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Monday, January 28, 2008

Christmas Day Walk


I spent christmas with Eric (my flatmate's) family in Chelsea, a small town just outside Ottawa. He took me on a magical walk to a nearby snow covered field at sunset. This photo fails to capture the magic of the moment, but hopefully you get the idea. I received a phone call that day from someone overseas, and I remember thinking how impossible it would be for me to explain where I was given it was just so different from any normal frame of reference.

Montreal in Winter


Montreal from the Mountain - 28 December 2007

Sunday, January 27, 2008

Obama - Leaders and the Hope revolution

I was recently referred to a great article by George Parker in the New Yorker on the choice between Clinton and Obama in the American elections. Parker explores the different types of leadership, which is most effective, and the constant battle between substance and style. Should leaders inspire us, or should they more realistically inform us of our available options? Should they ideally do both?

This excerpt is illuminating:

"The next morning, Obama was scheduled to appear before an overflow crowd at the opera house in Lebanon. When he walked onto the stage, which was framed by giant vertical banners proclaiming “HOPE,” his liquid stride and handshake-hugs suggested a man completely at ease.

“I decided to run because of you,” he told the crowd. “I’m betting on you. I think the American people are honest and generous and less divided than our politics suggests.” He mocked the response to his campaign from “Washington,” which everyone in the room understood to be Clinton, who had warned in the debate two nights before against “false hopes”: “No, no, no! You can’t do that, you’re not allowed. Obama may be inspiring to you, but here’s the problem—Obama has not been in Washington enough. He needs to be stewed and seasoned a little more, we need to boil the hope out of him until he sounds like us—then he will be ready.”

The opera house exploded in laughter. “We love you,” a woman shouted.

“I love you back,” he said, feeding off the adoration that he had summoned without breaking a sweat. “This change thing is catching on, because everybody’s talking about change. ‘I’m for change.’ ‘Put me down for change.’ ‘I’m a change person, too.’ ”

...Obama spoke for only twenty-five minutes and took no questions; he had figured out how to leave an audience at the peak of its emotion, craving more. As he was ending, I walked outside and found five hundred people standing on the sidewalk and the front steps of the opera house, listening to his last words in silence, as if news of victory in the Pacific were coming over the loudspeakers. Within minutes, I couldn’t recall a single thing that he had said, and the speech dissolved into pure feeling, which stayed with me for days."

Click here to read the full article.

Ted Talks: Ben Dunlap on why we're here



Ben Dunlap, a Rhodes scholar, ballet dancer, poet and lecturer talks about learning and inspiration by telling some stories. The man breaths in life and exhales passion.

"Live each day as if it will be your last said Mahatma Ghandi. Learn as if you will live for ever. This is what I am passionate about. It is precisely this. It is this inextinguishable, undaunted appetite for learning and experience, no matter how risible, no matter how esoteric, no matter how seditious it might seem. This defines the imagined futures of... everybody here. This is our task. We know it will be hard."

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

The Law School I go to....

I recently saw the following graffiti on a toilet wall in the Law Faculty of McGill University.

"The Elitism and Self-Entitlement of my class mates is suffocating me!"

Beside it was written in different coloured ink:

"Why can't Law School have normal toilet graffiti?"

Touché.