A few days in Madrid and Lisbon

Madrid last week was quite warm during the day, around 30C, but the mornings and evenings were a little cooler and pleasant – apparently much more so than in San Diego.  Wednesday afternoon there were very heavy showers, which helped cool things down more.  On Tuesday night a huge fireworks display lit up the skies near Alcobendas.  A neighboring town was having a celebration and was doing fireworks every evening during the week! Spain is one of the best places to indulge in one of the top three existential human experiences – savoring flavorful foods with all your senses.  Very few places compare to the steak eating experience one can enjoy while in Madrid.  A rock-salt seasoned version is served raw with an extremely hot stone plate.  The server prepares the plate by rubbing it – very carefully – with a piece of beef fat, after which you cook the raw slices of the steak on the stone plate.  It is very simple, but oh so delicious!  Of course, nothing beats the seemingly unlimited varieties of Spanish tapas (the extremely tender, sliced octopus with potatoes stands out as it melts in your mouth), except maybe Chinese Dim Sum. Central Madrid is a great place to walk around.  Evening strolls on Paseo de la Catellana, walking towards the Plaza de Cibeles is amazingly relaxing.  Well-dressed couples of all ages walk hand in hand, heading to one of the many museums, or to a small cafe on the cobble stone paths around the Gran Via.  This part of Madrid is quite enjoyable. In Lisbon, a generally laid back atmosphere permeates the air even more so than in Madrid. As you stroll around the small city, two monuments, both inspired by similar structures in other places catch your eye. First is the Cristo Rei (Christ the King) statue, inspired by the Cristo Retendor (Christ the Redeemeer) statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.  The Portuguese statue is at a much lower elevation (341 ft. vs. 2300 ft.), but is much taller (260. ft vs. 98 ft.) than the Brazilian statue.  It is a sight to behold, arms outstretched, overlooking the second memorable structure – a very familiar, red painted suspension bridge that spans over the Tejo River.  No, it is not San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Bridge.  But if you were just dropped at the southern end of the 7374 ft. long Ponte 25 de Abril (25th of April Bridge) in Almada, you would find yourself disoriented, and reasonably so, wondering where you...

3 Simple Maxims of Writing

In his article in the NY Times http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/should-we-write-what-we-know/, Ben Yagoda reminds us of three maxims of writing. Kill your darlings Show, don’t tell Write what you know All three of these deceptively simple adages are known, maybe even understood, at varying levels by every writer.  But living them is quite another thing. Being ruthless on your own creation is not a skill that comes easily.  Yet it is even more necessary in writing than if you are creating a painting.  You can more easily justify the forms and colors in a painting by telling yourself ‘I am making this for myself.  I don’t care if anyone else likes it or not.’  However, when you put pen to the paper (or fingers to the keyboard), it is rarely for your own gratification.  Whether you admit it to yourself or not, the real desire is to have others read your words and be moved by them.  To do that, you must excise every unnecessary word from your creation.  And if you cannot do it, hire a good developmental editor to do it for you. Making the reader share the image the writer has in his or her mind is even more difficult.  It is easier to describe the scenario is excruciating detail.  But doing it in a way that protects it from becoming a mechanical description is where the art of writing comes into play.  Giving the reader just enough… bringing the reader along to be in the same place, real or conjured, as the writer, while allowing the reader to experience it through their own senses, biases and backgrounds…well, that is the magic. The third one is tricky.  Certainly, while the writing is much more powerful if you intimately know what you are writing about, I do not think it is always necessary to have lived through something to write effectively about it.  I would like to think that meticulous research and an active imagination can come pretty close to living through something.  It is not a substitute for the experience, but it can be pretty close.  What I do agree with is that, however you do it, you must know what you are writing about. Try following these tenets next time you write.  You will see the...

Using Art to Transform Communities

Art is most often used as an instrument for personal fulfillment.  It is the material expression of one’s deepest thoughts and feelings.  It is an outlet for that which must be voiced in one’s unique way, through poems, essays, paintings, sculptures.  A little less often, while still resting on the personal expression of its creator, art goes beyond the individual, expanding and engulfing entire communities in its embrace. Three such projects have been featured in the media.  Manya A. Braechar’s article in the Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hometown-buddha-20130616,0,224336.story) covers the ‘Ten Thousand Ripples’ project, in which one hundred of artist Indira Johnson’s emerging Buddha heads have been placed, in parts of Chicago where one would expect to see anything but that.   I have not personally seen them, but looking at the images, I can imagine the unexpected smiles of bemusement and involuntary oohs and aahs when people see these sculptures during the daily bustle of a metropolis like Chicago. Teo Kermeliotis’ piece in CNN (http://www.cnn.com/2013/06/17/world/africa/weapons-creation-guns-art-liberia/) describes how a metal works founder, among others, in Liberia is collecting scraps of the killing machines that devastated the country, and recreating them into useable art – think tables and candle holders with machine gun legs, trees and furniture using bazookas and rocket launchers. But my personal favorite is the wind-propelled rolling ball sculptures, made out of bamboo and biodegradable plastics, created by afghan brothers, Mahmud and Massood Hassani.  (http://www.reuters.com/video/2012/12/04/afghan-harnesses-wind-for-landmine-deton?videoId=239625975) This combination of art and industrial engineering design, which is still to be fully tested, is intended to be set loose on terrain filled with land mines, which lay hidden, ready to tear apart human flesh.  As the ball sculpture rolls around, directed by the wind on random paths, it detonates the land mines, clearing the land and rendering is safer for humans. How can you not feel invigorated and inspired by this, when art is used as the vehicle to transform a community, even if it is a person at a time.  In my view, this is practical art helping humanity remember who we are.  Creators.  With a little...

