Coloured Culture Quotes

We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

The downfall of the attempts of governments and leaders to unite mankind is found in this- in the wrong message that we should see everyone as the same. This is the root of the failure of harmony. Because the truth is, we should not all see everyone as the same! We are not the same! We are made of different colours and we have different cultures. We are all different! But the key to this door is to look at these differences, respect these differences, learn from and about these differences, and grow in and with these differences. We are all different. We are not the same. But that's beautiful. And that's okay.In the quest for unity and peace, we cannot blind ourselves and expect to be all the same. Because in this, we all have an underlying belief that everyone should be the same as us at some point. We are not on a journey to become the same or to be the same. But we are on a journey to see that in all of our differences, that is what makes us beautiful as a human race, and if we are ever to grow, we ought to learn and always learn some more.

If you are a woman, if you're a person of colour, if you are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, if you are a person of size, if you are a person od intelligence, if you are a person of integrity, then you are considered a minority in this world. And it's going to be really hard to find messages of self-love and support anywhere. Especially women's and gay men's culture. It's all about how you have to look a certain way or else you're worthless. You know when you look in the mirror and you think 'oh, I'm so fat, I'm so old, I'm so ugly', don't you know, that's not your authentic self? But that is billions upon billions of dollars of advertising, magazines, movies, billboards, all geared to make you feel shitty about yourself so that you will take your hard earned money and spend it at the mall on some turn-around creme that doesn't turn around shit. When you don't have self-esteem you will hesitate before you do anything in your life. You will hesitate to go for the job you really wanna go for, you will hesitate to ask for a raise, you will hesitate to call yourself an American, you will hesitate to report a rape, you will hesitate to defend yourself when you are discriminated against because of your race, your sexuality, your size, your gender. You will hesitate to vote, you will hesitate to dream. For us to have self-esteem is truly an act of revolution and our revolution is long overdue.

Tell your heart to keep beating and stand strong, and eventually you will bounce back to see colour in the world.

What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick by brick, to shut out colour and light and prevent us from flying.

Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body.

Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual -- from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual -- whether this be animal or plant or man -- is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is foredoomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the "have-been" works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hybris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about "undying achievements"?

Musa Okwonga, the poet, journalist and essayist whose powerful ‘The Ungrateful Country’ closes the book, once said to me that the biggest burden facing people of colour in this country is that society deems us bad immigrants – job-stealers, benefit-scroungers, girlfriend-thieves, refugees – until we cross over in their consciousness, through popular culture, winning races, baking good cakes, being conscientious doctors, to become good immigrants. And we are so tired of that burden." (from "The Good Immigrant" by Nikesh Shukla)

These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette.

Some people's taste is to an educated taste as is the visual impression received by a purblind eye to that of a normal eye. Where a normal eye will see something clearly articulated, a weak eye will see a blurred patch of colour.

But I couldn't respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled. I clenched my teeth against the stars. I closed my eyes. I surrendered to sleep. One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.

Cultures should not be like water that dissolves them evenly, but like colours that stand out distinctly.

Something must be radically wrong with a culture and a civilisation when its youth begins to desert it. Youth is the natural time for revolt, for experiment, for a generous idealism that is eager for action. Any civilisation which has the wisdom of self-preservation will allow a certain margin of freedom for the expression of this youthful mood. But the plain, unpalatable fact is that in America today that margin of freedom has been reduced to the vanishing point. Rebellious youth is not wanted here. In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no colour, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organised looting. All our institutional life combines for the common purpose of blackjacking our youth into the acceptance of the status quo; and not acceptance of it merely, but rather its glorification.

They wept for humanity, those two, not for themselves. They could not bear that this should be the end. Ere silence was completed their hearts were opened, and they knew what had been important on the earth. Man, the flower of all flesh, the noblest of all creatures visible, man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven. Century after century had he toiled, and here was his reward. Truly the garment had seemed heavenly at first, shot with colours of culture, sewn with the threads of self-denial. And heavenly it had been so long as man could shed it at will and live by the essence that is his soul, and the essence, equally divine, that is his body. The sin against the body - it was for that they wept in chief; the centuries of wrong against the muscles and the nerves, and those five portals by which we can alone apprehend - glozing it over with talk of evolution, until the body was white pap, the home of ideas as colourless, last sloshy stirrings of a spirit that had grasped the stars.

The different shades of colours present cultural diversity.

We’re all familiar with the Hippie dress code. Long hair, beards, psychedelic colours, sandals, lots of beads, and the women could often be seen wearing long, flowery granny dresses. So much so in fact that it became a uniform. Hippies rebelled so much against inflexible dress codes that eventually they created their own rigid styles. Hippies mutinied so much against conformity that over the course of time they were forced to play the game and comply with what everyone else was wearing. The counter-culture became a counter-counter-culture. Everyone was the same

The image Miisi had constructed in Britain of the noble African rooted in his cultural values shunning westernization was a myth. What he returned to were people struggling to survive, who in the process had lost the ability to discern the vivid colours of right and wrong. Anything that gave them a chance to survive was moral.

