In the jungle...

...terrible jungle, the people sleep and the lions eat everyone.

Election fever has started in Mauritius (and in England too). Parliament has been dissolved and Mauritians will find out on May 1st when they will have to choose between the hot pan and the fire. It's getting harder and harder, but I have forbidden myself to be cynical about politics. Politics is after all about our rights, our money, our futures. Being dismissive about it only sends the message that politicians, those individuals who are in power only because we give them permission to, can do whatever they want with that power and that we won't mind.

In the beginning of beginnings, politicians are only there because the average citizen decided that he wanted to use his time to care for his family, his personal interests and his backyard and delegate the management of defence and national policies to a chosen body. That the State is today much more than that, that it seeks to be an identity-definer, that it decides who has access to medical care, that it decides when it is acceptable to die, are merely consequences of a certain kind of evolution of the Leviathan.

The keyword here is delegate. Delegation of tasks has never implied delegation of responsibility. We allow others chosen by us and informed by our preferences, to accomplish certain tasks. The responsibility for our well-being is never with them; it remains ours. We are still accountable for who is steering the rudder of our lives.

May our elected servants never forget where they stand, or they might find the chair slipping back when they try to sit.

My Aji

Today is my grandma's birthday. She turns 70.

When I was little, she looked after me, put up with my whims, wet my hair then parted it in the middle and disciplined it into two curly little pigtails. She made me eggs sunny-side up which we ate with pain maison* and tea. She raised her voice to make me see reason and sewed me new dresses all the time. For my fourth birthday, she made me three different little-lady outfits and trotted me to the photo studio to get my pictures taken. She taught me the basic Marathi words and which god to pray to for inspiration in my studies.

She remains the picture of courtesy in the worst circumstances and never attends a wedding without a pink rose in her chignon. Every morning she prays towards the sun, and her heart has room for all of us, scattered in South Africa, France, Réunion, Canada, Mauritius.

She stoically feels our pains, our joys and our hopes, and with a little magic in her fingers and a whispered blessing under her breath, she dispels the evil eye and tries to make everything alright again.


*A round-shaped bread.

C'est pas le printemps ça!

Sit

by Vikram Seth

Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.
You're twenty-six, and still have some life ahead.
No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I'll
Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.
This twenty minutes' rendezvous will make my day:
To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,
Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.

spin...

... ach! What I learnt today that's going to be hard to practise: eating boiled spinach is really good for your health.

Bleh.

Enflammant

Hier soir j'ai été voir un concert de la série Les Envolées Musicales à l'OSM. Le chef d'orchestre, et de chorale, était Gregory Charles. Durant deux heures et demie, cet homme à l'énergie débordante a enflammé le public en dirigeant avec passion l'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal et le Choeur du Nouveau Monde. Les morceaux étaient touchants: The Sound of Music (ooooh!), La Mer de Charles Trénet, des morceaux en chinois, en japonais, en allemand, en dialecte africain, en anglais et français bien sûr, en hébreu et en latin, du gospel. Et en plus, une chorale qui saute et tape et claque et joue!

Cet homme est le parfait showman: il tire de son public larmes et rires à volonté, mais le tout est fait avec tellement d'enthousiasme, tellement de sincérité, et surtout tellement d'humour, que c'est irrésistible. Le moment le plus émouvant: les premiers solos de deux petits garçons d'environ 9 et 11 ans. J'avais le coeur dans la gorge. Ils étaient adorables.

Un chef d'orchestre qui de ses mains guide les voix d'une soixantaine d'enfants pour en faire des choses si belles, c'est magique.

?

Two weeks ago, the headlines were overflowing with the ethical debate about Terri Schiavo, a woman who after a temporary cardiac arrest at the age of 26, entered a "permanent vegetative state" and was the object of an ensuing 15-year legal battle between her parents and her husband over whether she should be kept alive or not. Her feeding tube was disconnected on March 18, 2005 and she died at the age of 41 thirteen days later.

All I could find in the news were rehashings of the parents' arguments against those of her husband, until I finally hit a Newsweek article that provided some background. More information can also be found at this link.

It is not my intention to discuss how moral or not Ms Schiavo's death was. Rather, there are a few questions that have arisen inside of me which I feel compelled to talk about, and your response is most welcome.

Some have written that this case underlines the importance of live wills. I feel that it is easy for someone to simply write down at 26 that if they were to be in a vegetative state, then they would rather die. Medical reports about Ms Schiavo state that her cerebral cortex had become scar tissue and brain fluid so that no cognitive activity was possible. That's pretty clear. But the brain stem was still alive. Do we know what new functions the brain stem can develop? Do we know whether a dead cerebral cortex means a dead consciousness?

But what if someone else got trapped into a body and could not hear or communicate, but could still see? What if that person, after having written that he would rather die in his will, suddenly discovered that, trapped inside, he could still feel, and would give anything for another glimpse of the sea? And that life was something more than what we all think, and that he still wanted to live? I don't know how dead Terri Schiavo's senses were. I'm trying to find more information, but there's little of it available. In the fictitious second case I mentioned, having drawn a will beforehand would still have been useless, even dangerous. What do we know about that state?

