The Others (German Experience)

Three Times Germany is an audio production of twenty-three monologues performed by eight actors. The monologues are based on interviews of East Germans, West Germans, and Germans living in New York. Retracing his own life journey from East Germany to West Germany in 1974 and on to New York in 1980, Uwe Mengel interviewed Germans who crossed his path along the way. The resulting monologues offer an unusual and often disconcerting view into the prejudices and reservations with which Germans view the “other Germans” after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Listen Or Read [link]

The Buddhist (Short Story)

Boston review published this story “The Buddhist” Dorthe Nors

Before the Buddhist became president of the aid organization People to People, he was an ordinary Christian and a government official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was he who wrote the Foreign Minister’s speeches and thereby put words into the Foreign Minister’s mouth. It was a way of lying and at first it didn’t bother him any. Then it started bugging him because he found out he was a Buddhist. It didn’t just come to him all of a sudden that he was a Buddhist. The Buddhist, as an idea, more like crept up and settled in him shortly after his wife said she wanted a divorce. The Buddhist came in to him and sat down at the opposite side of his desk in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He contemplated the Buddhist and thought it was a good format to step into. Buddhists are good people. They’re deeper than most. Buddhists can see connections no one else can. These were all qualities he recognized in himself, but which all could be improved upon, and so he became a Buddhist. If he hadn’t become a Buddhist, the divorce would have hurt that much more, but a Buddhist gains insight through pain. The more it hurts, the wiser the Buddhist becomes, the government official thought, and stopped being a Lutheran.  [link]

New Research Blog on Caste

Caste on Web [link] seems to have taken off months back, but still had not caught my eye, even with all the RSS feeds and hours of loitering on internet. They are interested exploring,

• how youth utilizes the space of Internet to discuss, debate, criticize, interrogate and introspecting the opinions of themselves and others about caste and caste related issues
• how the modern technology like Internet is strengthening or weakening the issue of caste

They are in youth fellowship program from PUKAR-an NGO  with which a group of urban dalit women i was associated briefly had projects. More interestingly, the youths in “Caste on Web” are making their research (including data) available online, which gives us a unique opportunity to discuss, scrutinize (even guide, if they needed) how caste comes up in internet.

“Governmental Discrimination in Srilanka”

Dr Brian Senewiratne is  nephew of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the former prime minister of Srilanka who conceived the idea of discriminating against the Tamils to win over the majority since 1965- as you will listen in the following interview- which escalated into the bloody massacre we witnessed (we didn’t, it was blacked out! no, he says, he has documentary/visual evidence), and left 160,000 Internally Displaced and 300,000 in concentration camps/welfare villages (depending on whose language u speak).

Excerpts

“…the most serious thing is the toilet facilities, i mean, you might think that it is absurd, it is not absurd. because the toilet facilities are holes in the ground. they are latrines and some of the latrines are full and overflowing. I mean, I hate to discuss the crudity on air but it is a very coarse crude thing that they are doing. And now the area is filling up with water cause the monsoon is just about to break. and in the pre-monsoonal rain, the rain fill the area and maggots and feces actually float into the tents. I mean, the people who couldn’t be killed by shells and bombs are going to be killed by cholera, typhoid and infectious diseases.”

“…..It not just the Srilankan government. But the govt. assisted by India and particularly china and Russia, for their own geopolitical gains, because the whole thing hinges on the control of the India ocean….”

Interesting ? listen it here [link]  [its 34 min. long]