#Other travels
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Imagining Japan from Africa
I am watching a Japanese tv channel (NHK world) alot these days. It all started when my satellite TV connection expired due to non payment and i for some reason wanted not to watch the hundreds of channels anymore and convinced my self instead to watch the only Japanese free channel coming. Strange, how the whole world starts to dance in the ‘palm of our hands’; me sitting in Africa, away from my land , and getting obsessed with a another culture of a land even farther away. I am beginning to love this channel and the whole Japanese culture in particular. The channel undertones are so serene, so objectively…
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Smells, sounds, Imagination
I was wondering if it is the imagination we associate to a certain music or smell which changes it to a music of longing, or a fragrance of subtle remembrance of life. Or is it in these invisible singing birds carrying fragrances from old times and far off places which reminds us of our mute existence and paint our imagination in their own colors…Yesterday Ertyaas was preparing a potpourri with alot of dry Champa flowers she collected from near by tree, grounded fresh cloves and cinnamon from the Zanzibar island and local sea salt. She imagines the five petals of the Champa flower as the five phases of women (Birth,…
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Women… Fiction… stockholm… More coffee..
” You know, a gentleman always allows a lady to maintain her own fiction” she said It was an unusually pleasant sunny day in Sweden and we were drinking coffee in one of the street cafés when we saw a woman passing by with tears for obvious and only reasons and Ertyass commented on her, in her usual unique style. “Come on! Give me a break” I said, “are you suggesting women live their lives artificially, knowing that they are living in fiction?” I asked. “Well it’s a matter of perspective; fiction can be as real as reality depending on how much feeling or tangibility you can give to it.…
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A jewish Coffee, with love
I drink coffee after a very long time and a very good one indeed. Was in Stockholm Sweden a night before and a colleague of mine took me to one of the small cafes in the gatans near stureplan (gatan is streets in swedish). The coffee was made by a very friendly jew who, with his long beard would have been mistaken by a taliban if he is not wearing his kippah cap and tzitzit robes and not to forget the naive smile……. He brewed the grounded coffee with as much love and care, as if he is creating a piece of art, slowly leveling and pressing the grounded coffee…
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My country – A sad piece of art……
Ok i am going to say it…………….. I am not a religious person, least of all a nationalist, but something in my heart broke of what happened in my country this week. Call it my inflamed sense of nothingness or de-flamed sense of identity but I felt as if i was made naked with the tiny helicopters hovering around with spotlights and capturing my nakedness. I felt tangible sadness in the air for my land, my painting… One needs to see my land as as a painting or a piece of art and not as work of science, if they really want to understand it. You cannot study it by…
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Identity visualized
She has such a different way of looking at things, making me fall for her more and more as my age goes by. Anyways that was just my emotional outburst, but finally me and Ertyaas after a long time did a real collaborative work together on defining my identity, which she thinks is something people are starting to mingle up in this globalized-terrorized-hypnotized world.All the thinking work I left to her, and all the logical rationality I kept for myself and together we were able to put in some thing really tangible this time. Sometimes I think she is slowly filling the right empty side of my brain, taking all…
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Mastering the art of giving….
“But why can one not start to love someone after marriage” , my little remaining not so western part of soul asked her . Ertyaas gave me a very long smiling gaze, the gaze she seldom gives, and after a long smiling silence said, “ your soul is too small to understand that sort of great love, you will be blown away with that sort of love my dear, its not for the fainthearted” , and she laughed long after that. I was confused as usual by the way she gazed at me and more confused on what she was saying, for we normally always differ on every discussion and…
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Traveling Desires
Am thinking for quite some time, if there is a far far remote possibility that the desires and wishes from our fathers and forefathers may have the ability to travel through the genes and are still alive some where in a dark hidden corner of our DNA code? Off-course there is alot of instinctive behavior that we humans do instinctively, like craving for eating, copulating, survival stuff but i am not talking about that and I am also not talking about the desires that the parents associate with their sons and and daughters.I am talking about the desires that one wishes for him self, I am talking about all the…
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Trilemma
I am standing now on crossroads, in a serious acute trilemma. I am seeing three clear paths to choose from for my future life and the irony is my heart is divided for all three. A long time back Ertyass asked me of why it is not possible to love 2 persons and the whole world at the same time, i was naive and emotional back then but while standing on this cross road right now, i am remembering her words. I want to live all these three lives that i define but my heart is equally divided. The tiny hearts within my heart city are lobbying based on their…
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Night and Day
Night:“A perfect naked moon and still something is missing, isn’t it”. That was a surprise statement by Ertyaas……She seemed to be in a somber mellowy mood today, for she always talked about hope and today she seemed to be standing on the dark side of the world (or may be i thought that way)…. It was a perfect moon view from my Dar-es-Salam apartment balcony today though i missed the moon rising from the sea. The moon was coloring the whole sea in her own yellow color, and there was one ship made of lights completing the whole portrait like a mole on her infinite white beauty.The song playing on…
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Istanbul to Dar
Dear ErtyaasA beautiful apartment facing the enormous indian ocean, a long balcony to look at the passing boats and ships,the rising sun from the depths of the ocean, the sea changing its colors from white to yellow to blue to black and then a silvery white, as if a child is born in the morning and grows old with the moon the same day………… my new nest where i am trying to settle just like a ghost trying to settle up in a big palace, not wanting to be disturbed by the events around, and yet determined to live…… some times i think I too am becoming a ghost, a…
