Utopia

'Stop teasing. What are you? You give money to the socialists and communists, you help the
Congressmen, you encourage the Leaguers...'
'I help all honest men.'
'But what are you?'
'Must I be labelled?'
'But you must be something. What would you call yourself?'
'A citizen of the world.'
'Who believes in?'
'Who believes in the building of a new world.' She sighed and he smiled and went on. 'Where all people shall have the right of self-determination, where all countries shall be free, where peace shall abide and the toilers will enjoy the fruits of their toil...there will be an end to the exploitation of man by man.'
'Ah, Utopia!'
'You asked me what I believed in.'
'But one must be a realist'.
'I am. I did not say we'd get my world in a day... but the ideal is a Utopia until we achieve it.'
'And then?'
'And then it becomes reality and our minds move on and we find it imperfect. Then we work for some new Utopia.'
'And so it goes on.'*

These were words exchanged by a young couple in search of a new space, a Utopia. What they got were two 'free' nations and a communal bloodbath.

I wonder if there isn't a search for Utopia inside each of us. A desire to be happy, to feel free... happiness being momentary and freedom an illusion?


* excerpt from the heart divided by mumtaz shah nawaz (delhi: penguin, 2004)

Cheese and Christmas

I see a fundamental connection between Christmas and cheese. It's threefold.

Fold one: I am always hungrier around Christmas. It could easily be explained by my body burning more calories in order to produce more heat to keep my body at 37 degrees. But it probably has more to do with seeing pictures of food everywhere and knowing there's a festival coming where I should be stuffing my face like a perfect little show dog suddenly let loose in a butcher's. The snacks you find in most cities these days contain some indeterminate substance called "cheese", which is basically a very filling paste of some sort. For some reason, I am tempted by the most revolting 'cheese pizzas' or 'pide' as they are called in Turkish takeaways here. Similarly we are all tempted to call the flashing lights and miserable-looking Santa clauses selling their wares on merchant high streets 'Christmas'. Just like 'cheese' on the takeaway menu, Christmas as we know is a shadow of a shadow of its original form. You'd be hard pushed to make a connection between the depressed teenager in my local shopping centre wandering about limply handing out chocolate santas with a religious celebration having something to do with a baby popping out of a virgin in Bethlehem.

Fold two: Everything Christmas reeks of cheese. Cheesy music, cheesy red hats which people normally wouldn't give the dog to drag around in mud puddles... Cheesy shop windows with Santa dolls struggling their way up a chimney on a rope ladder. The Über-cheesy lights that end up on every window and stretched across commercial streets are of course dripping with the same commercial goo. And did I mention cheesy music? God awful screechings of Mariah Carey telling me that all she wants for Chrismas is me. I suddenly become a consumer good to be wrapped under Mariah Carey's tree when I walk through a department store or a card shop. A convenient block of Safeway cheddar.

Fold three: Christmas is squishy, dripping, melting in warmth. Like the white goo that dribbles off your pizza and leaves oily stains on your couch, Chrismas is sort of sloppy. You get that bloated feel of having eaten too much at Christmas. The glutinous stickiness of family and consumerism splurging and swelling. The ectoplasmic feeling that, jolly as it may be, there's still a sort of dull call of the Christian in the 'spirit' of Christmas. We bomb the bejesus out of one another and refuse development funds to the Sudan on grounds that 'abstinence is the most effective form of treatment to Aids'. But in fairness to our European values, we're sufficiently guilty about eating so much food and consuming so much to make it alright.

To illustrate my Christmas-as-cheese thought for the day, I leave you with the lyrics of a well-known Christmas ditty

Well there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life
(Groan)
Where nothing ever grows
No rain or rivers flow
Do they know it's Chrismas time at all?

I rest my case.