Opinions
I hope you’ve had a good Christmas and look forward to fulfilling cherished goals in this year.
As we memorialise Jesus Christ it seems appropriate to consider his story, one the enduring puzzles of the last two millennia, and choose biases aside, and remembering the locations and timing of all relevant historical records, what is the most believable version of the life and times of this iconic man.
A Roman Catholic co-worker greeted me before Christmas with “Merry Christmas and...” stopped abruptly, and apologised, “I’m sorry; you’re a Hindu, yes? I should say ‘Happy Holidays’, no? in the way Eastern Europeans speak.”
“No, no!” I replied equally briskly, “I prefer Merry Christmas; I don’t use ‘Happy Holidays’; it sounds insincere, fake, you know, almost an apology for the real event... Besides years ago my mother told me that Christ was a good Hindu!”
“Noooh,” she exclaimed doubting, “I’m not very strict and don’t follow all the teachings; but why do you say this?”
“It’s a long story, but briefly, many Buddhist and Hindu priests of Kashmir, Ladakh, Bhutan and Tibet and Ahmadiyyas of Kashmir believe that Jesus spent the ‘missing’ 18 years in India at the universities of N?land? and Taxila, the world’s first, studying metaphysics, religion and so on, and went back to live there.”
“Oh, I don’t know that!” I gave her a few references; she was awestruck, but open-minded enough to consider consulting them.
The last year was in many ways a trying adventure, where greedy and insensitive bankers – the ones Jesus drove from the temple – who manipulate the economy, aided by the US federal Reserve, got rewards and the needy became more so, enabling even people in North America, the wealthiest in the world, to lose hope of achieving or maintaining self-sufficiency. Canada seems superficially less troubled.
The Canadian dollar is almost par with the American, and China is close to overtaking the USA in worth, while McGuinty’s Ontario reeks of governmental abuse of public funds handed to political friends as “consultancies”.
Prime Minister Harper touted his Government’s 2010 achievements but omitted the G8/20 cost extravaganza, the biggest budget deficit ever, ministerial lies in Parliament, the StatsCan long form etc. I do not like Harper: he’s smug and flippant, and misrepresents opposition. When he said “The values of hard-working Canadians – living within your means and reducing waste and duplication, to keep taxes low – will continue to guide us...”, I wish I could believe him. After all, this is the guy who preached against Senate sinecures, in fact promised an elected one, if one at all. Instead, he’s more gung-ho on appointing Senators today than even Mulroney of old. So much for integrity! His recital of achievements includes free trade with Colombia – music to the drug lords of Medellin!
We saw high points at the Vancouver Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Jan-March and at New Delhi’s successful Commonwealth Summer Games, each city weathering a storm of criticisms, often rancorous in India, each country achieving its best performance. The G8/20 in Toronto was a fiasco and clearly a low point for Harper and McGuinty with outlandish spending and brutal police actions in an already sour event.
But what of 2011? World population is expected to reach 7 billion: twice that of 1960, with average growth rate of 133% overall. Canada doubled, Europe grew by 21%, Japan 36%,the USA 72%; China 111%, India and Brazil 175%, Africa generally, Myanmar, Pakistan, Bangladesh over 200% each, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa over 300%. The numbers by themselves are only meaningful in terms of the world’s ability to feed them. More than half that population earn less than the world average income of $9500 and arable land is increasingly depleted or degraded by development and chemo-agriculture, both of which simply fatten the rich. This ability to pay will also affect wage-earners who face the mounting and often unrealistic costs of elder care. A full demographic analysis is beyond the scope of this short piece; the numbers however point to a need to be cautious in the use of practices that degrade farm land and threaten food supply sources. Coincident with the population growth is the global spread of resistant microbes, which will be addressed on WHO’s World Health Day, April 7th. Much resistance stems from indiscriminate use of antibiotics in medicine, animal husbandry, agriculture etc while Corporations add poison and now unnaturally alter staple foods.
