There’s probably a little bit of mean girl in all of us; everyone wants to be accepted, to be a member of the in crowd. And for there to be an “in” crowd, there have to be people who are left out. A sense of exclusivity can be intoxicating for adults, let alone kids, and we seem to have a very primal instinct for how to fabricate this exclusivity, how to make membership in a social group seem both desirable and almost unobtainable, almost.

My 7 year old daughter is a social butterfly; everyone wants to be Sasha’s friend. She has very strong opinions about what clothes are cool (none of mine, apparently), and what music is worth listening to – yes, she’s only 7! For Sasha, it’s not about fashion in the traditional sense that you can go and buy the latest styles off the rack. It’s about a very innate sense of how to put clothes together in a unique, funky way that is “cool”. She’s really very good at this and has a look all of her own. But she can make rather harsh judgements about people, including her parents and sister, who don’t share her aesthetic, and has been known to extend this judgement to girls in her class. At a recent parent-teacher conference, Sasha’s second grade teacher told us that there had been some less than ideal behavior towards another second grade girl, and Sasha was at its epicenter. It seems that the behavior leant more towards the exclusionary, rather than name calling, but even so. The teacher had spoken to Sasha and the other girls about it, and of course, we did as well, a few times. It seems that things are much better now.

Jostling for a place in the social hierarchy is never going to go away, its part of how humans, and other animals, interact with each other. But that doesn’t mean that we should just accept this and turn a blind eye. Particularly if, as this NY Times article points out, bullying of various sorts seems to be happening ever earlier these days.

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by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

I usually write about politics here on 3QD, which often means trying to deal with my disappointment in America and the Disappointment-in-Chief Obama. But what with it being Christmas and all, I thought I should take this occasion to tell you a bedtime story for grownups. Here it is.

* * *

There was great consternation on the day the baby was born.

“I never saw anything on the scan,” Doctor Brown said.

“How would I be able to tell?” asked Jane, the mother.

“There’s nothing odd about me,” said the father, Bill. “I’m very normal.”

But there it was. The baby girl was not like other babies. In fact, she was like no other baby born in the history of babies.

Snugly against her back, folded down so neatly that you hardly noticed them, were two wings.

* * *

Jane passed her hand over the wings.

“She doesn’t feel like a Miranda to me,” she told her husband.

“Please, Jane,” said Bill. “We can’t do that again. First Jennifer, then Shirley, then Priscilla, then Rose, then Emily, then Babette, then Courtney, and finally Miranda. I like Miranda. It’s original. It’s not like Jennifer or Shirley or Priscilla or Rose or Emily or Babette or Courtney.”

“I want to call her Angel.”

“Angel?” asked Bill.

“Yes, dear. Angel.”

“Please, Jane,” said Bill, and sighed.

* * *

Angel has Bill’s nose and my eyes, thought Jane. But who do these wings belong to?

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by Tom Jacobs

One night more than a decade ago, I found myself alone in the apartment I shared with several friends from college in Minneapolis. It was one of those humid summer nights where the only reasonable thing to wear were one’s boxers and a t-shirt. I was, at the time, seeking to cultivate a pompadour; this was long before there were a raft of metrosexual hair products to assist in such a project, so I was reduced to buying bryl-creem from the local old-school pharmacy. Bryl-creem, by the way, reeks: whenever you see those black and white photographs of crooners from the ‘30s and ‘40s, know that they must have trailed clouds of vaporous, vaguely mint-smelling fog.