Who should decide? The person's chosen life-partner, the person's parents, God?

Another question is this: once the courts have decided that it's more humane for someone to die rather than to live in such a state (as was the case for the Schiavo case), isn't it also fair to say that the court should decide of a humane way for that death to happen, i.e., euthanasia? Why starve a person to death?

What was right, and what would be right in another case?

I don't know.

Un bon repas

C’est quoi pour vous un plat réussi, un bon plat ?
Un bon plat, c’est quelque chose qui dégage une émotion, c’est quelque chose qui doit être partagé avec des gens qu’on aime.

C’est Pierre Perret qui affirme : “Il n’y a pas de repas sans bons amis…”

C’est tout le sens d’un bon repas. Le sens du partage. Partager, c’est se réunir autour d’un symbole, d’une cérémonie. Un repas c’est une passation entre deux personnes, un moment d’union, un moment de ressenti commun. Un plat, c’est un moment de culture quelquefois même d’histoire. Imaginez un repas autour d’un briyani ou d’un repas de Pâques. Le sens même est différent, les symboles aussi. Les deux repas sont porteurs d’histoires.

-Extraits d'Apartés, une entrevue avec Daniel Heerah-

Being a chef

Avoir trois étoiles, et puis en perdre une, a mené le chef Bernard Loiseau au suicide… Cela en valait-il la peine?

Vous savez, une étoile c’est bien, mais ce n’est pas la fin du monde. Je l’ai eue, j’en suis fier, et si on me l’enlevait, cela voudrait dire que ma cuisine a baissé. C’est tout. On me l’enlèvera comme on me l’a donnée. On est des hommes, la vie est courte. Il faut être raisonnable. Le drame qui a frappé Bernard Loiseau est terrible. Il vous fait aussi voir comment les chefs sont des hommes fragiles. Comme des artistes. Je comprends que Bernard Loiseau ait pu prendre toutes ces choses tellement à coeur. Même si moi je ne suis pas comme ça. Il faut se protéger de ces choses-là. Devant Dieu, on n’est pas tous égaux sur ce plan. Il faut profiter des choses quand elles sont là. Nous avons dans les mains des choses particulières et il faut les partager avec les autres. C’est une joie énorme.

-Extrait d'Apartés, une entrevue avec Daniel Heerah, premier chef mauricien étoilé au guide Michelin -

À ce sujet, voir l'article d'Adam Gopnik, The Food Critic at Table:

"So when we read, in “The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine” (Gotham; $27.50), Rudolph Chelminski’s forthcoming biography of the doomed three-star chef Bernard Loiseau, the story of Loiseau’s restless search for a way to transform cauliflower from a discouraging vegetable into a radiant side dish by caramelizing it, we smile at first, and are expected to smile. It is, after all, only caramelized cauliflower. As the search picks up momentum and intensity, however, and we learn how Loiseau began to blanch and strain and purée, we start to succumb to the grandeur of the quest. Why should the search for caramelized cauliflower be any less significant than Ad Reinhardt’s search for the pure-black painting, or John Cage’s for pure silence? But then when we read that Loiseau committed suicide after the failure of his caramelized cauliflower to impress his critics, we rebel again, in shock. It was, after all, only caramelized cauliflower."

-Adam Gopnik in the The New Yorker, April 4, 2005-

"Aujourd'hui je suis convaincue que personne ne perd personne, parce que personne ne possède personne.

C'est cela la véritable expérience de la liberté: avoir la chose la plus importante au monde, sans la posséder."

-Paulo Coelho, Onze minutes (2003)-

Simple pleasures

I love this freedom in Montreal, to finish work and go sit in a bookshop café, sipping Earl Grey made from an open teabag dangling on a wooden spike, looking out over McGill College Avenue at the new spring bustle, and reading. Settled at a small round table, surrounded by an artistic disarray of students rephrasing the world at Macs, doodlers redrawing the world in their sketchpads and young and old sages re-constructing the world over nouveau health food, I had a delightful afternoon browsing through the café's latest issues of The New Yorker, The Economist, Newsweek, and of course, Vogue and Cosmo ;).

In two hours, I discovered Spring's latest accessories, Chirac's plans for a Google à la française, Google's corporate strategy, Adam Gopnik's hilarious, witty writing about people who write about food, Netherlands and its integration of its Muslim population... I can hardly think of a more blissful way to simply not do anything useful in one afternoon.

PS: Actually, nothing beats the beach and the sea, but I'll take what I get.

One day you will take me completely out of my self,
I'll do what the angels cannot do.

Your eyelash will write on my cheek
the poem that hasn't been thought of.

- Jelaluddin Rumi, Quatrain 670, Kulliyat-e-Shams, in a translation by Moyne and Barks called Unseen Rain-

Tonight I'll have, on a night-blue plate,
fluffy mashed clouds sprinkled with snow flakes,
a swig of freshly-fallen rain
to quench my thirst, some éclairs for dessert.