No fishing spot beyond finished roadway
Our kids were young that year we holidayed in Trinidad. I tried forcing an agenda until I was gently asked to let it go with the flow. There was so little time and so much to do. I had planned to take them fishing in the spot where as a boy I would duck out from my grandmother’s gaze and head for the bamboos with a safety pin, string and a knife.
It was here by the river, under the creaking bamboos, where I learned to appreciate the soft rush of the river’s water over the fibrous roots of the green bamboos.It was through fishing alone where I first started to understand the deeper purpose within me. And it was here where I caught my first fish, pulling the sliver of silver out of the dark depths of the cold water to gleam in shafts of sunlight filtering through the bamboos on the river’s bank.
I wanted to take the kids to that very spot. I envisioned it all in my mind. Walking up the pitch road to where it ended and the bamboos started. It was as if here was the point where civilisation ended, with the road suddenly breaking down into scattered gravel, as if the pitch had run out during construction and no one had bothered to return to finish the roadway. Push through this and the lower leaves of the bamboos with care, because these are razor sharp. Pull the young bamboo shoots apart with caution - it is elastic and becomes a stinging whip when released. And there, with a final step deep into the grove, the bamboos a tall and thick canopy overhead, was the river that ran below. The yellow, dry leaves crackled underfoot. The plops of fish in the water stopped. Then, nothing but silence within the intervals of creaking as the bamboos rubbed mournfully against each other.
And then a cacophony of tweets. Hundreds of parakeets inhabited the bamboos overhead. They flittered in and out of the canopy with the garrulity of hawkers at a Saturday market place.
This is where I fished as a boy. Quiet, pensive, hunched with my chin on one knee, the river flowing softly with time having come to a complete stop. The rod was a crooked bamboo pole, freshly cut, its edges snow-white, its greenery trimmed and at my feet. Bait was a worm dug from the moist river’s bank. The bobber was a shaved piece of cork from a rum bottle. It floated down current with the safety pin bent into a hook dragging deeply behind.
I spent many happy hours here as a young boy, ensconced among the bamboos, having rejected the civilisation where my grandmother wearily eked foods out of the hard dirt that clung to cassava. Away from the back-breaking work of weeding the kitchen garden, this followed by unending trips with buckets to and from the water well.
Decades later I wanted to take the kids to this place among the sugar canes. I wanted them to follow me into the bamboos, cut a rod, bend a safety pin with a slight twist, and grub for a worm. And then, to listen to the world around that were steps beyond where the roadway ended and where a wheel had never rolled.
The decades had passed since I fished there as a boy. I enquired from a younger relative about the fishing spot.
“You used to catch fish there?” He was incredulous. “Nothing growing there now, boy. The bamboos cut down and a bridge throw over the river. Plenty sand and gravel in the hills. Big-time quarrying happening there for construction. You sure you used to catch fish there?”
It hurt me tremendously that the road had been finished, that it had continued up into the hills. Now huge trucks trundled across the river, the fumes of diesel hanging over the water. It was here were the silver fish swam. It was here where I understood there was a corresponding pool within where I could find living silver if I were ever again to come to cogitative, reflective rest.
The river was now poisoned, this relative said. A landfill had grown upstream. The poisons from this dump leached into the waterways and flowed downstream into the river. Years before there was a massive fish kill.
“This place gone to the dogs. Now they killing people and dumping the bodies there,” the relative said. There was resignation, futility in his hunched shoulders. It was as if such change was unquestionable and unalterable.
No taking the kids there, I thought. Instead, they were forced into the market the one Saturday morning our vacation allowed. It was not a good experience. Today, they recall looking at the fish stall at the eye level children have because of their height. It was not a pretty sight – the falling cleaver, the severing of a fish’s head, the displayed grill-work of gills, and the entrenched stench of rot. Not a pleasant vacation moment.
And for me, a finished road leading to a place of pain.