None of us were what you would call “gainfully employed” at the time, yet all of my roommates had gone out for the evening with their girlfriends. These were the days of what DeLillo calls “languor and drift,” when the notion of a “career” was a distant horizon that can be safely ignored for the brief but more intriguing possibilities of pursuing sensuous intensities an d simple drunkennesses with little thought or care for tomorrow’s hangover. I was, then, left to luxuriate in the pleasures of self-pitying loneliness and solitude. I thought that perhaps I would practice my pompadour in the bathroom mirror. This was an older apartment—perhaps built in the ‘30s—and the lighting wasn’t so good—everything was cast in a lovely golden haze, like the opening scenes of The Godfather with Don Corleone massaging his cat. In this flavescent light signaling nostalgia (or maybe I only remember it that way…ha!) I reached atop the medicine cabinet to grasp the foul-smelling pomade and inadvertently knocked it over. It fell behind the medicine cabinet, into one of those non-spaces like the walls that separated room from room, one of those unthought about regions that contain things like pipes and wires that we tend not to want to see or think about. Realizing that I had lost my bryl-creem and thus, my pompadour, I grabbed a flashlight and stood atop the commode to see if I could retrieve it from its crypt. Leaning over the sink I strained to see what had become of the tube; shining the light into the small crevice that separated the top of the medicine cabinet and mirror from the bathroom wall, I observed a range of other objects lying on the pink fiberglass insulation—a razor, what looked to be a receipt, a variety of q-tips, a comb, and a tube of hair gel, and other things that I can’t really remember.

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The year is 3010 and an interesting new species has evolved: a muscular, knuckle-walking primate with sparse body hair and a strikingly human face. It appears to be deformed, with extra non-functional limbs in various anatomical positions–like something out of a sci-fi horror story or a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. The creatures are vicious. Individuals routinely attack and eat members of their own species.

This generally isn’t how we envision our species a thousand years from now. More typical scenarios feature technological advancements, like flying cars and intergalactic travel. We might imagine that future humans will have eliminated disease and extended our lifespans substantially.

It’s debatable as to which of these scenarios is more likely. And of course, both could be far off the mark. But this much is clear: there’s trouble ahead for our species if we continue on our current path. The problems that future generations will face are largely predictable.

Our environment is becoming increasingly toxic, with carcinogens and teratogens, allergens, hormone distrupters, and pharmaceuticals accumulating steadily. Such pollutants also build up in the tissues of animals that we eat and depend upon.

Food shortages are anticipated. With the population increasing at alarming rates, there’ll be a lot more human mouths to feed. Heavier reliance on meat will worsen environmental problems, making clean drinking water harder to find. Non-animal food sources may also be much scarcer. If honey bees succumb to the threats they currently face, we’ll lose most of the foods that depend on bees for pollination.

Disease will be rife. Infectious disease will likely rise with the loss of biodiversity. Authors of a paper published last year in BioScience suggested that biodiversity loss “can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans.”¹ Authors of a more recent paper appearing in Nature came to a similar conclusion, noting that, in many cases, biodiversity “seems to protect organisms, including humans, from transmission of infectious diseases.”² Increased population size and proximity to one another will exacerbate the problem.

Cancer and environmental diseases will be widespread due in part to the greater toxicity of the physical environment and the foods we eat. Genetic disease is also expected to rise sharply. Michael Lynch, in a recent paper published in PNAS, suggested that the accumulation of deleterious mutuations will have a profound impact on members of industrialized societies within a few hundred years.³ He states: “Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.”

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It’s probably unfashionable to say this, and it’s certainly a sign of a thoroughly colonized mind, but English is my favorite language. There are many reasons for this: the massive vocabulary, the puns, the double-streamed Germanic-Romance roots (so that ‘mistake’, ‘wood’ and ‘hue’ mean and evoke differently from ‘error’, ‘forest’ and ‘color’). But a large part of my affection for English lies in the sounds of the language.

This is a complicated thing to say about your first language. It’s much easier to know what a language sounds like when you don’t speak it, before comprehension has made the language transparent. It’s hard to reconstruct the way a language sounded before you learned it, and this is much more so if you grew up speaking it. Still, while some impressions are only available to a non-native speaker and others are irretrievably lost, others never leave or even wait to be discovered later on.