Teach your children this from a very early age: "Everybody in this world is different, you're going to meet people who don't look like you, think like you, or even feel like you. This world is filled with so many different colours and shapes, so many different thoughts and feelings. You should never expect anyone else to be the same as you and you should never expect yourself to be the same as anybody else. But everyone can have so much fun learning about each other and celebrating one another" and when you are all able to do this, the world will begin to change for the better.

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The memecomplexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus and Marconi are still going strong.

But I couldn’t respond. My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.

I see, in place of that empty figment of one linear history which can be kept up only by shutting one’s eyes to the overwhelming multitude of facts, the drama of a number of mighty Cultures, each springing with primitive strength from the soil of a mother-region to which it remains firmly bound throughout it’s whole life-cycle; each stamping its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own idea, its own passions, its own life, will and feelings, its own death. Here indeed are colours, lights, movements, that no intellectual eye has yet discovered. Here the Cultures, peoples, languages, truths, gods, landscapes bloom and age as the oaks and the pines, the blossoms, twigs and leaves - but there is no ageing “Mankind.” Each Culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in the deepest essence different from the others, each limited in duration and self-contained, just as each species of plant has its peculiar blossom or fruit, its special type of growth and decline.

The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now. Infantile foods in the form of crisps, chips, sweet fizzy drinks and pappy burgers or hot dogs smothered in sugary sauce are considered mainstream nutrition for millions of adults. Intoxicating drinks disguised as milkshakes and soda pops exist for those whose taste buds haven't grown up enough to enjoy the taste of alcohol. As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple.

In other words: what we call history is the specific form in which the cycles of nature are acted out in man-made form. A quote from Goethe comes to mind as particularly illustrative: ‘Colour is a law of nature in relation with the sense of sight.’[2] By analogy we might say with Spengler that culture is a law of nature in relation with human minds (the plural is an important qualification here).

This institutional racism, the report explained, is ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.

She loves filming and taking photographs. I can imagine her making beautiful films in France or India or somewhere with a gorgeously colourful culture. She somehow reminds me of my favourite place in the world, she and Paris I can romanticize and immortalize in ceaseless poetry for the rest of my life.

The Apollinian [classical Greek] Culture recognized as actual only that which was immediately present in time and place-and thus it repudiated the background as pictorial element. The Faustian [modern Western] strove through all sensuous barriers towards infinity-and it projected the center of gravity of the pictorial idea into the distance by means of perspective. The Magian [Byzantine-Arabian] felt all happening as an expression of mysterious powers that filled the world-cavern with their spiritual substance-and it shut off the depicted scene with a gold background, that is, by something that stood beyond and outside all nature-colours. Gold is not a colour.

The trouble with mimetic fiction isn’t that you can tell what’s going to happen (I defy anyone to guess what’s going to happen in Middlemarch, even from halfway through) but that you can tell what’s not going to happen. There isn’t going to be an evil wizard. The world isn’t going to be destroyed in Cultural Fugue and leave the protagonist as the only survivor. There aren’t going to be any people who happen to have one mind shared between five bodies. There are unlikely to be shape-changers. In science fiction you can have any kind of story—a romance or a mystery or a reflection of human nature, or anything at all. But as well as that, you have infinite possibility. You can tell different stories about human nature when you can compare it to android nature, or alien nature. You can examine it in different ways when you can write about people living for two hundred years, or being relativistically separated, or under a curse. You have more colours for your palette, more lights to illuminate your scene.

I love the different shades of colours. Purely beautiful!

Lahore was a different world in its own; the busy life, the rich history, the colourful culture, and the unfamiliar faces

Honour killing is a cocktail made of prejudice, hate and misogyny to which the colour red is contributed by religion, caste, father or brother as the occasion may demand.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one.

To colour all empires black and to disavow all imperial legacies is to reject most of human culture.

A persons race, religion, culture, colour is not important. What is important is how that person treats you, and how you treat that person. We are all the same inside.

all men, just of different cultures, wearing different uniforms, having different-coloured skins perhaps, but simply men nevertheless

The uniqueness of different colours represents the uniqueness of individuals!

Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder.

Why do you consult [women's] words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes, their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer. The lips always say 'No,' and rightly so; but the tone is not always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter.

Think of a nectarine, what we eat is the precious, sweet, nectar flesh that surrounds the stone/seed of the plant. The seed is clearly separate from the flesh. The flesh is the thing that is, so to say, given karmically freely. Think of a melon, what we eat is the deliciously tasting flesh of the melon. Not the seeds in the centre which generally get left out of the digestive experience. (Yes, I'm aware that some cultures roast them, but fresh out of the fruit they are none too appealing in my eyes). Think of a papaya, we eat the life giving, juicy, vibrantly colourful, sweet flesh of the papaya. the small black seeds get released back into nature. Or should. Think of an apple. The flesh is savoured, the core, discarded. I could continue ad infinitum.

In this nation people assume they can write your story from beginning to end, and wait for you to fall into place on the stage that has been set, it is why every conversation scans like a hostage negotiation, with your humanity being the item that's up for deliberation.

Culture always tells you to look to illusions for answers. ‘Look at me’, it says, ‘I’ve worked it all out’. Celebrities grow too powerful because people mistake their colour for content. They allow them to create a hole at the heart of our culture, in which they then flourish.

