Carter – the last respectably flawed president

President Carter is in hospice care. At 98 and in declining health, it seems the curtain falls on the remarkable career of the last respectably flawed president.

Carter is both credited and criticized in excess. His presidential accomplishments – the Camp David accords, the longest nominally peaceful period in modern America, and a reinstatement of decency in the presidency after the Nixon/Ford regime – are few but highly publicized. His failings – stagflation, the hostage crisis, the energy crisis, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan – are equally prominent. Most of his shortcomings have one thing in common: they are failures of omission rather than commission. However, it's also true that the US foreign policy in his administration ended up causing atrocities in East Timor and Palestine. [1]

Without condoning or excusing the violation of human rights one iota, it's possible to view Mr. Carter with compassion and respect; in stark contrast with all the presidents who have thus far followed him.

In many ways, Mr. Carter's pre- and post-presidential careers are more successful than his presidency. There might have been some  other men to occupy that office of whom one or the other of the statements could be said. (Grant, Eisenhower, and Reagan were arguably better at their first careers; Taft in his second.) However, it is difficult to think of another man whose presidency is a footnote to his pursuits as a farmer before; a peacemaker and volunteer afterwards; and a preacher both before and after.

Every human is flawed, and those in positions of power (whether it's thrust upon them or a fruit of their own ambition) are apt to have their flaws both magnified and spotlighted. Despite this, James Earl Carter, Jr. may be the last president whose flaws haven't consumed the respect he deserves.

Thank you, President Carter, for earning our respect.

Notes

[1] https://chomsky.info/199910__02/

Identity

 

I'm not here to be the butt of your jokes,

The anvil to your hammer,

The mortar to your pestle,

The pusillanimous receptacle to your Dickensian humor. 

I'm not created for you to be thankful to your Creator that He created you in His image, 

Not in mine. 

I'm not here for you to count your blessings that you were born into privilege, 

Not into destitution. 

I'm not here for you to misquote John Bradford, 

And proclaim with your vain religiosity upon seeing my face:

 "There but for the grace of God, go I." 

Do you even know how he paid for this utterance?  

By being burned at the stake. 

Would you agree to that? 

Be the singed cinder with which I could scrawl my reply? 

"No, not I."

April 2018

You cast a long shadow

The first thing one noticed was how short and petite she was; how well coiffured her hair was; and how she carried herself, her bag, and even her shoes with an air of uncomplicated, self-assured ease. Simultaneously the opposite of diffidence and vanity, remarkably contained in and exuded from that smallish figure.

My only encounter with Cokie Roberts was when we shared an airport security line, separated by a dozen other travelers. As the serpentine queue of humanity wound itself around the retractable barriers, I was able to observe her a few times. We didn't make eye contact – I was too conscious of not appearing to stare, and she probably too accustomed to being noticed and therefore to ignoring it.

It was long enough ago that I have forgotten the airport and even the year when it happened. I'm rather sure that it was while she was still hosting This Week on ABC. I'm equally sure of my regret at not having my copy of We are our Mothers' Daughters with me when I saw her; as if having it would have magically imbued me with impudent courage to rush at her through the barriers and ask for her signature! Considering that all travelers had their shoes off, it narrows it down to 2001 or 2002. Recalling my air-travels during that period, it was likely at one of Newark, LaGuardia, or JFK airports.

She inspired generations of listeners, viewers, and readers through her nuanced yet uncomplicated analysis of politics. She made us see the possibility of good, virtuous politicking. It came naturally (one may even say genetically) to her; however she made the rest of us believe that politics was not only important, but also a worthy, even noble pursuit.

I distrust some politicians all the time and all politicians some of the time. The fact that I don't distrust all politicians all the time is due in no small part to that petite, self-assured journalistic daughter of career politicians.

Requiescat in pace, Cokie Roberts. You are already missed.

Honoring Mr. McCain

Senator John McCain has died.

“Warrior”, “Maverick”, “Straight Talker” — these are some nouns that have been used for him. One adjective that is used repeatedly is “honorable”. By all accounts, he was that.