To me, the most striking thing about English is its diversity of vowels, something I only noticed after many years of speaking the language. English, in many dialects, has about 15 vowels (not counting diphtongs). Listen to the vowels through these words: a, kit, dress, trap, lot, strut, foot, bath, nurse, fleece, thought, goose, goat, north[1]. There are languages that have more (Germanic ones tend to be vowel rich), but there aren’t many of them, and none that I know well enough to frame a sentence in. And compare this vowel list to the relative paucity of vowels in so many other languages. Hindi really has only about 9 or 10 vowels; Bengali, which has lost several long-short distinctions has slightly fewer (though lots of diphtongs). Some languages (including these two) do include extra vowels formed by nasalizing existing ones; these nasalized vowels often sound lovely, but feel very similar to their base vowels. It’s more a flourish than a genuinely new creation. Japanese and Spanish have about 4 or 5 apiece, and I’m told that Mandarin and Arabic have about 6.

English, then, is capable of exceptionally rich assonance and exuberant plays on vowel sound[2]. Listen to the interplay between the ‘ai’ sound in ‘light’, ‘shines’, ‘tides’ and ‘file’ with the ‘o’ in ‘no’, ‘broken’, ‘ghosts’, ‘glow’ and ‘bones’, and notice the diverse vowel background they’re embedded in:

“Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides;

And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,

The things of light

File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.”

(From “Light breaks where no sun shines” – Dylan Thomas)

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I thought at first it was a bomb, but when I got up to the wreck I realised that the man had been speaking German, and it had been a ‘baum’ that had done for the car. It made more sense that it was a tree, as this road had been out of the fighting for days as far as I knew. (It also turned out that the dead guys were German, but I don’t suppose the Croat who told me changed the nationality of the tree on purpose.) Anyway, by the time I got there, they were just two pairs of feet sticking out from under a blanket and the tree was being cut up for logs. It must have happened about twenty minutes ago, because the people in the short traffic jam were already arguing. There was room to get a car round the wreck but not a lorry, and the drivers of the former were trying to get those of the latter to get out of the way. Someone in a blue serge uniform was shouting at everybody, including the dead Germans, and nobody was paying him any attention at all. He looked pretty old, and had no belt or epaulettes.

It was the guys from the village chopping up the tree who gave me the idea, because some of them began to turn their attention to the mangled car. They were the only ones there who seemed happy, and practical, and alive, and I like people like that. The thing to do was obviously to shunt the car off the road, where the rest of the useful bits of it could be best pirated and where it wouldn’t be blocking irate people with guns in their glove compartments.

It’s simple sign language to convey ‘move car from road into ditch’, and it was truly pleasing to see how easily an angry crowd can be transformed into a cooperative workforce when presented with a mission. It took less than a minute for ten of us to pick it up and manoeuvre it to the side, and without being asked several others kicked the debris after it. God knows who had pulled the Germans out and covered them up, but I’d lay money on the fact that no wallets or mobile phones will have been found on the bodies.

It was all smiles and laughter now, and someone even produced a bottle of slivovic. The man in uniform was still shouting occasionally, but as far as I could tell it was aimed even less specifically than before. I briefly wished I had my camera with me, because the sun had reappeared and was reflecting off the shards of the windscreen. It was shatterproof and had come off in one piece but in many pieces, stuck together by whatever they coat it with. Blood had filled all the little cracks, and the mid-afternoon sun danced and sparkled off the whole bits of glass, the tessera of the most beautiful mosaic I had ever seen.