Innocence lost, Beggary and Religion

As I read Mobeen Azhar’s article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22729351) on the ‘Child victims of Pakistan’s begging mafia’, my heart felt heavy.  I was torn between the sense of relief that someone is championing this social disease – organized beggary by exploiting children and twisting religion – at the heart of a state that positions itself as Islamic, and the anguish of seeing another report that casts a dark shadow of my country of birth. It is true that I have spent more of my life in my adopted country, the US, than the country I was born in – Pakistan, but it is virtually impossible to break all ties, real or emotional, to the place you were born. Karachi is the largest city in Pakistan.  Official census puts the population at around 18 million, but conventional wisdom says it is 3 to 5 million more.  If you live there, beggars are part of the fabric of society.  You see them everywhere, women, children, old men.  Some simply frail and in tatters, some handicapped, with twisted limbs.  You generally become immune to them.  Sometime you given them the change you have, other times you just shoo them away or ignore their pleas.  Then you run into a ‘rat-boy’ or ‘rat-girl’.  Those particular beggars with small heads and features like a rat.  You cannot help but stare at them, with an overwhelming feeling of ‘how is this possible?’.  Yet there they are. Over the years, there have been many articles, both in Pakistani media as well as foreign newspapers on this topic.  Yet the epidemic of kidnapping, and violence against children has not been stemmed.  It enrages me that these inhuman acts – maiming and deforming of children – are perpetrated against the weakest and the most innocent.  And for what?  Money.  If that were not enough, these heinous acts are then justified by religion through some twisted logic. The guilty here are not only the people who kidnap these children.  It is also the so-called caretakers of religion, who twist and contort it to satisfy their own desires.  But that is no different than any other major organized religion. Hope in humanity comes in the form of Mohammad Ali of Roshni (meaning Light) Helpline.  This may be only a small light in the raging darkness, but enough of those is what reverses the tide.  Continue the fight, Mohammad Ali and all others like you.  Children must be protected and nurtured.  They are our...

A Cause Worth Rallying Around

What makes an entire nation, even the entire world rally around a person? It takes a hero.  Not because they think of themselves as a hero, but because they find the courage to stand up against something that makes no sense to them.  In this case, Malala Yousufzai, a fourteen year old Pakistani girl making good on a personal commitment to get an education, no matter what the cost.  The rest of the world looks at their actions, listens to their words, and aspires to be like them. It also takes a villain performing a cowardly, hateful and inhumane act.  It takes a group, like the Taliban, that through some twisted logic believes itself to be right, and superior to all creation.  It takes a few of these cowards to walk into a school bus, identify our hero, and shoot her in the head. But our hero survives.  If this is not divine intervention, what is? Over the last few weeks, since this heinous act by the Taliban, all sides of the political spectrum in Pakistan has spoken and acted in unison against this heinous act.  Talk about a rainbow coalition.  Then the support has spread outside the boundaries of Pakistan.  The US, the UN, the EU and other countries and organizations have come together in support of Malala Yousufzai and against the Taliban. This little girl, now fourteen, was eleven when she was blogging against the Taliban’s policies – atrocious then, and atrocious now – against educating women. For her courage, last year she became the first-ever recipient of the Pakistan national peace award.   In addition, KidsRights Foundation, an advocacy group, also nominated her for the International Children’s Peace Prize. She was becoming an international symbol of hope, a peaceful and powerful young voice against the insanity of the Taliban mind.  So they did what their warped logic dictated. Now, further demonstrating their utter lack of humanity, they have renewed their vow to kill Malala, whose precious life a community of doctors in Pakistan and the UK are trying to save, and for whom entire nations are holding prayers. What do you say to people whose minds function like this?  Is it even worth sitting down with them? One can only hope that the news reports about the Pakistani government catching hundreds of the people involved in this tragedy are actually true, and that the responsible people will actually be brought to justice. One can even try to find the silver lining in this difficult chapter of the...