Thursday, February 25, 2010
The beauty of Culture.
Below is a song that I heard at the aforementioned culture night. It sounded lovely in Burmese, but the English translation is also beautiful:
Let's make the world beautiful
(1) How majestic are the rivers, the valleys and the mountains
Teeming with sweet and colourful flowers
Making the whole world look beautiful
(2) Though we are entrusted with the task to maintain its beauty
Our misdeeds make the world ugly
Now where are love and kindness
(3) Many plants and flowers have withered in the scorching sun
But let's take the task of a gardener
And let's revitalise and beautify the world again
Chorus:
People are hungry, they thirst for love
People are mourning and perishing in the darkness
They are dying in wars of hatred
Now our world has become ugly
Let's revitalise and beautify the world again.
- I want to thank my colleague for sharing part of his culture with me for an evening.
from:http://www.everyculture.com/Bo-Co/Burma.html
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
It happens even where freedom and opportunity are coveted.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Fair weather weather lover.
The lunar new year holiday is underway here in Hong Kong and for most children and parents it meant at least a 4-day holiday and at most a couple of weeks away from school. For me, there is no class this week and while I had grand plans to read for my dissertation all week....just me and my books and papers on war crimes trials....but the chilly and rainy weather has made me motivated to do little more than watch the Olympics on TV and stay in my warm bed because there is not indoor heating in HK and the temperature was 9 degrees C last night.
Friday, February 12, 2010
An unjustified reason not to feel.
In a lecture last night I learned about perpetrators of grave crimes: of the people that took part in the holocaust, of those in the Rwandan genocide, and other massive human rights violations. As much as we as outsiders looking in on the history want to paint the perpetrators as something other than us, extensive studies show that perpetrators are ordinary people. They are ordinary people that owing to a number of factors in a high-stress situation come to do extraordinarily evil things. But the common misconception that must be dispelled is that they are not extraordinary people.