If you are an Aboriginal person in Australia, he writes, “you perform and display the paint and feathers, the pretty bits of your culture, and talk about your unique connection to the land while people look through glass boxes at you, but you are not supposed to look back, or describe what you see.

Probably in no other place on earth, is there a gathering of all mankind with different skin pigmentation, hair colours and textures, eye colours, tongues, cultures, beliefs or lack of any thereof, inclinations, and desires, and they peacefully (mostly) coexist. This is what makes America, the United States.

Women with dark skin are sharing selfies on social media after decades of being underrepresented in the mainstream media. From what I have observed much of the dark skin adoration on social media appears to come from us - black women. We tend to use the appreciation hashtags with our own pictures of photographs of dark skin women whom we feel are stunning. While I am loving this fierceness.. There is just one sidetone to this revolution: I feel as if we are much more appreciated if we show more skin. The timelines are filled with absolutely beautiful dark-skinned women but most sadly most of the time they are all oiled up and showing their body parts in different angles. Now, I am definitely in to art and as a model I know that this comes with the territory. But we most not forget that we are Queens.. We need to stop degrading ourselves for likes on the gram. You don't have to be naked to show the world you're beautiful. You my sister are an African Queen. I feel as if black women are only appreciated if they wear very provocative clothes or if they do naked photoshoots. To me, it's degrading and reminds me of the time that we couldn't ride the bus because we were black. Women were seen as servants. The black women that weren't servants were sex slaves. We are not objects, we are not meat and people need to stop looking at us as sex objects. BUT we need to start respecting ourselves first! A black woman is a woman first and it should not even be necessary to specify the colour but this is the society we live in and I feel like I had to share this.

In my view, the West is not a concept to be explored, analyzed, or enlarged through a study of the history and great ideals that created it; it has always been an instrument. It is when we use it as instrument that does not exist in our own history and culture because we see it in Europe, and we legitimize our demands with Europe's prestige. In our own country, the concept of Europe justifies the use of force, radical political change, the ruthless severing of tradition. From improvement of women's rights to violation of human rights, from democracy to military dictatorship, many things are justified by an idea of the West that stresses this concept of Europe and reflects a positivist utilitarianism. Throughout my life I've heard all our daily habits, from table manners to sexual ethics, criticized and changed because "that's how they do it in Europe." It is something I have heard over and over: on the radio, on television, from my mother. It is not an argument based on reason and indeed precludes reason.

Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.

But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.' Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon. Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess. Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.

The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

Human colour is the colour I'm truly interested in, the colour of your humanity. May the size of your heart and the depth of your soul be your currency. welcome aboard my Good Ship. Let us sail to the colourful island of misex identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboad. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let's toast to the minorities who are the majority. There's no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now. I drink to our sameness and to our unique differences. This is the twenty-first century and we share this, we live here, in the future. It is a beautiful morning, it is first light on the time of being other, so get out from that shade and feel the warmth of being outside. You tick: Other.

I believe a writer is...the scribe-griot of his/her nation. S/he has the power to incite, ignite, excite, pacify, edify, motivate and eliminate others with the slash of a pen, click of a mouse or swipe of a finger. Though coloured by time, class, age, geography, childhood and other factors, a writer crystallises a slice of his/her society's culture, mores and its dark and light truths. A writer makes everything real.

The Princess Pocahontas myth represents a passive sex symbol, the “Good Indian” who unites the white man and the Native, the civilized and the savage, the past and the future. But—and this is a big but—through her attraction to white men she also affirms the superiority of white society over her own, and so functions as tacit permission for whites to conquer, assimilate, and destroy Native culture. Even her “princess” status was a fabrication

Sometimes, sexual violence is a ‘cultural problem’ (but only when this culture is non white). Sometimes, it is a product of male anatomy (but only when this anatomy is assigned to a trans woman or a man of colour). Sexual violence is never the violence of heteropatriarchy or globalising racial capital. Instead, representatives of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism weaponise the idea of ‘women’s safety’ against marginalised and hyper-exploited groups.

One of the ways to distance ourselves from the madnesses of our times is to retain an interest in politics but not to rely on it as a source of meaning. The call should be for people to simplify their lives and not to mislead themselves by devoting their lives to a theory that answers no questions, makes no predictions and is easily falsifiable. Meaning can be found in all sorts of places. For most individuals it is found in the love of the people and places around them: in friends, family and loved ones, in culture, place and wonder. A sense of purpose is found in working out what is meaningful in our lives and then orientating ourselves over time as closely as possible to those centres of meaning. Using ourselves up on identity politics, social justice (in this manifestation) and intersectionality is a waste of a life. We may certainly aim to live in a society in which nobody should be held back from what they can do because of some personal characteristic allotted to them by chance. If somebody has the competency to do something, and the desire to do something, then nothing about their race, sex or sexual orientation should hold them back. But minimizing difference is not the same as pretending difference does not exist. To assume that sex, sexuality and skin colour mean nothing would be ridiculous. But to assume that they mean everything will be fatal.

