Gaudi & Parc Guell

Before reading on, I urge you to read up a little about Gaudi and his works.

So like all geniuses, Gaudi walked really close to the line between genius and mad man. Barcelona's street cafes are full of stories of his eccentricity and perfectionism.

But this is not about the man himself, this is more about Parc Guell. Parc Guell was commissioned by Eusebi Guell, one of Gaudi's ardent and most regular patrons. It was meant to turn out into a housing estate eventually, but apart from Gaudi, Guell and their lawyer friend, no one really was interested in moving to a barren hill top.

After a tiring walk up the Avinguda Vallcarca, you come up to the escalator which gets you to an entrance of the Parc. As I entered, I found a Trinidadian man, playing the flute for alms. Upon further enquiry he said that he had learnt it from an Indian guru many years ago.

You get to see sweeping panoramas of Barcelona from this park. A long and winding road leads you to the main the entrance and the eccentric halls and admin offices with an unmistakable Gaudi mark on them.

The mosaic dragon is probably the most famous sculpture in the park. Above it are the halls that were meant to be open living spaces. The way the ceilings are done also have Gaudi written all over them. There is a certain style of art, that Gaudi decided to blur his architecture with.
Basically he breaks ceramic tiles and repositions them together like a jigsaw puzzle giving it a superb finish.

The park has many ups and downs that finish at the cross at the top of the park near where we entered, completing a full circle.

So in a way, Gaudi's Parc Guell is like life itself. Long and winding, with interesting people and music, with stops to see and admire, with sights that perplex you, with places to relax, with uphill climbs and most importantly with the feeling of accomplishment and freedom at the end.

Gaudi. Genius.Mad man. Soon to be saint ?

The Horrors in Lanka

“ Father, you fed me with these hands, why did you leave ? ”, an absolutely unconsolable girl asks the corpse of a man. “Why has everyone left me ? “ wails a woman sitting amidst a few bodies that lay astrew half clothed and some half bodied.

We all know Sri Lanka. My knowledge of it growing up, was that it was once ruled over by Raavana, many years ago. As a teenager I got more interested in the likes of Jayasuriya, Aravinda De Silva who let their blades do the the talking and Muralitharan his fingers.

It was during that time that I heard about Prabhakaran and the Tamil tigers. The naïve teenager that I was, I brushed them off as just another terrorist organization wreaking havoc with the locals in Northern & Eastern Sri Lanka.

Then I chanced upon Kannathil Muthamittal. Obviously it was an extraordinary story of a girl in search of her mother, but the backdrop of it was something that stayed with me after the movie finished. This prodded me on to read more about the goings-on in the land.
Civil war I read had taken a severe toll on the life of ethnic Tamil civilians in the area that was named Eelam, a separate Tamil state by the Tigers. One often heard names of cities like Jaffna and Kilinocchi being targeted by the Sri Lankan Army as counter offensives to the rebel forces attacks.

But just as in most parts of war torn Africa, the controversial West Bank, Northern Sri Lanka too was making the civilians, regular people like you and me pay a hefty price. The latest documentary evidence of War Crimes was Channel 4’s dossier called Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields which I had the misfortune of youtubing and watching after reading a rather compelling report on an e-paper.

And in Sri Lanka’s case it has stretched for more than half a century, from the days of Solomon Bandaranayake in 1950s. A struggle that was initially democratic but one that slowly and surely become violent, leading to its ghastly end in May 2009. The media reports that almost 250,000 people were displaced and 100,000 killed. Numbers & News reports. These numbers and news reports have no meaning to the aforementioned woman and child who mourn the loss of their loved ones.

The International Community condones and cries out for justice. As always, that’s all they do. I clearly remember Norway trying to broker some peace agreements between the two sides, somehow I do not seem to recollect what happened or what it led to.

The course of events is as disturbing as it is outraging. Systematic executions, rape, mindless destruction and possibly the attempt of marginalising or maybe even completely erasing a race of people from their homes enrages me to no end. I can’t even start describing how angry, sad and helpless I felt while watching the videos. It is quite evident for what the UN and other international bodies are saying, that the Sri Lankan Army is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Its one thing when you are killing the enemy, which in this case for the Army was the LTTE cadre. But to go after makeshift hospitals and refugee camps in No Fire Zones is stuff of unadulterated evil. So much carnage in a nation that is predominantly Buddhist only further reinforces the fact that it is the men that are evil, not the religion or an ethnicity.

It is high time for the fiends responsible for this to be brought to justice at the Hague. And these proceedings go, I know that will take a long time, but in the end, I hope and pray justice, justice for the innocent prevails.