Geography is History

"The East is a career." This quote from Benjamin Disraeli's 19th century novel Tancred, reappeared as an epigram in Edward Said's celebrated critique of the culture of empire in Orientalism. 


Today in an era of globalization, the East is not only fertile ground for a "career", but also as a geographical place for the post-career, post-work-life retirees of the West to rest their weary bones in.

No, the retired British elderly in Deborah Moggach's novel These Foolish Things, later renamed, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, don't invest in the East as potential burial grounds, but they relocate to Bangalore, India, as a group because they are in an economically distressed state, having variously lost their retirement funds for reasons both global-economic and familial (an elderly couple have lost their retirement savings in their daughter's failed startup).

The British elderly suffer from the millennial fears and anxieties that the elderly in many Western (and now "Eastern") societies suffer from: the closing down of care homes, dwindling pensions and rising life-expectancy.

In the words of the author:

[The novel] came about because I’d been thinking a lot about growing older, about what is going to happen to us all. The population is ageing – for the first time the over 50s outnumber the rest of us – and it’s getting older. Where are we all going to live? [...] Then I had a brainwave. We live in a global age – the internet, cheap travel, satellite TV…when it comes to goods and services it hardly matters where we live. “Geography is history.” Our healthcare is sourced from the developing countries; how about turning the tables and outsourcing the elderly? How about setting up retirement homes in developing countries where it’s sunny and labour is cheap? So I created an Indian whizz-kid called Sonny who sets up a retirement home in Bangalore and fills it with Brits.

The thought underlying "geography is history" acquires new meaning in this context. 

The movie version of the novel has just got released in theatres across the U.S. The locale has been shifted to Jaipur from Bangalore. In the movie, Tim Wilkinson plays the role of a retired High Court Judge, who returns to Jaipur to find one of his gay male lovers, who had been disgraced into an outcast after the love affair was exposed. 

Marilyn Monroe

"Talent is developed in privacy." The best thoughts emanate from the least expected of sources and the element of surprise triumphs the value of the thought itself.

Goethe said this originally, in another form. American actress and famous sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe made this thought into her own and re-expressed it in the above form.

Marilyn Monroe, revamping Goethe's thoughts! That is a bombshell of a surprise, as Jacqueline Rose, suggests in her wonderful uncovering of the "real" Monroe.

But Rose's piece does not aim at surprising readers. On the other hand, she wants to re-acquaint the world with the woman behind the image, a woman who was thoughtful and educated herself constantly, in private, had affinities with the most un-Marilynesque of things.

She adored Abraham Lincoln during McCarthyism, when Lincoln had become an anathema (believe it or not, he was perceived as a "Communist" being an "equal rights"-for-all guy); she was in favor of granting civil rights to blacks and was one of the few white actresses who was liked by blacks of the time. She read copiously, even though she didn't have the opportunity for formal education. 

Monroe was a thoughtful woman and gravitated to men who didn't pay attention to her body, but to her mind. Thus she married Arthur Miller...

All in all Marilyn was a thoughtful woman according to Rose who wishes that she were known more through the books she read and the politics she believed in, rather than through the undergarments and the costume jewelry she wore. 

Humans can emulate nature

Breaking away from the usual mode of anthropomorphic thinking the following asks humans to be less like humans, and more like nature:

Spring is the torrential season. On a bright, blue-skied day in April or May, it can feel as if you’re standing in a river of biological change, whether you’re in Central Park or out in the country. Everything seems to be regenerating — every species of plant, animal and insect — all of them cued to the new light and the new warmth. It’s as though we’re living in three kinds of time at once: geological time, which is too slow for us to grasp, human time, which is just right, and tulip time, which comes and goes in the blink of an eye.
In all this change, we are the unchanging species. We don’t become vernal with new growth. We don’t blossom, nor do we contribute to the clouds of pollen that drift through the air. We don’t shed or nest or den. We are not the green men (and green women) of myth, vegetative humans who live by the cycle of the seasons. We go about our business and our pleasure. Perhaps, about now, the palette of our clothing shifts toward the pale and pastel. To all the beings that are rioting around us, we must seem like a remarkably stodgy species.
New Yorkers like to think of ourselves as 24/7. In fact, as a species we are even busier — and certainly never dormant. But there is also a constancy to us.
In the dark of winter and the light of summer, we remain more or less as we always are, a constancy so characteristic of our species that we don’t even notice it. It is useful. It is productive. But just once it would be nice to be budding out, breaking into leaf, bursting into blossom as the warmth of May approaches.

(Via The New York Times)