Thursday
Had a nasty shock today when i logged on to arts and letters daily It has suspended operations. No more funds. Didnt realise what a big part it played in my life online. It was a guiding light to intelligent, sensitive essays, reviews and opinions from all over. I refuse to delete the link to it for sentimental reasons. I really hope it can start up again sometime soon.
Thursday, October 10, 2002
From Reuters: Hungarian novelist and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertesz won the 2002 Nobel Literature Prize on Thursday.
Kertesz, who is Jewish, won the prize “for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history,” the Swedish Academy said in its citation. Kertesz is the first Hungarian to win the Nobel literature prize. Born in Budapest in 1929, Kertesz was deported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in German-occupied Poland in 1944, and from there to the concentration camp of Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in 1945. He returned to Hungary and worked as a journalist from 1948, but was dismissed in 1951 when his paper adopted the communist party line. After that he supported himself as an independent writer and translator. He was able to make more public appearances after the communist regime ended in 1989.
I notice this advertisement everyday on the way to work. The ad sprung up right in the middle of Bombay's heat wave. It makes me laugh out loud because it is an ad for Benetton's Fall/Winter collection. A giant hoarding filled with beautiful people wearing very WARM-looking, bright coloured jackets, shawls and wollen caps. Just looking at it makes me feel unbearably hot. What were they thinking?
I'm now making a concerted effort to ignore the spectacular display of wretchedness and squalor as I make my way to work. But this city manages to shock in new ways, each day. As my car turns, i catch a glimpse of the back of a woman sitting on a traffic divider behind us. She is probably insane and has taken off her blouse. I can see the sweat pouring off her back, the side of a breast. we drive on. As i get close to work, a small boy hurls his hands at the car window. He has no hands, they are actually stumps and there is a big burn mark across his chest, he has big protruding eyes and uneven teeth. I am shocked and tears threaten. I feel worthless that i cannot help, i loathe our collective apathy. I write about it because i want to exorcise these images from my mind. i'm an escapist. But these fleeting images will not be erased, they linger. They will raise their painful heads and revisit me on a quiet day or contrast against the grandeur of a purple sunset. Why do I still feel so hollow? I'm reminded of eliot's hollow men, a poem i studied in college.