He was imperfect and aware of it. That’s more than one can ask of a decent, honorable man.

Thank you, Mr. McCain, for your decades of service, for your decency, and for displaying honor in the face of adversity. You are missed.  

Requiescat in pace.

"Magpie Murders" by Anthony Horowitz

Atticus Puend ... Dust In Teacup ¹

The "story within a story" device has been around since before Hamlet. In Magpie Murders, Anthony Horowitz uses it fully: the inner "book" (a manuscript, really) having its own author's blurb for the fictitious author, a frontispiece including other works by the said fictitious author, and even its own page numbering. The division between the "outer" and "inner" story is almost even: 230-odd pages for each narrative; which makes this two-books-in-one-cover a good candidate for a "buy one mystery, get one of equal length free" marketing slogan.

With two equal-length stories compacted and somewhat intertwined like this, a comparison of each with the other is inevitable. Anthony Horowitz does this himself by using the inner ("fictitious") story to drive the outer ("real") one. The outer story chases the shadows of the inner one in interesting ways -- the most interesting being the list of suspects, the denouement, and the fates of the protagonists.

Given this much overlap and the resultant limit of about 230 pages per story, it's impressive that Horowitz is able to weave in sufficient twists and turns in the inner story (less so in the outer one). There is only so much limelight; so most of it falls on Herr Pünd (inner protagonist) and Alan Conway (outer one). There are the unavoidably serendipitous events that allow Horowitz to quickly make the story flow -- a chance encounter at a train station that catapults the plot of the outer story or the extremely convenient and equally unlikely appearance of a beau to save her woman from dying in an assault-arson.

The inner story is independent enough to be read on its own. Indeed, that's how I first read it: it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the entire work.

All in all, the two stories work sufficiently well enough to make this 460+ page codex enjoyable.

---

1 "Pünd" without umlauts is properly "Puend"; which, happily, also makes the anagram work^↩

The edification of priviliged white people is not my vocation

This is a declaration of purpose, a clarification of intent, and an admission of disinterest.

This not a manifesto of hatred. It is not an expression of patronization towards my own kind: people of color. It is not a plea for anything, least of all for empathy from the very people whose edification it disavows. It is not whimsy, flimflam, spiteful, childish, angry, evil, reprehensible; nor a dozen other names that it shall probably attract but not deserve.

This essay does have the flaw of being paradoxical: by its very existence — and with the few references at its end — it intends to inform. It is difficult to escape this paradox. I won’t try to.

In the second decade of the 21st century, living in the richest country ever to have existed, I’m constantly surprised to find myself in the company of people who are ignorant of the struggle that people of color, people of non-binary gender, immigrants, poor people, and other under- and un-privileged groups go through on a daily basis. This struggle is continual and unabated. It is caused by transgressions both covert and overt, both subtle and coarse, and often perpetrated by the selfsame people who profess ignorance of their own privilege.

In the last few years, I have experienced several incidents that have convinced me that the job of educating white, upper middle-class people is uninteresting and unsatisfying in the extreme:

1. Summer 2013. A white male colleague refers to the US Civil War casually as the “War of Northern Aggression”. He also questions me if I have any principles (because I have opinions different from his) — while we are driving to have dinner at my brother’s house who had graciously invited him as a guest.

2. Summer 2014. A white male colleague — after several notorious incidents of sexual harassment of women at tech conferences have come to light — publicly asks if we really need to support women-in-technology causes.

3. Fall 2015. I get “feedback” at work that states that I’m “too formal with clients”. Upon inquiry, it turns out it reflects my practice of speaking in full sentences using proper grammar. There is no attempt on the part of those giving this “feedback” to discover that I learned English as a second language as an adult, and have constantly worked on overcoming this handicap. The “feedback” also ignored the large amount of literature that indicates that foreign accents (especially those associated with “brownness” or “blackness”) are looked down upon in the United States, and are equated with ignorance.

4. December 2015. In the aftermath of candidate Trump’s promise of a “Muslim ban”, a white male software engineer asks me via Facebook if I’m “planning on blowing anything up while I’m here [in the US]”. (He knows that I’m a US citizen and that this is my home.)