Inhabiting this universe is not a cultural prerogative, or a lifestyle decision. And I don’t have to forgive or forget a single act of enslavement, theft, imperialism, or patriarchy, in order to be a physicist – or to approach the subject with whatever intellectual tools I need. Every scientist sees further by standing on a pile of corpses – and frankly, I don’t care what kind of genitals they had, what language they spoke, or what the colour of their skin was.

In the modern era, teachers and scholarship have traditionally laid strenuous emphasis on the fact that Briseis, the woman taken from Achilles in Book One, was his géras, his war prize, the implication being that her loss for Achilles meant only loss of honor, an emphasis that may be a legacy of the homoerotic culture in which the classics and the Iliad were so strenuously taught—namely, the British public-school system: handsome and glamorous Achilles didn’t really like women, he was only upset because he’d lost his prize! Homer’s Achilles, however, above all else, is spectacularly adept at articulating his own feelings, and in the Embassy he says, “‘Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones / who love their wives? Since any who is a good man, and careful, / loves her who is his own and cares for her, even as I now / loved this one from my heart, though it was my spear that won her’ ” (9.340ff.). The Iliad ’s depiction of both Achilles and Patroklos is nonchalantly heterosexual. At the conclusion of the Embassy, when Agamemnon’s ambassadors have departed, “Achilles slept in the inward corner of the strong-built shelter, / and a woman lay beside him, one he had taken from Lesbos, / Phorbas’ daughter, Diomede of the fair colouring. / In the other corner Patroklos went to bed; with him also / was a girl, Iphis the fair-girdled, whom brilliant Achilles / gave him, when he took sheer Skyros” (9.663ff.). The nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos played an unlikely role in a lawsuit of the mid-fourth century B.C., brought by the orator Aeschines against one Timarchus, a prominent politician in Athens who had charged him with treason. Hoping to discredit Timarchus prior to the treason trial, Aeschines attacked Timarchus’ morality, charging him with pederasty. Since the same charge could have been brought against Aeschines, the orator takes pains to differentiate between his impulses and those of the plaintiff: “The distinction which I draw is this—to be in love with those who are beautiful and chaste is the experience of a kind-hearted and generous soul”; Aeschines, Contra Timarchus 137, in C. D. Adams, trans., The Speeches of Aeschines (Cambridge, MA, 1958), 111. For proof of such love, Aeschines cited the relationship between Achilles and Patroklos; his citation is of great interest for representing the longest extant quotation of Homer by an ancient author. 32

You’ll also notice that there’s an awful lot of swearing in the pages that follow. I don’t apologise for that. It’s not ‘bad language’, it’s ordinary language. I don’t understand the snobbishness about swearing. I grew up swearing. Everybody around me swore. It’s part of our culture. It can be poetic, it can be violent, and it can be very funny. It’s the rhythm of how we speak, and the colour of how we communicate – at least when we’re being honest and open and raw. So, if you’re likely to be offended by the swearing, you may as well fuck off now.

So I gardened as I could, learning my few plants intimately, handling them, getting to know their likes and dislikes by smell and touch. “Book learning” gave me information, but only physical contact can give any real knowledge and understanding of a live organism. To have “green fingers” or a “green thumb” is an old expression which describes the art of communicating the subtle energies of love to prosper a living plant. Gradually I came to recognise through idiosyncrasies of colour, texture, shape and habit the origin of a plant and its cultural needs.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

There are no lower orders. There are no lesbians or transgender people or fill in the blank. There is only people, a wild mix of energy, different abilities, colours ranging from ebony to bleached white. We’re everything and everybody. I don’t even believe in male and female, it’s a sliding scale and we are hag-ridden by a binary culture: male-female, black-white, straight-gay, rich-poor and so it goes. The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by their material possessions. It’s even worse if people define themselves by money.

The people of Earth cannot progress in isolation from each other. The family unit, community spirit, and society as a whole are fragmenting at alarming rates as we sit inert behind our devices and social media. Fear of cultural appropriation inhibits the inspiration necessary for others to create new things. We must build on the towering achievements of all those who have gone before us. Then, by pooling our resources, regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, sexuality, or physical ability, we ensure that our legacy is a rich inheritance for all those yet to be born.

It so happened I was barefoot, as was often the case, and had pants on which had grown too short over time. Suddenly he looked up at me from his work and said: "Would you like to have your feet greased?" I had always held the man to be a great marvel and felt honoured by his familiarity and so stretched both my feet out to him. He dipped his spoon into the bung-hole, brought it over and drew a long streak down each of my feet. The liquid spread out nicely over the skin, had an exceptionally clear, golden brown colour and wafted its pleasent resinous odour up to me. It gradually spread across and down the curves of my feet.

our modern Canadian identity is no longer based on ethnic, religious, historical, or geographic grounds. Canadians are of every possible colour, culture, and creed, and continue to celebrate and revel in our diversity. We have created instead a national identity that is based on shared values such as openness, respect, compassion, justice, equality, and opportunity. And while many of the almost one hundred countries I’ve travelled through in my life aspire to those values, Canada is pretty much the only place that defines itself through them. Which is why we’re the only place on earth that is strong not in spite of our differences but because of them.

