Archive for November, 2003
About home and belonging
Met some friends for dinner. We were talking about the “notion of nation” and belonging to a country. Mr. Shin mentioned a book called Imagined Communities. It talks about the origins of nationalism. Is it necessary to belong to a country or a tribe? Is it very hard to feel at home anywhere else? Why is that being in Thailand or China feels a lot like being at home?
I remembered reading a book earlier this year - The Global Soul . This was a remarkable book for me as it asked some questions (about the concept of home) that I was asking. Here in the author’s own words (click to play audio - 800 K Mp3 file)
(the complete talk is available as a real video stream at the UCTV site )
Cesar - a funny guy
Cesar is one of the funniest people I have ever met. I found this video of his while doing some housekeeping on my computer (in anticipation of Panther). This is from my housewarming party way back in 2001. It was shot on a floppy based Sony digital camera.
Click to play the video (310Kb AVI file)
A visit to a Mangrove Forest ( Sungei Boloh, Singapore )
We had a office excursion to one of the Nature Parks in Singapore . Some pictures of what we saw there.
The north west shore of Singapore has a lot of tiny rivers draining into the placid waters that separate the island from Malaysia . The perfect environment for Mangroves.
These stilt like plants grow in shallow, warm tropical waters.
They help in preventing shore erosion and also are home to crabs, mud-skippers, snakes and birds.
Big scam sign, We could not spot a single crocodile. I guess the guides and the teachers accompanying the school children use this sign to scare the kids into keeping quiet.
You can see the Johor coast ( Malaysia ) from here.
From here too.
These guys had some huge lenses.
And now lets look at the animals that live out here.
A pit viper - belonging to the same family of snakes as the rattlesnake, pit vipers are venomous.
A mud-skipper stuck to a branch. Mud-skippers have muscular gills that they use to jump about.
A monitor lizard trying to sneak out.
We used to think animal was extinct. Here is a last of its kind, the “Jackysaurus” in its natural habitat.
Why we travel
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. ”
Remembering Indo-China
It’s not even been a week since I returned from Indonesia , and I am restless again. This would be the first Sunday in almost two months, I would be spending away from a bus or train or plane. But the weekend won’t be a waste. I would be spending it to collate some material for a Indo-China “Travel Talk” I am doing at the library. I have been looking up my iPhoto attic for the dusty pictures that I took in Lao , Vietnam and Cambodia . It is nostalgia time. That quote by the way is from Pico Iyer.