dead man waiting: a Tragedy

my father passed away on Saturday, or probably on Sunday.
I'm not sure as I was not there.
But he was cremated for sure on Monday.
father was waiting for a long time after his death.
He wouldn't have allowed it if he was alive.
after his end he wanted it to be 'the end' as quickly as possible rather than rotting around & stipulated in his last wish to be cremated strictly within 12 hours.
he should have known better for a self taught man who grew up on the road that your wishes are seldom fulfilled in real world, and, to expect them to be satisfied when your at nether world would just be too much of an asking.
The delay was owing to the confusion over his last place of rest.
he had planned well ahead and done the necessary to own a six feet after his death in the cemetery nearby home.
it was uncharacteristically far sighted for a man whose profession was to sell lands but never managed to own an inch for himself.
Anyway, everybody else who had an influence over his dead body wanted him to be buried in Colombo -7, where the posh were living and well to do were buried.
the necessary clearance were hard to come by as it was a weekend.
and the municipal authorities were determined not to give in even an inch to nobody; certainly not after they are dead death.
due to all this, the dead man, lying innocently without the uncertainty that 'all would be fine', with a smile in his face, sleeping his last sleep at the mortuary in the government hospital, grew to become a sort of a small problem.
and the problem was portrayed out of proportion by the relatives who found great concern for the man after his death; the honour of the family itself apparently was at stake now.
when i got to hear about dead man waiting, i realized there is not an ending of problems even after death.
hwat a Tragedy the life is.

On reading

It is said reading is the gate of great learning.
Whenever you go to a house, fist you go I thorough the gate.
Therefore the gate is a sign that you have reached the house. Going through this gate, you enter the house and meet with the host.
Reading is the gate to attainment of learning and understanding of reality. Therefore, reading is the gate, not the house. When you see the gate, do not think it is the house. You have to go through the gate to get to the house, which is inside, behind it.
Since reading is a gate, when you read books do not mistake it with understanding. This misconception has made many people remain ignorant of the reality no matter how much they study or how many words they know...

A Question between our breath; can LOVE SURVIVE a relationSHIP?

While having a late evening walk with eyes begging for a sight, a remarkable generosity of nature blessed my poor eyes.
Confirming to typical tropical conditions the pre-monsoon late evening showers arrived at a distance.
But before the gloom, dark and the thunder afar arrived across the plains, there was this ineffable beauty of a double rainbow, fourteen layers of colors on top of each other, across the horizon.
Empty though my stomach was, my mind filled with the question, Can love survive a relationship?
It occurred to me by sheer chance that doesn't the question amount to asking whether a rainbow can survive a rain. The signs of one in its fathomless interminable beauty resulting in much needed refreshing rain though eventually will erase the beauty that is a rainbow, undoubtedly follows natures command for needed fertility. To know that, is to know the reality in its innumerable successive manifestations, is to know the 'truth of the situation' as 'it' unfolds between our breath.

(To A_i_y)
As your delicate finger tips
Strums the strings of
the Veena…
…cries from supple sorrow
In a desolate dark blue sky
…………far away
Shines a lonesome star
Time to time
Heart desires
Anticipates
Hopes

Infertile barren earth
Yearns fresh
Flowing
Springs

Time to time
Heart ruffles
Longs for
Everlasting comfort

In a bush full of thorns
Blossoms and dangles a flower

U are
The dark dash of pain
The quenches my heart
(The Veena)

You may not know
How the strings
May yearn for the touch of your delicateness;
But the dry arid letters
Typed full of silly typeface
Must be menacingly familiar to you
Fromn the outset
My initial
I, my name, me
Many a times
Must have bothered sensitive emotionality
Through your laptop screen
As you ignore me politely
Laughing from within at my irrationality
When you read this stupidity
I am overwhelmed with your evasive embrace
And, my heart filled with shame
Delete move to recycle bin…

Of their time, the goal was set by dissident idealism
Cold air inside the darkness, makeshift home,
The winter birds in their towering cage,
Peering out at bare naked trees of ashen,
Ground level feeding under neon strobe
Where filled Maruthi taxis and fancy dress suits jingle
Turnstile iciness against the ancient land of Himalayas.

This is where children dream, dirt and cardboard
Cushioning their hunger with cold and fierce eyes,
Holding them close, kissing their thinning red lips,
And the concrete humming low, echoing,
Hungry beasts marching toward their grief
Like a serenade of giants rising out of the fiery ash;
Marx, Lenin and Mao reaching up in fury
With bright redness, thunder, and lightning.

They rise not for the hordes of sleep-tattered children,
They rise for the noise made of coldness, their heated
Hands wrapped in lava with the reaping of the unkind
Upon their breath. They’ll seek the cultivators of gloom,
The progenitors of war and the ravenous well-to-do
So there might be relief for the misery-born folds
Sleeping near death’s ragged claws.
Soon the beasts of winter will clap their fury
From end to end of the piercing streets
With only the names of greed upon their lips.

Before this momentous month meanders off the calendar and its events become the stuff with which historians work, Lanka would have ended thirty years of war. How long is thirty years?