First up, Blackwell [1972] did a set of experiments on fifty-seven college students to determine the effect of colour—as well as the number of tablets—on the effects elicited. The subjects were sitting through a boring hour-long lecture, and were given either one or two pills, which were either pink or blue. They were told that they could expect to receive either a stimulant or a sedative. Since these were psychologists, and this was back when you could do whatever you wanted to your subjects—even lie to them—the treatment that all the students received consisted simply of sugar pills, but of different colours. Afterwards, when they measured alertness—as well as any subjective effects—the researchers found that two pills were more effective than one, as we might have expected (and two pills were better at eliciting side-effects too). They also found that colour had an effect on outcome: the pink sugar tablets were better at maintaining concentration than the blue ones. Since colours in themselves have no intrinsic pharmacological properties, the difference in effect could only be due to the cultural meanings of pink and blue: pink is alerting, blue is cool. Another study suggested that Oxazepam, a drug similar to Valium (which was once unsuccessfully prescribed by our GP for me as a hyperactive child) was more effective at treating anxiety in a green tablet, and more effective for depression when yellow. Drug

The eyes have been used to signify a perverse capacity - honed to perfection in the history of science tied to militarism, capitalism, colonialism, and male supremacy - to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power. The instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture have compounded these meanings of dis-embodiment. The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit; the eye of any ordinary primate like us can be endlessly enhanced by sonography systems, magnetic resonance imaging, artificial intelligence-linked graphic manipulation systems, scanning electron microscopes, computer-aided tomography scanners, colour enhancement techniques, satellite surveillance systems, home and office VDTs, cameras for every purpose from filming the mucous membrane lining the gut cavity of a marine worm living in the vent gases on a fault between continental plates to mapping a planetary hemisphere elsewhere in the solar system. Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere, but to have put the myth into ordinary practice. And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. Zoe Sofoulis (1988) calls this the cannibal-eye of masculinist extra-terrestrial projects for excremental second birthing.

Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian. In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids.

Luck sets its stamp upon a man outwardly. Whence had the Northmen their keenness of vision, which enabled them to apprize a man at a glance? At the first meeting they would say either: he is a man promising luck and honour (sæmligir and hamingjusamligr), one luck is to be expected of(giptuvænligr), or: he bears the mark of unluck (úgiptubragð). Partly on the strength of intuition, as we say — or, as the ancients put it, because the mind of the beholder told him what to think of the stranger, — but partly on external criteria; luck manifested itself openly in the newcomer's mien, gait, behaviour, bearing, and not least in his well-nourished appearance, his health, his dress, and his weapons. Only a family of wealth and speed is able to send its youngling out in many-coloured clothes and with a splendid axe, an “heirloom” of a weapon.

In Delhi we drove past dozens of Jain Sādhu holy men in saffron-coloured clothing which symbolises their saṃnyāsa (the ashrama life stage of renunciation). The Sādhu are respected for their holiness and feared for their curses, and 2000 years ago military generals laid down arms rather than wage war against a city protected by the Sādhu. In ancient Vedic verses they were called the long-haired ones and even today they have long stringy locks of hair that resemble dreadlocks, and many smoke sacred chillums of hashish all day long. They survive off alms or the goodness of others, often eating food provided only by prostitutes or low-ranking ‘sweeper’ caste people. The ones we saw, we were told, had walked 838km from the holy Ganges River carrying a spoonful of holy water. And it is with profound sadness that we missed the photographic opportunity.

To development belongs fulfilment — every evolution has a beginning, and every fulfilment is an end. To youth belongs age; to arising, passing; to life, death. For the animal, tied in the nature of its thinking to the present, death is known or scented as something in the future, something that does not threaten it. It only knows the fear of death in the moment of being killed. But man, whose thought is emancipated from the fetters of here and now, yesterday and tomorrow, boldly investigates the “once” of past and future, and it depends on the depth or shallowness of his nature whether he triumphs over this fear of the end or not. An old Greek legend — without which the Iliad could not have been — tells how his mother put before Achilles the choice between a long life or a short life full of deeds and fame, and how he chose the second. Man was, and is, too shallow and cowardly to endure the fact of the mortality of everything living. He wraps it up in rose-coloured progress-optimism, he heaps upon it the flowers of literature, he crawls behind the shelter of ideals so as not to see anything. But impermanence, the birth and the passing, is the form of all that is actual — from the stars, whose destiny is for us incalculable, right down to the ephemeral concourses on our planet. The life of the individual — whether this be animal or plant or man — is as perishable as that of peoples of Cultures. Every creation is fore-doomed to decay, every thought, every discovery, every deed to oblivion. Here, there, and everywhere we are sensible of grandly fated courses of history that have vanished. Ruins of the “have-been” works of dead Cultures lie all about us. The hubris of Prometheus, who thrust his hand into the heavens in order to make the divine powers subject to man, carries with it his fall. What, then, becomes of the chatter about “undying achievements”?