5. Summer 2016. A white male colleague derides me under the guise of feedback that my posture and voice aren’t impressive enough. He can’t seem to see that he’s 6’4”, with a booming voice, and I’m much shorter.

6. Spring 2017. A white male colleague addresses me curtly in public, and later has the temerity to commend me (in writing) for not losing my temper under his verbal fusillade.

7. Fall 2017. A white male colleague jocularly accuses me of plagiarism in public after I recite an all-too-famous piece of literature.

This is just a sampling of the events that white people of privilege whom I know have perpetrated. In the face of such blissful cluelessness, I admit that any attempts on my part to cure this institutional ignorance are bound to fail. Therefore, I resolve to hereby make no more such attempts.

I have been blessed with the friendship, love and support of many friends and family, for which I’m humbly grateful. I will focus the finite capabilities of my limited life on enriching my relationships with these beloved souls. To the general population of privileged people; especially privileged white people; I have nothing left to say.

References

1. Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
2. What I Told My White Friend When He Asked For My Black Opinion On White Privilege
3. This Comic Perfectly Explains What White Privilege Is. The last line says something like “Please educate yourself”. The end.

"Essays After Eighty" by Donald Hall

Donald Hall's composition of essays found me by accident. Looking for Bertrand Russell's "Unpopular Essays" in a library shelf, the fingers and eyes instead got stuck on this delightful little compendium of reminiscences by an octogenarian poet who admits to being abandoned by poetry.

Donald Hall was a poet laureate of the United States for one year. This was a recognition and sadly, a culmination of decades of prodigious poetry writing. (He frankly admits to not being a productive poet during his tenure, and resigned a year later.) He wrote more than 20 books, many (but not all) of poetry. He also wrote for children, on baseball, and on art.

Essays After Eighty is just that: a book of fourteen essays spanning a brief 134 pages. These are memories of a life well-lived and well-enjoyed. From his pre-war youth in Wilmot, NH to his years in France with his first wife, Kirby. From his appointment as a teacher at the University of Michigan to the breakdown of his first marriage and a rather late period of sexual liberation in his 40s (if my math is right). From his meeting his second wife, the poet Jane Keynon (almost a generation younger than him) to moving back to his native New Hampshire. From fighting a battle with cancer and winning --  to finding out that Jane had leukemia and seeing her die of it only 15 months later. From the first signs of fear of old age:

"Earlier, if I was 51 and the [recently departed] cadaver was 53, for a moment I felt anxious. If the dead man was 51 and I was 53, I felt relief."

to the inevitable comicality of later old age for those of us who (may) reach it:

"As I escorted my date to New London's Millstone one night, the hostess asked if my companion was my granddaughter. We both shrieked "No!" and never saw the hostess again. Most of my dates were mistaken for daughters, not granddaughters."

Hall pokes humor at his increasing physical frailty, at the ever-approaching bugaboo (he's much too jovial to justify specter) of death, and at the tragi-comedy of otherwise banal life. His memories are fresh and refreshing despite having taken 85 years to ferment in a 150 year old house built by his great grandfather. There is death everywhere in this book: his parents, grandparents, an aunt, both wives, his dog Gus, a casually killed garter snake -- "I stepped on its head and threw it outside", woodchucks, an almost-pet chipmunk, and almost-vermin mice. There's even time to genially mourn the destruction of a comfortable blue armchair by exuberant firemen. Yet this is a book about mortality, not morbidity. Hall does rue that one day, there will be no one left to remember what he remembers -- which is a lot: from the New England Hurricane of 1939, Pearl Harbor, VE Day, VJ day, JFK, Vietnam to 9-11 and Usain Bolt. However, he never lets the book sink into self-loathing or even self-pity. Even as he contemplates his present life -- living only on the first floor of his ancient house, microwaving Stouffer's TV dinners while inching towards his kitchen with his walker in a knee-brace, and eating these dinners alone with his dentures and a Red Sox game on TV -- he is ebullient:

"My problem isn't death but old age."

