Januray 17th 2013

 My world is still relatively normal. I don't know, is it normal to have a full rainforest in your school grounds? Is it normal to speak three different languages a day? Is it normal for boys to play cricket in the mornings, basketball at break, and football after school (soccer to you AMERICANS)? Is it normal to eat rotis one day and pasta the next? My multicultural upbringing. That's true, I've never lived in my home country, never learned my mother tongue, instead learning Chinese, and to be honest, barely understand what's going on in India. I've been reading Pico Iyer's The Global Soul lately and it's really made me think about the weirdness in my life. Cause I am weird from the regular Indian living in India, but then so are my friends: my best friend is a Korean-American who's never been to Korea and lived while she was young in Germany. Singapore really, as a city, has no culture of its own, but a mishmash of others, like someone was sent to the 'Pick Your Candy' department of a sweet shop and kind of went crazy. So that's where we live. It's ideal for us expats. And expats are just going to get weirder and weirder as we have expat children and expat grandchildren till no one's really sure whether they belong anywhere. Maybe an airport.

Waiting for Godot- Extremely Philosphical Interpretation

Waiting for Godot

In this play, two men wait for a person named Godot- who never comes. Through the play, we learn he has a white beard, and that he ‘doesn’t do much in particular’. However, in this play though the focus seems to be on these two men waiting for Godot, in between, they eat and sing and dance and talk endlessly about why they’re waiting and other things. One of the two men is Erasmund, affectionately called Gogo, and Vladimir, nicknamed Didi. Pozzo and Lucky are a master and his slave respectively that come in between. A boy comes, also, to tell them that Godot will come the next day. The play takes place over two days and references are made to having done this before, indicating they have been waiting for a long time.

I think that the fact that the men, despite having said they will leave, never do, is testimony to humanity’s extreme stubbornness and ability to stick with a lost cause. I think their wait, and what they do in between, symbolizes human life: in all our life, we are basically waiting for our next meal, waiting for the holidays, waiting for graduation, waiting for our payday, and eventually, waiting for death. They dance and sing and laugh and talk and embrace and eat and do all the things a human would do in his/her lifetime. I think that the coming of Godot symbolizes the end of life for these men. And when then you say their life is pointless, well, then, ours is too. It’s what we do to give it meaning that counts. And the men have given it meaning, the base meaning: waiting.

Vladimir and Erasmund make frequent references to having seen someone before or heard something before, to make us think that they have been going through this same routine for a long time. For me, this is another testimony to the monotony and routine flavor that most of our lives have taken on: each day, each week, is just the repetition of the last, with little or nothing to distinguish one from the other. If you think of it that way, the play is encouraging us to differentiate our lives, our days.

The four characters (possibly five, if you count the boy) each represent a type of human. Pozzo represents the rich and famous and so bossy and overlording. Vladimir is the inquisitive type, why, what, where? If we had to place him in our lives, I’d say he’d be a scientist.  Erasmund represents the passive, the people who watch life go by and think, Oh, what pretty clouds. The people easily bent to a will, a large majority of the population. Lucky is the enslaved, the downtrodden. And the boy is representing all the sweet, innocent, little children. 

Lucky, as a character, is very intriguing. His ‘think’, where he repeated himself and used a lot of long words, represents a side of him we haven’t seen before. When he moves it is a like a weary person, shuffling, stooping, we get the image life has thrown all its weight on his shoulders. Also, on the matter why he doesn’t drop his load when he gets the chance, I think it is because he knows no other way to do it. It is so ingrained in his way of life I believe that it would be impossible to take away the constant weight of the briefcase from his hand. Perhaps it is an analogy for the constant weight of life’s burdens and how we can never drop them.

Underwater World

Chapter One: I Put Toothpaste In My Mask

I look doubtfully at the tube of almost-finished toothpaste in my hand. There is barely enough to brush my teeth, let alone my mask. I squeeze a tiny burst into both glasses, and then gingerly raise a finger, mix it around before going to the shower on the dive platform and washing it off. What a waste of toothpaste, I think. Glenn comes over and sees I have done as instructed.
"Good, now when you get up tomorrow morning do it again." he says.
"Um..... I'm not really an early riser...." I try to worm my way out of having to complete my already pitiful supply of toothpaste. I could have had more, Laxmididi was about to put a full tube of Barbie toothpaste when my mother stopped her.....
After I escape my equipment, which is all put together, though mostly by Glenn. How was I to know that the BCD goes on first? As soon as possible, I struggle into my pjs and collapse on the tiny bunk, which I have to share with Devyani. Pretty soon into the night the school week's exhaustion takes over.