I certainly don’t know.

Perhaps it’s long enough for people to marry and have children, and in turn for their children to grow up, long enough for a revolution, and in turn for their own corrupt system to be established. Thirty years is long enough for you to forget what it was like to have fallen in love for the first time and remember the innocence you regarded the world at first.

Thirty years is long enough for schoolboys to grow up and become soldiers but not long enough to permit you to forget the friends who have died.

It’s plenty of time for empires to change hands, for the social, economic and political fabric of nations to be ripped to shreds. Damage that is done in thirty years cannot be measured in dollars or pounds. Millions of people can be made destitute; hundreds of thousands may starve or be butchered. There’s plenty of time for a civilization to die and probably enough for a new one on the becoming...probably?

ON FINANCIAL CRSIS

Business cycles are as intrinsic to capitalism as earthquakes’ are to the earth’s geology. Capitalism has always had them and always will have them. Tulip mania started in Holland in 1624. 18th witnessed the South Sea Bubble in Britain(speculators focused on the shares of the south sea company that had been charted to slave and fish in the South seas) and the Mississippi Land Bubble in France( the focus of the attention was land values in France’s territory of Louisiana). the 19th century was full of financial panics that only look small in comparison with the “big one” of the 20th century-the stock market crash of 1929 and the consequent banking collapse of 1930 that led to the Great Depression. That quake almost destroyed Capitalism- unemployment hit 27%.
The half of the 20th century has also seen its share of small and large financial panics. The collapse of the American Savings and loan industry. a worldwide collapse in property values, the stock market crash of October 1987, one major stock market crash in a small county(Taiwan), and a very big stock market crash in the world’s 2nd biggest economy(Japan). Financial instability is to capitalism what succession problems are to medieval kingdoms or dictatorships. Both put their respective system at risk.
If one examines financial crises, the questions is not “why did the markets crash?” but “How could market process have reached unsustainable levels in the 1st place?”. Given absurd overvaluations, it is only a question of when the market falls and whether the fall is slow or rapid; confirming to the age old adage that what has gone up must eventually come down!
Global capital markets and the existence of electronic trading system have made it possible to more enormous amounts of money around the world very fast. On a normal day the world capital markets move $1.5 trillion, but the entire world’s exports amount to only $3.2 trillion per year. in a little over two days the world’s economies move in a year. And on an abnormal day the world’s capital markets can move much more than $1.5trillion. a high school educated trader for a British investment bank(Bearings) located in Singapore places a $29 billion bet on the Japanese stock market($7billion that it would go up and $22billion that it would go down). What he did was not unusual. We only know his name (Nicholas Leeson), since he lost $1.4 billion and forced his firm into bankruptcy.
Very large, electronically connected, global market increases the probabilities of having financial bubbles, but they do make them potentially bigger and they do link national markets together so that markets are more apt to crash together, just as case this time around as the global financial meltdown is slowly dragging the whole world in to a deeper worldwide recession.
In capitalism, booms lead to booms and declines feed upon declines, theoretically, capitalism should not have, like unemployment, recessions, at all. As demand falls or rises, prices and wages, not output, should fall or rise. Supply and demand should ensure that all the productive factors that want to be employed are employed. Workers who are laid off should quickly find reemployment by offering to work for lower wages. Employers, if necessary, should fire existing workers who refuse to work for lower wages to make room for those who will. However, markets, especially the labor market, just don’t seem to quickly and easily clear by lowering wages and prices. Output adjusts more quickly than either wages or prices-exactly the reverse of what should happen. As usual, capitalism comes with recession. They are part of the capitalist system. They cannot be eliminated. But to say that recessions will exist is not to say how often of how deep they will be, or how speedy the recoveries.
To work well, the global capitalist system as it was designed after the World War II needs a dominant economic locomotive-a country that could act to help others improve their economic conditions since it didn’t have to worry about its own economic conditions. Till the 1990s fall of USSR, US held this role in the ‘free world’ but in the aftermath of the fall of USSR, US conveniently gave up this position. Another effect of these changes is the heralding of infallibility of free market anarchy; even a mention of national counter cyclical Keynesian stimulus politics were considered blasphemy according to the economic gurus of Chicago school economist.
With the impeding global crisis threatening to take the whole world down the drain coordinated in action, the world over can be explained by some fears of inflation, an inability to control structural budget deficits, and the growth of a global economy where one-country Keynesian policies have become impossible. But the bottom line is inaction.
the consequences care clearer. without an American global economic locomotive while the Chinese are still not quite there to take the rains and steer the global economy, without countries willing to be regional economic locomotives, and with national stimulus impossible for all but the very biggest, without macroeconomic coordination among the countries as the much fanfare and failure of recently concluded G20 summit exemplified, the world will have more frequent, longer and deeper recessions with a much slower recoveries. This new reality is evident in Europe with the latest revisions in the forecasts for the year by ECB for the euro zone. this pattern should be seen as the new standard pattern. it’s only a matter of choice as to how we should resign to this grim fate;as the French does, c’est la vie! Or our gami goday does, karume, karume!