But I realised that that sunny afternoon, that sudden comradeship, that tragedy for two families I had never met, that peculiar beauty – that is something a camera can never catch. Furthermore, the small new side to one’s character that such experiences create is young and impressionable, and readily lied to by photographs. I find most things are best left to memory, because even if you think you’ve forgotten something it’s usually in there somewhere, a problem of access not storage, sculpting the insides in subtle ways.

by Colin Marshall

On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth about pretty much every Jim Jarmusch film: what doesn’t look like much in one sense turns out, in others, to actually be quite a lot. This holds especially true for for his choppier black-and-white pictures of the 1980s which, to the untrained eye, offered little more than slouchy characters walking, running, and standing around. Night on Earth is substantially glossier, in its own way, than those early projects, but it also manages to be more accessible than the even slicker productions that would follow. Purists might argue that, as penance, the movie has wound up as one of Jarmusch’s least seen; purists might argue that, but I won’t.

Whether intentionally or accidentally, Night on Earth proves difficult to write about without digging in the mothballs for a set of clichés tiring even to ponder. Taxicab stories force the lazy critic’s hand: if you don’t talk about the liminal state — the “non-place” — of such a temporary, disposable, rattly means of transit, you’ll probably talk about the distinctive short-term commercio-social dynamic between rider and driver. This is safer territory for a filmmaker like Jarmusch, whose deadly allergy to cliché demands that, for his own safety, he keep these risk factors at a distance. I assume the all-knowing, cigarette-bottomed, somehow unironically ironic deadpan stare of the 1970s NYC hipster by way of Akron scares them, as it would you or I.

Nevertheless, the forces of temperance seem to have come down just slightly harder on this film than on the rest of the Jarmusch canon. I consider it modern cinema’s loss, however slight, that Night on Earth lost its original title, Losangelesnewyorkparisromehelsinki. That word search, which contains the film’s five locations, wields the advantage of specificity, not to mention truth in advertising. Night, sure. Earth? Well, America’s biggest coastal cities, the two most romanticized ones in continental Europe, and one in, uh, Finland. It’s a point both for and against the movie that you wonder if Buenos Aires, Bombay, or Tokyo lay buried on a cutting room floor somewhere.

Each darkened city has its own cab, its own driver, and its own passengers; these form separate segments that, happily, share nothing else. It would have taken a certain art to tie all these vignettes together with common characters, incidents, or structures, but that’s not Jarmusch’s art. On the broadest level, each scene is about a different relationship between a cabbie and their fares, but these relationships are different enough that, in saying that, I’m not saying much of anything. Do I get any closer to the truth with the claim that that, in all five cities, Jarmusch harnesses the rich, creatively nourishing randomness generated by the matching of people in need of a ride with drivers in need of about fifteen bucks?

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Michael Blim

Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with snow we go, skidding just a bit on the tarmac where little ice flows glow in the landing lights.

My parents’ house is about six miles from the airport. We may have passed above it, but one square looks like every other at a couple of thousand feet. I had tried in vain to find the expressway junctures, but like houses from above, every cloverleaf looks like every other too. Even a big, but rare patch of forest preserves, an odd and invented site on the prairie, doesn’t help me figure where we were or what I might have seen.

Best to have stuck with “white and gray.” Topography is destiny, if only for this trip to America’s self-proclaimed heartland.

Wherever I go, I read newspapers, as many as I can find and even in languages I don’t know. It’s true that the papers in unknown languages are like those infernal English crosswords, number and nameless, and for me thus clueless. Still I hope that I’ll pick up something, remembering even now my one great coup when marooned on an Adriatic island I deduced from Croatian that Sadam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Compulsions, it seems, require little reinforcement.

My father gets two papers at home, the Daily Herald, a town daily, and the Chicago Tribune. Giving my mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, he only has time now to glance at them, choosing the editorials and op-ed pages over the rest. To me, it’s like he eats the wrong part of the chicken. I have plenty of opinions and a low opinion of the opinions of others. I prefer the facts, such as they are.