Was the decline and decay of those houses inevitable, absent the political pressure and military conflicts of those times? How do they look now, dimly descried from this distance of time? What is it that veils their images now? Is it the sooty dark of the past, or the pink haze of nostalgia and longing? How did these people regard themselves? What value did they put on their own selves? What kind of light coloured their self-perception? Did they apprehend or even imagine that the glorious sheathing that was their culture was soon to be rent asunder so that their value systems would mutate into the impenetrable smoke of a country in conflagration, with the smoke destined to dissolve itself into the ocean of the new age, and that the discontinuity wrought by this dissolution would be a gulf whose depth no one could sound and into which men’s power to recall the past would weaken and dissolve, and their memories would lose their way forever?

I love football. I love the aesthetics of football. I love the athleticism of football. I love the movement of the players, the antics of the coaches. I love the dynamism of the fans. I love their passion for their badge and the colour of their team and their country. I love the noise and the buzz and the electricity in the stadium. I love the songs. I love the way the ball moves and then it flows and the way a teams fortune rises and falls through a game and through a season. But what I love about football is that it brings people together across religious divides, geographic divides, political divides. I love the fact that for ninety minutes in a rectangular piece of grass, people can forget hopefully, whatever might be going on in their life, and rejoice in this communal celebration of humanity. The biggest diverse, invasive or pervasive culture that human kinds knows is football and I love the fact that at the altar of football human kind can come worship and celebrate.

When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may bear a resemblance to you, perhaps in facial features, in a talent for music, in the colour of her hair. But as each generation passes, the contribution of your genes is halved. It does not take long to reach negligible proportions. Our genes may be immortal but the collection of genes that is any one of us is bound to crumble away. Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Yet it is quite probable that she bears not a single one of the old king’s genes. We should not seek immortality in reproduction. But if you contribute to the world’s culture, if you have a good idea, compose a tune, invent a sparking plug, write a poem, it may live on, intact, long after your genes have dissolved in the common pool. Socrates may or may not have a gene or two alive in the world today, as G. C. Williams has remarked, but who cares? The meme-complexes of Socrates, Leonardo, Copernicus, and Marconi are still going strong.

I think Shakespeare would have been amazed if people had to limit him to English themes, and if they had told him as an Englishman, he had no right to compose Hamlet, whose theme is Scandinavian, or Macbeth, whose theme is Scottish. The Argentine cult of local colour is a recent European cult which the nationalists ought to reject as foreign. Some days past I have found a curious confirmation of the fact that what is truly native can and often does dispense with local colour; I found this confirmation in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work. It was written by Mohammed, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were especially Arabian; for him they were a part of reality, he had no reason to emphasize them; on the other hand, the first thing a falsifier, a tourist, an Arab nationalist would do is have a surfeit of camels, caravans of camels, on every page; but Mohammed, as an Arab, was unconcerned: he knew he could be an Arab without camels. I think we Argentines can emulate Mohammed, can believe in the possibility of being Argentine without abounding in local colour.

*Africans, Embrace One Another* -------------------------- My fellow African, when you look at another African, what do you see? Do you not see the reflection of yourself? Do you not see someone who was once a victim of the dark past? Someone who has now emerged as a survivor at last; just as your forefathers did before the shadows enslaved your kins! Do you not see the same colour of your skin? Do you not see the same texture of your hair? Yes, you see yourself, it's clear. Now, since you're looking at your reflection, don't you wish to cover yourself with affection? Beloved Africans, you were once the victims of confusion in the past. But you shouldn't remain in that disillusioned class. Today you're free and enriched with resources to maintain yourselves. Let the victim mentality go as a start. Like the three wise men, embrace your survivor status. Be wise and be resourceful. Africans, you have the permission to celebrate your roots, your heritage, and the teachings of your books. Go on and heal your bodies with your traditional herbs. And teach your children the secrets of your ancestors. Tell your children that your ancestors were self-sufficient. Efficient, your ancestors lived well — with little to nothing. Yet, they were the happiest. The merriest. Embrace the secrets of your traditions, just like the seas. You're safe and free.

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

Bali Style Magazine, Book Review. James Fenton. "Books About Food and Spirit. Bali's Food Culture." Vol. 10, no.2 May 2014 “To an outsider, the cuisine of Bali is perhaps one of its least visible cultural features. Just about every visitor to the ‘island of the gods’ will have witnessed the spell-binding beauty of Bali’s brightly festooned temples and colourful ceremonies. Many of us have had the experience of being stopped in traffic while a long procession of Balinese in traditional dress pass by. However, how many of us have witnessed first-hand the intrinsic cultural links between Bali’s cuisine and its culture and religion? How many of us have witnessed the pains-taking predawn rituals of preparing the many and varied dishes that accompany a traditional celebration, such as Lawar or Babi Guling? In Balinese Food: The Traditional Cuisine & Food Culture of Bali, social and cultural historian Dr. Vivienne Kruger has compiled a meticulously researched record of the many aspects of Balinese cuisine—from the secular to the spiritual—with an eye for detail that evades most observers. In the book Dr Kruger chronicles in careful detail the ceremonies, rituals and practices that accompany virtually all of Bali’s unique culinary arts—from satay to sambal. All the classic Balinese dishes are represented such as a babi guling, the popular spit-roast pork to bebek betutu, whole smoked duck—each accompanied with a detailed recipe for those who would like to have a go at preparing the dish themselves. Lesser known aspects of Bali’s intriguing eating habits are also presented here. You may not know that the Balinese enjoy catching and eating such delicacies as dragon flies and rice paddy eels. Dog is also widely eaten around the island, and regretfully, endangered species of turtle are still consumed on some occasions. In all, Dr. Kruger has prepared a spicy and multi-layered dish as delicious and pains-takingly prepared as the dishes described within to create an impressive work of scholarship jampacked with information and insight into the rarely seen world of Bali’s cultural cuisine.