Or even more magnanimously:

"Not everything in old age is grim."

It may have taken him the better part of 9 decades, but Donald Hall sure has a poignant insight about the relevance of it all:

"At 16, poets think that if they publish in a magazine that will be it. When it happens, it is not it. Then they think it will be it when they publish in Poetry. No. The New Yorker? No. A book? Good reviews? The Something Prize? A Guggenheim? The National Book Award? The Nobel? No, no, no, no, no, no. Flying back from Stockholm, the Laureate knows that nothing will make it certain. The Laureate sighs."

That's a lesson which we can be thankful to Donald Hall for sharing.

End of the experiment

It was to be expected, wasn't it?
Isn't this how all experiments end?
At least the controlled ones,
The scientific ones,
The "proper" ones;
Where the experimenter has prepared
The specimens with care,
Divided them neatly into two groups —
Control group and experimental group —
And carefully tested for one variable?

All such experiments end one way,
Regardless of what happens
To the hypothesis:
Disproven or not yet disproven.
(As scientists incessantly remind us:
Good hypotheses are falsifiable,
And hence can never truly be proven.
Their best hope
Is constant fortification
By surviving several experiments.)

The way all experiments end
Is at the laboratory sink.
Where flask, pipette and petri dish
Are cleansed of the last vestige
Of all specimens —
Control or experimental.

The experimenter, being well-pleased
With data so meticulously gathered,
Is expected to have scant respect
For his now-used, now-worthless specimens.
It's not a moral question for him,
It's simply following protocol.
For this is how experiments must end:
"Please wash all equipment when you're done."

A Curve Closed

Her short cropped hair admitting few curves
Like her equations, a trove of frugal beauty.
Of surfaces, toruses, and closed curves--
Real things in an imagined topology.

A geodesic is the shortest curve
Amongst all like it:
The laconic prefect of an unruly class
That stands and speaks for them all.
What it lacks in length,
It makes up for in weight --
Though not in the literal sense;
Euclid won't allow it!
But it carries the weight
Of other wanton, wasteful curves.
It speaks for all, despite being the shortest.

Thus it was with the curve of her life
Brief though it was --
How illogically, unfairly, painfully short!
It carried the weight
Of not just her ambitions
Across continents, cultures, classrooms, conferences;
But also those of more meandering life-curves.
That accomplished not so much,
Longer and loopier though they were.

And though I can't speak for her,
Ungifted, untutored, unprepared and unskilled as I am,
She speaks for me
Through her scintillating work.
The geodesic of her life,
Though it closed too soon,
Is yet the weightiest one of all.

For Maryam Mirzakhani

August 2017

July 4th in Vietnam

I was invited to attend day 2 of the 4-week long teacher training in Kim Dong Elementary School in Tay Ninh. It was a privilege to be able to observe and learn 16 teachers from the region absorb and ask questions from the small group of American teachers about  "teaching as leadership".

Spending July 4th in Vietnam is poignant in its own way.

This being Vietnam, memorials are everywhere. From the life-sized bust of Ho Chi Minh in the meeting room we were in, to pictorial-memorials of fallen heroes -- everyday people whose lives were cut short by the curse of war -- adorning the hallways. It's a somber reminder of how war and conflict makes heroes out of everyone -- sometimes needlessly, often without solicitation.

May we learn from our own independence the burning desire of other peoples to be independent like us. Even people who once had to fight to be independent from us.

Tây Ninh

It took us the better part of 36 hours to get from Flossmoor, Illinois to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. An hour to get to O'Hare airport. A couple of hours waiting at the airport for our non-stop, 15+ hour AVE airlines flight to Taipei, Taiwan -- the Boeing triple-7 (extended range) can directly connect any two airports in the world. A couple of hours waiting there. A three hour flight to Ho Chi Minh City. A couple of hours in immigration at Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport -- turns out, you do need separate visas for 8-year olds! An hour from the airport to the Nikko Hotel in Saigon's bustling "District 1".