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The first of these spontaneously popped into my mind as I regained consciousness after some recent shoulder surgery. As the effects of anaesthesia wore off and before the pain became a roar which drowned out every other thought, I made up the rest in the ultimately futile attempt at distracting myself:

1. Send not to know why the bell is ringing. Curiosity has killed many a “cat,” and you could be next.
2. The biggest philosophical problem is suicide, thought Camus. He died young in a traffic accident and as far as I know, no one thinks that that is a philosophical problem.
3. Time is money, which cannot buy happiness, which is why the leisurely and rich are always so sad.
4. I am told, and I have no reason to doubt it, that it is better to have a bird in one's hand than not to.
5. If you don't really believe in God and then say, “God does not play dice,” it is a bit like saying, “Unicorns don't speak French,” isn't it?
6. I firmly believe it is better to say “never” late than never ever to say it.
7. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is an easy way to remember that a trillion pictures are worth a quadrillion words.
8. Who let the cats out of the bags? Who? Who, who?
9. If you have a terminal illness then consider Einstein's profound words to the effect that the Lord is subtle but not malicious. Try to imagine what you'd have if the Lord were malicious. Hopefully you will feel better.

Micrograffiti is a project edited by Stacey Swann for The Owls site. The writers were asked to respond with fiction to Ben Walters’ photographs of the South London graffiti tunnel. Editor's Note: These two writers responded to the same image but interpreted the text of the tag differently, one reading it as “we live to learn now to love” and the other reading it as “we live to learn how to love.” -S.S.

*

we live to learn now to love

By Stefany Anne Golberg

He had been staring at that wall for like, he didn’t know, a half hour? It was a stupid phrase. The stupidest phrase he had ever seen, just like that, spray painted on a wall. It was the kind of phrase that aimed to sell you something, but he couldn’t think what. Ice cream maybe, or lady products. Anyway, he had to get going.

What can you say to such a stupid phrase? How can you just write that, out there for everyone to look at? Someone must be really embarrassed. Anyone who writes something like that only wants one thing. And then they had to go and paint a heart in the middle.

He took off his hat and sat down on the ground. He really had to get going too.

we live to Learn ♥ how to Love

By Sean Hill

An ocean and half the country away from Bemidji, Minnesota, this bit of graffiti. It takes me back to that Sunday night in the Hard Times Saloon. You’re out of town on business. I’m beginning to feel lonely and hungry. The saloon is open late and in walking distance, and I want a beer to go with the wings I will order. The guy on the barstool to my left props his forearm against the bar, and holds his right hand in the air—swollen, oozing blood—clearly busted. After a couple wings and sips, “What happened?”

“Got into a fight with my girlfriend; she made me mad. You know, it’s not right to hit a woman.”

“Yeah.”

“I took a walk instead, but when I got to the corner I punched the Stop sign. So I came down here for some beers.”

“I see.”

“She made me mad, but I didn’t hurt something that’s alive.”

“Right.” We talk some more while I finish the wings and another beer. He seems like a nice guy; I worry about his hand. I walk home stopping at every Stop sign, in no hurry because you’re not there.

*

Stefany Anne Golberg (“we live to learn now to love”) is a founder of the nascent Huckleberry Explorer's Club and writes for The Smart Set.

Sean Hill (“we live to Learn ♥ how to Love”), author of the poetry collection Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, the first city on the Mississippi River and home to Paul Bunyan and Babe the blue ox.

The Owls site is for digital writing and art projects. Cross-posts appear here by the generosity of 3QD. You can receive updates from The Owls via free email subscriptions on the site's main page.

Can nonexistence be a saleable commodity? Can the free market establish its price? Two stories for your consideration: A public bid to dismantle a rock and roll band, and a Beverly Hills company that will invest in your divorce.

Breakup checks

An annoyed guy in Seattle tried to raise $10 million, to be given to the rock band Weezer if its members agree to immediately and permanently break up. Why? Angry Internet Dude (his name is James Burns) said he didn't think Weezer's fans liked any of their new albums.

“This is an abusive relationship,” he said, “and it needs to stop now.”

“Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since Pinkerton, and what happens? Another pile of crap like 'Beverly Hills' or 'I'm Your Daddy'.”