It was on the morning of the first day at my school after the long summer break this year that I noticed something stunning as I was about to enter my school through the rock garden gate. As usual, I was so much eager to have a first glimpse of my favourite red brick house from a distance, but instead something even redder captured my eyes. It was an elegant tree full bloomed with red coloured flowers in the morning sun waiting to welcome me back to school after the break, which immediately lifted little remaining home sickness. The guard uncle told that the majestic tree is called Krishnachura. Again I was awed by the beauty of the name. I have seen this tree a plenty in my locality at Salt Lake, but they never ever drew my attention the way this tree did at the school gate at the backdrop of the red building that summer morning. After returning home, I immediately searched for more details of the Krishnachura and found that the tree originally belongs to the islands of the Madagascar. In other parts of India, this tree is known as the Gulmohar. They are also fondly called “Flames of forest”, which somebody rightly resembled them to the flames of the bushfires in hot dry summer. I also found that in many countries, e.g. in Japan, every school must plant at least few flowering cherry trees in their premises. These cherry blossoms have influenced the Japanese society and its art and culture tremendously. Similarly, the Krishnachura has also influenced many poets and appears in the Indian literature and music. However, in our country, they are not mandatorily planted in our school. I am so fortunate to have these trees in my school. I again realized the visions of the founders and subsequent nurturers of my school. I have been seeing this tree since my nursery days, but probably, I was too little to be conscious about its beauty. I told about this to my father, but he further astonished me when he told me that even he looks forward every year for the blossom. Probably, me too will be waiting every year henceforth for the Krishnachura to bloom, but the trail of the sight of the tree of my school that very morning of June with remain with me forever.

the most colourful characters of the historical advocates of vegetarianism was George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). When Shaw decided to eliminate meat from his diet, it was so contrary to his culture that his physician was alarmed. He cautioned the young Shaw that if he continued to insist on this meat-free diet, he would surely die of malnutrition in short order. Shaw replied that he would sooner die than consume a “corpse.” One can appreciate the irony of the situation when, as he approached his eighty-fifth year, Shaw proclaimed: The average age (life expectancy) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and I am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

Can there be such layers in international relations? Layers, say, of compassion and mercy, ambivalence and imagination, abjection and horror, forgiveness and history, industrialism and birdsong, power and faith? Well, there had better be. The world is not getting any easier to navigate. Might as well navigate it in all its layered complexity. It is the sort of ‘long revolution' the Welsh thinker Raymond Williams once sought to impose upon cultural and intellectual work within a capitalist society — to subvert and change it from within its very structures, not of exchange, but of communication. Well, I think it just got harder, because we must seek to understand communication and its foundations within societies we have never approached on their own terms before. And, in the clamour of industrialised and industrialising world politics, we must seek still to do it serenely. Seek to appreciate the flower, with myriad colours in its petals, surviving still at the mouth of the sewer that carries our fetid human and chemicalised wastes towards the gasping ocean.

We’re all human, we should be respectful of others, and tolerant with each other. This matters more than whether we eat the same food or speak the same language. The skin colour does not make us different. It’s easier to be with people that are different to you but have the same values than to be with people who appear similar to you but have different values.” Sophie

Warm, Considering likes to think it is very protective of me.” QiRia drank from his glass. “It is very protective of me. But certain sorts of protection, even care, can shade into a sort of desire for ownership. Certainly into a feeling that what is being protected is an earned exclusivity of access for the protector, not the privacy of the protected.” He looked across at her. His eyes were the colour of the sea, she remembered. Dark now. “Do you understand?

The soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

2. Men like women without make-up. They don’t. They like extremely well and carefully made-up women whose skin has that expensive cultured look which comes from three hours at the dressing table. A woman who is really without make-up would frighten them to death. They regard blotches as eczema, and uneven colouring as a sign of tertiary syphilis.

For understanding Shakespeare’s confrontation with L.A, it is important to see how these practices helped make L.A into a wasteland. Since American popular culture was self-consciously constructed as only novelty, action without precedent, or form without tradition, L.A., as the emblem of American media, was transformed into a cultural black hole (forgive the colour-coding of the metaphor). L.A., like “covered” music, seemed not only to have no taste for humanly-felt culture but even to drain authenticity from culture. American media forms, derived from this world of premeditated amnesia, seemed to reproduce on their own as formulaic knock-offs of current hits. The banality of this way of making popular culture was palpable, but the social sources of it were profound. Knock-offs were echoes of the covering processes that obscured the roots of pop songs in heart-felt working class, folk culture.