Safa and I are indebted to Dr. Janelle Scharon for letting us string along on this trip. Dr. Scharon has the important work of coordinating a group of first-year teachers under the aegis of Teach For Vietnam. Safa and I are simply taking in the sights, sounds, aromas and tastes of what, for all of us, is a new country.

Ho Chi Minh city is a vibrantly perfect conflation of motor-scooters, friendly people, and sumptuous food. In the first 24 hours, I had two kinds of chicken, pizza with shrimp, [1] iced tea, iced coffee, and sugar-cane juice from a street vendor (it was nicely sealed).

On the morning of Monday, July 3rd, we traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Tây Ninh about 3 hours to the northwest. The landscape alternates between urban congestion and rural farmland -- often within the course of minutes.

I met the other coaches who have flown in from places like Houston and Beijing. I was happy to listen in on their conversation about how to help the 16 teachers in this program and offer a few suggestions (about feedback and retrospectives) when asked. I do not have formal training in childhood pedagogy; however, I'm planning to make myself useful with the skills I do have.

[1] I have recently transitioned from being a vegetarian to allowing chicken and seafood to infiltrate my diet.

Electromagnetism

The crackle of static
Excited electrons
Jumping out of their assigned orbits
Arcing through the air
The photons they emit
Glance off the brown iris
Of your eyes
A micro instant before
The electrons contact my skin
A full instant before your fingers
Touch mine;
Triggering dormant nerve cells into action:
Racing impulses to a brain
Where eager synapses trigger thoughts
That stoke the imagination for a while,
Yet never incite the tongue to speak,
Nor the limbs to act.

The twinkle in your eyes,
The jolt of static,
The touch of your fingertips
(A digital connection of the physical kind),
And the thoughts they inspire --
A four-beat symphony of attraction,
Of electricity and magnetism
That lives in the fecund imagination
Of a mind
Trapped in a timorous body --
Too timid to act.

March 2017

#OneMigrationPerGeneration

This article is about migration of human populations.

My father was born in India under the British Raj. When he was a child, his parents took him and his younger sister — my now deceased aunt — from Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh to Khulna in what was then the eastern wing of the nascent state of Pakistan. 

I cannot claim to know their exact thoughts. My grandfather died when I was 4. My father talked about it infrequently during my formative years. When he did mention it, it was with an air of descriptiveness. Emotive expression isn't his style when he's discussing history, literature, linguistics or logic — a bit ironic since those are his passions. Of course he spared us the goriest parts of the migration: the ghost trains that crossed the borders, full of murdered corpses and the slaughter of neighbors by neighbors. Those details I was left to learn upon adolescence by sneaking into his sizable library. 

As stoic as my father has been about his first migration, I know it affects him. What affects him more, however, is the second migration he made. 

My father spent most of his boyhood and early youth in Khulna and Dhaka. He learned the Bangla language, in which he retains his fluency despite decades of sparse use. He found a job there, and then a wife — an émigré like him — and he and my mother overcame the challenges of raising a growing family on a meager salary with admirable aplomb. By the late 1960s, they had achieved a respectable, if delicately poised, balance in financial stability and societal integration. 

The seeds of decades of disaffection, sown by dishonest governments and fomented by mistrustful leaders at all levels of society, were bound to sprout sooner or later. By 1969, they did. Sectarian tensions escalated, discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and mother tongue became the new norm. My father, despite speaking fluent Bangla and being an integrated member of society, was rather suddenly "the other". He recounts one vivid incident which laid bare to him the stark realities of the times.

As an employee of the national airline, he often flew between Dhaka and Karachi for work. Despite the tensions, he never made much of these travels. On one such trip, one of his long-time friends and colleagues joked with him in Dhaka "next time you return from Karachi, you'll need your passport and a visa". 

My father loves Bengal, as much as his father loved India. However, he could read the signs, as I'm sure his father read a generation before him. Over the next several months, he packed up his belongings in Bengal, applied for a transfer to Karachi, and moved his young family from Dhaka to Karachi. As it turned out, he got his timing just right: the tumultuous Pakistani national election of 1970 started a precipitous series of events culminating in the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state in 1971.