But his main grievance wasn't aesthetic: it was attentional. “If we reach at least $10,000,000,” his pitch said, “then we get a chance to possibly stop hearing about a shitty new Weezer album every goddamn year.” It was a joke, of course, as Burns felt obliged to explain: “I figured since the internet wasted so much of my time with all the ridiculous articles about the new Weezer album, I thought I’d return the favor and waste some of the internet’s time.”

Attention Surplus Disorder

He didn't collect much money, but the campaign was a media smash. It went viral because it was pretty funny – not very nice to the guys in Weezer, but still funny – and no doubt because people are sick and tired of certain ideas and topics being forced into their attentional space. The campaign inverted the typical Internet economic model: Instead of paying to grab an audience's attention, the audience was paying to take it back. It's like a hostage negotiation, with attention the kidnap victim and $10 million the ransom.

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ABP is a house; it is one quarter of a house, the bottom left corner of New Haven’s 111 Howe Street to be precise. ABP is short for Alif, Bay and Pay which are the first three alphabets of the Urdu language. It has been given the name ABP by the three Pakistani undergraduates from Yale University who live there. A name only the friends of the inhabitants know. Three Pakistani undergrads live there but, more importantly, every Pakistani at Yale (and many non-Yale ones) have been in this decadent den to sleep, eat, get help with their Math problem sets, play HALO and watch life pass by. You must understand that ABP is a house full of Pakistanis, and specifically, Pakistani men.

ABP is located on the piece of Howe Street that falls between Elm Street and Edgewood Avenue. Howe Street is an enigma. It is one of those roads that fall on the very boundary between Yale and New Haven. And you can see New Haven’s culture diffusing into Yale’s pretentious Gothic around this point. This is a place where people become darker, don’t wear polo shirts, smoke cheap cigarettes and hang out around gas stations rather than libraries. ABP is right around the corner from Main Garden, Elm Street’s worst Chinese restaurant. It is one of those grubby little affairs whose dirty kitchen you can see through a side door that is permanently open to the street and where nobody speaks English nor does anyone make authentic Chinese food. Everybody is trying to find their own homes and their own identities on Howe Street: two Chinese brothers behind the counter, a few black men near the gas station and a bunch of Pakistanis in an American house.

Once you arrive at ABP you realize that like any respectable counterculture house the proper entrance is at the back. The house has three bedrooms on the ground floor and a common room and a kitchen in the basement. The common room is the place that holds the house together. It has three couches and a table in the middle, cluttered with fast food leftovers, math textbooks, Xbox remote controllers and BlackBerrys. On certain days, the table is cleared to play poker. The couches, all of different sizes and providing different comfort levels, are booked early in the day by people sleeping over. There is a large television facing the table and the couches which is exclusively used to watch cricket and to play HALO. The common room is always slightly dark and very loud. The kitchen is always dirty and never used. Unlike the basement, the upstairs is not a communal space. White broken stairs lead you to a narrow corridor and three very different bedrooms. The first room belongs to Muneeb, more commonly known as Bubbles or Bubbz, and is in total disarray. Muneeb, a generously proportioned guy, is the primary sight of the room and there is not much else to see but litter. The second room belongs to Oosman and serves as the second common room. The third room belongs to Owais, who is the eldest and most religious. His room is meticulously ordered and decorated by calligraphy posters with quotations from the Quran hung on the walls. This is the room you go to find useful but rare things like nail cutters, old textbooks, spare sandals and good advice.

