinking, but I can at least promise to try and remember. Although for all my talk of remembrance, I have to say I was struck by the irony of the fact that as I sat in front of the computer today ready to blog again, I had to stare at the monitor and think hard for almost a minute before I could remember that the website is called wordpress.com.