All this turmoil has had an affect on my father. "Patriotism", in the traditional sense of "my country, right or wrong", rings hollow with him. He is nevertheless a loyalist — a remarkable trait to carry throughout a life that has seen him being loyal to so many regimes. However, he has always drawn a clear distinction between the concepts of State and Government, and an even clearer one between Justice and Statehood. 

As he spends his twilight years in his little apartment in Karachi, surrounded by his beloved books, watching yet another state crumble around him; this simple man — having outlived so many states and countless governments — is an inspiration to me to value Justice over all formal structures.

Now I spend my most vigorous years in the United States, having undergone my own migration as a (much!) younger man from Karachi to Chicago, confronted by the contemporary reality that I may yet be a persona non grata here in what I consider my home. I do not know what the future holds, but I have resolved to cap this familial tradition to #OneMigrationPerGeneration. As far as I can, I will resist attempts to be marginalized, cast out and "othered".

Just as my father painstakingly instilled it in me, I also resolve to teach my daughter the relative importance of Justice, Statehood and Government, so that the migration she embarks upon (hopefully a couple of decades from now but no sooner) is more fruitful and positively evocative for her than the ones undertaken by her forefathers.

July 4th, 2016

How does one measure the worth of a nation conceived in liberty yet not constant in its affirmation that all people are created equal? A nation that shares none of the bonds of religion, race, ethnicity and history that so obligingly bind the tribes of the old world. A nation whose entire fabric is spun from the singular thread of freedom ­— that most elusive of ideas that's forever under threat, is rarely enjoyed in repose and must always be protected against decay and decrepitude. A nation whose history, brief though it is, is nevertheless rich with tales of selfless valor and yet punctuated by sordid episodes of inhumanity. One measures the worth of such a nation by honoring its virtues; by recognizing that its greatest contributions to humanity have come about when it has healed the wounds of the hireling and slave, the orphan and the widow, the homeless and the tempest-tossed. One measures the worth not by tallying the nation's worst moments — when it wrought the scourge of war by foul footsteps undertaken in fear and haste — but by gazing upon the land illumined by liberty's smile, with humility and resolution intertwined, knowing that its best days are yet to come.

Death of a literalist

Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away. As a common person, unschooled in law and affected by it only as it governs and restricts my daily life, I disagreed with much of what Justice Scalia had to say from the bench. Yet I'm saddened by his demise and I hope that his is not the last voice of strict literalism on the Supreme Court of the U.S.

I strongly disagree with Justice Scalia's opinions on women's rights, gay rights and the death penalty. I was happy when he was in the minority in cases which furthered the humanist cause in these areas.

However, I value the fact that he was a strict literalist when it comes to the U.S. constitution. This is, of course, something for which he was criticized and derided. His unfailing belief that the constitution is not a living document -- something I also disagree with -- drove the entirety of his legal thought. In this, he was true to his words and beliefs.

In unflinchingly holding to his literalist value system, Justice Scalia pushed the rest of us to debate with each other, win each others' approval, persuade our opponents and pass laws -- the basic way a democracy is supposed to work -- to cause societal improvement. In restraining the court's reach, he may have thwarted progress on issues that I value; but he also curtailed the oppressive power of government when it could easily have worked against me and my fellow citizens. Two examples:

1. In Kylo v. United States, Justice Scalia opined that thermal imaging of a suspect's house counted as "search", and was protected under the fourth amendment to the U.S. constitution. This means that the state needs a warrant before it can use such technology, even though the technology does not require physical access to the property being searched.

2. In Hamdi vs. Rumsfeld, Justice Scalia wrote the strongest language limiting the power of detention of U.S. citizens by the federal government, even when such citizens are found in a combat zone where the United States is waging a war.  "Justice Scalia envisions a system in which the only options are congressional suspension of the writ of habeas corpus or prosecution for treason or some other crime." It is quite telling that Justice Scalia was unmoved by the fact that President Lincoln had suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War -- for Scalia, it was the constitution or bust.

We don't always need people in positions of power with whom we agree all the time. We need principled people with whom we may disagree. The benefits are twofold: such powerful people help us refine our arguments when we disagree with them. Secondly, by the force of their principles, they help us attain goals that would otherwise elude us all.