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Cold Sting

Last night under a full moon
with a threat of frost
we threw row covers over the kale

We stumbled from a pile near the tracks
with bins of river rocks
to weigh the covers down

Wind waved their white lightness
over the Red Russian and Lacinato
as if we were flagging Nature,
signaling Ok, ok, you win again

We laughed and mocked ourselves
for hauling stones so late in the day
in a black plastic bin among full-mooncast-shades
stumbling over clods of autumn-tilled rows
covering kale to save ourselves and the stuff of soup
from the cold sting of this newest
turn of the earth

by Jim Culleny,
November 2010

The day Tariq Ramadan came to the university to speak, I had just been teaching my social anthropology class about the contradictions between the ethical and pragmatic aspects of Islam. How can people claim Islam is egalitarian when Muslims around the world use religion to justify intolerance and patriarchy? I hadn’t been thinking about Ramadan, the Swiss philosopher and Islamic scholar who is the grandson of Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but since he was here and would be speaking about tolerance in Islam, I asked my students to go listen to him. Ramadan’s father was exiled to Switzerland, so Ramadan grew up in the European intellectual tradition, studying Islam at both the University of Geneva and Al-Azhar University in Cairo. After years of being denied a visa by the United States government, losing him a position at Notre Dame University, and after a challenge that worked its way through numerous courts, Ramadan was finally able to come to the US this year.

Ramadan is a lean man with receding gray hair, a closely trimmed beard and burning eyes, a charismatic figure. I saw two of my students in the auditorium seats before me, a young woman of Indian heritage, the other African-American. They alternated between gazing spellbound at the stage and scribbling furiously in their notebooks. I filled page after page of my legal pad. So many quotable quotes, both from the Quran that Ramadan recited in Arabic, then translated, and from the man himself. He gave us verses from the Quran that praised diversity (“If it had been God’s will, you would be one community.”) and that demanded a connection to the Other (“He created out of you the other, and between you love and mercy.”) and toleration (“You have no power to impose belief on others. If God had willed it, the world would be all believers. Who are you to impose your belief on others?”). Indeed, according to the Quran, difference and struggle are necessary because they provide a balance of power (“If God hadn’t set people against each other, the world would be corrupt.”).

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By Namit Arora

In December 2005, I took a bus out of the coastal city of Vijayawada in South India. Heading west, I passed small towns and villages whose names—opaque to me because written only in Telugu—I kept guessing at from a map. After years of regional drought, the monsoon had been bountiful this year. We passed field after verdant field of cotton and pepper in a region infamous for its depleted water tables and farmers fleeing to other regions, or committing suicide to escape debt. It took most of the morning, on three buses and an auto-rickshaw, to reach my destination: a village with tourist facilities near the ruins of Nagarjunakonda.

A city flourished around 1,800 years ago at Nagarjunakonda (‘Hill of Nagarjuna’). A great religious and educational center of Brahmanism and Buddhism, one of the names it had then was Vijayapuri, after king Vijaya Satakarni of the Satavahana dynasty. Thereafter a capital of the Ikshvaku dynasty (225-325 CE), it fell into terminal decline after the demise of the last Ikshvaku king. It was only in 1926 that a teacher, S Venkataramayya, discovered the ruins of the ancient city. Much of it now lies under one of the largest manmade lakes in the world, Nagarjuna Sagar, formed in 1960 by the Nagarjuna Sagar dam across the Krishna River. Archaeological digs in 1926–60 turned up finds from the early Stone Age to medieval times, spread over 130 sites across 24 sq km. Many structures were moved and reassembled on what is now an island on the lake, as well as on the lake’s eastern bank at Anupu (much like the ‘saving’ of Abu Simbel from the Aswan Dam in Egypt).

The island’s modern name was inspired by one of the ancient city’s most illustrious citizens, Nagarjuna, a Buddhist monk-philosopher and founder of the ‘Middle Path’ school, who most likely lived there sometime in 150-250 CE. Called by some ‘the second Buddha’, Nagarjuna’s work is indispensable to several Buddhist schools, particularly Mahayana. ‘Nagarjuna’s philosophy represents something of a watershed not only in the history of Indian philosophy but in the history of philosophy as a whole,’ writes Douglas Berger, a scholar of Southasian thought, ‘as it calls into question certain philosophical assumptions so easily resorted to in our attempt to understand the world.’ [1]

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