"Good morning! Dive time! Good morning! Dive Time!"
A meaningless noise penetrates my fabric of sleep, and I huddle back into my blankets, wanting to get a little more extra sleep before the school bus comes....
"Dive Time!"
Suddenly the noise turns into real words and in a rush I remember I am on a boat, that I am going to scuba dive....
Hastily I get up, as does Devyani as Mahajan Uncle comes and shakes the last blankets from us. We get ready, frowning at the bathroom/closet we have to share with the rest of the  unlucky folks on the boat not graced with one in there cabins. Already I barely notice the rocking of the boat. A light breakfast is done, and once downstairs and suiting up, I mentally sigh as Glenn produces Johnson's Baby Shampoo as a substitute for toothpaste. I struggle into my BCD and get up- to immediately regret it. How could I have forgotten the weight of everything? Just two steps..... and I collapse on the dive deck's steps, passing my shampooed mask to a crew member. I look doubtfully at the water as I wait. The only thing I'm scared of, really, is the fact that the water might be cold.
With a big splash, Glenn is in the water, and with two smaller ones, so are Devyani and I. I start breathing the compressed, dry air of the regulator as naturally as ever. Glenn signals to go down, and so we do.
The underwater world never fails to surprise me. I'm not going to be too eloquent describing it.... OK, fine, I am. Coral- like trees poke up, like many fingered giants. Brains have fallen to the sea floor. Bright blue specks dart to and fro, as brightly colored parrot fish make their way through it all. Schools of thin fish with a yellow stripe down the middle (rainbow runners) make their way past in perfect synchrony.  I feel so lucky to be able to have the privilege of being a spectator in the place, to be lucky enough as to have the chance to watch this spectacle, for even such a short time. Strange how little has been done to describe.... It's an amazing place, absolutely amazing.

Poems!

Here are some poems I have written in the past few days.

Memory
it has sunk to the depths
of the deep ocean of life
and every year
a fresh layer of time clouds it
yet still
it remains
a tantalizing taste
of things long past.

Alive (needs some editing)
bones long withered
ashes long scattered
eyes not seeing the new dawn
hands unmoving
hearts unbeating
but still those lives live on

History (needs some editing)

one day
the clash of arms
the smell of fear
the taste of blood
the next day
the rustle of pages
the smell of books
the taste of old

Gone (highly pessimistic. It does not represent my view of life)
younger, carefree times
before the weight of the world
fell on my thin shoulders
no cares
no worries
all gone
all gone...

National History Day: The Story

Past few months, I've slaved like- well- a slave, on the computer, trying to get my project done for NHD. What is NHD? National History Day, an America-wide competition that teaches history to students from Grades 6-12. Basically, they give you a theme, and you choose a topic relating to it, and make a project on it, like a website, exhibit, documentary, performance, and research paper. I chose the website, meaning literally days worth of staring at a computer scene and frantically searching for little pieces of information that seem to elude me with every click of the search button. But I have to say, I've really, really enjoyed it and now I know my topic, Symbol of Revolution: The Legacy of Joan of Arc, inside out so feel free to ask questions on her and her legacy in the comments below, and I'll try to get back to you on it. Have a look at the finished product below:
77086413.nhd.weebly.com
Anyway, this Wednesday, I went (for the very first time) on a plane with my school. It wasn't that different from regular plane rides with my family, just a lot louder and taking a lot longer to get through check in, immigration, etc., since we had these HUMONGOUS exhibits that we had to take too.We arrived at around 11, Jakarta time. Our hotel room (between three girls) was humongous! A suite, with a kitchen, mini bar, living room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, the whole package. We set several alarms on my iPod and then collapsed, knowing we would have to wake at like, 5:30 the next day. At the contest in Jakarta, everything was frenzied, and it took me fifteen minutes to get to the room I was supposed to go to. There I was the first one called for judging and my marks were terrible. Kind of. No superiors at all. Three almost-superiors, but two almost-failures. There, I gratefully escaped, with no hopes for the awards ceremony that afternoon.

The Teacher's Guide: Must Haves

I've been through four schools in my short life and a lot of teachers. So, prospective teachers out there, here is a list of must haves (you don't have to take this seriously).

1. A very, very, very good memory for all the children's names that are going to pass through your class and come back on visits later, so you won't be stuttering, "Ummmm.... ummmm.... you there, pass out the papers."
2. The eyesight of an eagle to see who's passing notes at the back.
3. (you're going to need this in bagfuls) Patience. Patience. Patience. There are a lot of things you need this for, amongst them children coming back to ask the same question a hundred times over, the class clown making the same joke a thousand times over, and other situations like these.
4. A very loud voice to scream over the noise (it's amazing how much twenty children can make) "Would you please just SHUT UP!"
5. A death glare, that can be personalized to fit you. Order from God, Postbox 1, Heaven, before you are born. (Amen.)
6. The silence of a... well..... ummm, well, figure out yourself. This is for sneaking up on the calss so you can catch them red handed in the middle of mischief.
7. And above all, a calm appearance, and the looks of an angel- remember, A+'s for all!

Fake

Fake: not genuine; spurious
According that definition, most of the things in the room I'm in are fake. A rock carved to look like a cat.... clay molded to look like a girl.... the amount of things that are fake that surround me is astonishing.
We surround ourselves with fake things. They make up our life. Not many things around us is real: everything is twisted to be something else, not just it. What does this curious habit tell us about ourselves? It definitely tells us of the way we're always trying to be someone else, like that rock which we tried to metamorphose into a cat. We're losing contact with what's real: can we get back in touch with it?
Take, for example, Arab Spring. Unless you were actually there and experienced it, to most of us it was something interesting, to keep track of- not really real to us, it's more like something happening light years away, or something played out for our own benefit. It seems to me, at least, almost fake. In books, people sometimes say, "We're living a lie". And that's what we are. A fake life, with fake things and fake people. TVs show us little figures dancing across a screen- fake. We all are fake. When can we become 'real'?