So while I admire Justice Thurgood Marshall -- he who criticized the foundational principles of our country as being unideal -- I can find respect for Justice Scalia, too, perhaps as much his polar opposite as one can expect to find.

Requiescat in pace, Antonin Scalia.

Shelley Could've Said IT

Music when the notes surcease
Keep the mind in a state of ease
Wafts when sweet violets wither
Stay the thoughts scattered thither

Rose leaves in the autumn wind
Gentle feelings cannot rescind
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone
Warm affection slumbers on

December 2009

Circular Connections

Today's the final game of the FIFA World Cup, involving Germany and Argentina.

It's a rather obscure fact that the "Brazuca" football used in this year's World Cup is manufactured in Pakistan.[1] The city where this football is manufactured is Sialkot, in northern Punjab.

Sialkot was also the birthplace, in 1877, of one Dr. Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal was a bit of a modern-day polymath: a poet, philosopher, traveler and -- perhaps unavoidably; given that he was born, lived and died under the British Raj -- a politician and statesman.

Iqbal spent quite a bit of his youth in Europe: England, Germany and Spain. He finished his doctoral thesis in Germany and resided in Munich and Heidelberg, studying Nietzsche and Goethe. Decades later, Heidelberg honored its one-time quiet, luminary citizen by naming a street after him.[2]

Decades later, too, the people of Argentina commemorated their friendship with the people of Pakistan by making a park, Plaza de Pakistan, in their capital city of Beunos Aires.[3] A plaque in the park quotes a Farsi (Persian) couplet from Iqbal:

آدمیت احترام آدم است
برتر از گردوں مقام آدم است

(Humanity is when man the dignity of others defends
And by doing so his stature above the heavens ascends)

I'm happily looking forward to seeing Germany play against Argentina on a football field using a ball made in Sialkot, Pakistan.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adidas_Brazuca
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iqbal_Street_in_Heidelberg_Germany.jpg
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_de_Pakistan

()

The void you left
I've tried to fill in many ways.
Tears sufficed for a while --
Brimmed over the gaping hole, in fact --
But you'd not have liked that.

A freakish workload, I also tried.
It worked: a practical salve
To heal and conceal.
But fatigue is the inevitable result,
And the heart-wounds still remain.

Memories, I have plenty.
With them I've tried to plug the gap.
But here, they work paradoxically:
They enlarge the hole
The more I fill.

I'm learning yet
To cope, to hope, to grieve,
And to learn to live with the void.
Not fill it up like a disused quarry,
But leave it like a serene valley
Where your dancing footfalls once resounded,
And where your footmarks still remain.


For Luke Barrett
July 4, 2014             

Measure of Man

Is man measured by his worst deeds?
By his lowest ebbs, his nethermost?
Is that his worth, the totality of him?
Is that the sum and sigma of his being?

Is he no better than the reckoning
Of his errors faults, frailties,
Flaws, venal and cardinal sins,
Mistakes of commission and omission?

If that's the true measure of man,
His essence, his core, his soul.
Let no man's death be ever mourned.
Let no man try as hard as he can.

Saints are sinners who keep trying.
Sinners are saints once forgiven.
Measure not man by his lowest ebbs
Let his soul to its fullest flow.

Feb 2014

INFP

Not for me the rough, roughed up, roughened ways of brawn.
Not for me the slick, smarmy, syrupy forms of glib.
Not for me the undue, unsolicited, unctuous style of deceit.
These modes are not for me.

I'd rather be quiet on the sidelines, observing.
I'd rather be unseen and unnoticed, noticing.
I'd rather be humble and circumspect, absorbing.
This style suits me.

Strut, swagger, smear, obliteration.
Self-loathing in defeat, triumphalism in victory.
A knee-jerk zero-summing of everything to competition.
Is not how I see and effect things.
                                         
Hunger, thirst, ache, unrequitedness.
Petals torn off tulips in their bloom.
Leave for me the shards of delicate things.
The unswept confetti of your victory parade.