My culture had taught me all the wrong things well. So I lay completely still, and gave no reaction at all. But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

There is no crueller tyranny,” said Montesquieu, “than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.

The white man's ideals and values together with the patterns of society to which they gave rise had not been evolved for racially or culturally mixed societies. They came under increasing strain or cracked in proportion as the area of white influence widened on the globe. In the resulting conflicts, the peoples of colour developed syncretic cultures to adapt to the demands of survival in the conditions created by white domination. In time the colonial peoples of Africa, the Americas and Asia found themselves divided into the traditionalists and the syncretists. . . . English is the link which binds this vast conglomerate of races and cultures. It assumes different forms in each racio-cultural milieu and develops different perspectives. the common differences create the peculiar consensus and identity which distinguish the English-speaking world from the others.

Hinduism" and the "mainstream"; how frequently are these words juxtaposed, and made synonymous, with each other by the ruling political party! "Mainstream": the word that would mean, in a democratic nation, the law-abiding democratic polity, is cunningly conflated, in the newspeak of our present government, with the religious majority; and those who don't belong to that majority become, by subconscious association and suggestion, anti-democratic, and breakers of the law. Ironically, saffron is the colour of our mainstream. Saffron, "gerua": its resonances are wholly to do with that powerful undercurrent in Hinduism, "vairagya", the melancholy and romantic possibility of renunciation. At what point, and how, did the colour of renunciation, and withdrawal from the world, become the symbol of a militant, and materialistic, majoritarianism? "Gerua" represents not what is Brahminical and conservative, but what is most radical about the Hindu religion; it is the colour not of belonging, or fitting in, but of exile, of the marginal man. Hindutva, while rewriting our secular histories, has also rewritten the language of Hinduism, and purged it of these meanings; and those of us who mourn the passing of secularism must also believe we are witnessing the passing, and demise, of the Hindu religion as we have known it.

Let us sail to the colourful island of mixed identity. You can eat from the cooking pot of mixed culture and bathe in the cool shade of being mixed-race. There is no need for a passport. There are no borders. We are all citizens of the world. Whatever shade you are, bring your light, bring your colour, bring your music and your books, your stories and your histories, and climb aboard. United as a people we are a million majestic colours, together we are a glorious stained-glass window. We are building a cathedral of otherness, brick by brick and book by book. Raise your glass of rum, let’s toast to the minorities who are the majority. There is no stopping time, nor the blurring of lines or the blending of shades. With a spirit of hope I leave you now.

Protecting white women was, and is, a key colonial preoccupation. Imaginings of Indigenous and/or slave uprisings were sexualised: fear of revolution was fear of rape. In colonial and neo-colonial cultures, white women’s tears are deadly to people of colour.

The twanging of life Thirteenth part : The essence of the beauty is unity in variety We are only able to contempt and treat people in a bad way, when we forget that the other person belongs to us and to the society as well as we too, when we only forget that in the form of doing the action, there is a strong relationship between the subject and the object so avarice, violence, egoism, sadness and looking at others as pawns of market's chess to get money arise from losing their unity, from forgetting their spirit of cooperation and collaboration and then starting perceiving others in terms of their individual differences. A humanitarian action that isn't intended to be done can make a huge storm of humanity, a single word can give people the feeling of unity, just like every time when a person passes by you and you say for him "السلام عليكم" both of you start to feel like there is a candle within both of you turning into clemency, the more love, the more mercy and the more salaam you show on your face the more light is reflected form that candle, you should start thinking that, greeting the people is proclamations of peace, every time you say "السلام عليكم" to a stranger your heart admits over and over again that we are all united, what I am trying to say is, in your heart's deepest place where the onus of your ego are fallen to pieces and the enigma of your soul is infiltrated, you find the awareness isn't different in any way from what all others may find, the mutuality of Sudanese people is appeared as the sun in the morning but only when our own humanness is surpassed our own dishumanness by accepting that we are all one in the fact that we are all made of diversified differences. We are all equal in the fact that our own society is made by different tribes, we are all the same in the fact that we will never have the same colour, life, thinking, dreams, feelings and luxury, we are united by the reality that Sudan is able to combine all colours, all cultures, all tribes and all of us in the fact that every one believes his tribe and culture are distinguished and individual, we are compatible in the reality that we are all recaptured to this country by the same history, the same conditions of living and the longest river in the world that all of them together give us a light to shine the darkness that covers the sky to allow for us to walk as one hand in the right direction, we don't share the colours but we share the blood, we aren't equal in existence of happiness but we drink River Nile's water that keeps us alive, we are different in existence of tribes but we share the same air that is blended by our breath, so I am you as much as I am me and you are me as much as I am you. Finally swingeing internal ructions and overmuch narcissism of a society devastate the tissue of its unity, not the differences of that society, Lord Robin said that unity begins at home within family is the strength to survive and win the fight of life.

The Morioka region of northern Japan is famous for its horses and this festival was originally conceived by horse breeders who wished to pray for long and happy lives for their animals. It now features a parade of colourfully dressed horses ridden by local children with round 80–100 horses usually taking part dressed in konida costumes (worn by the horses of daimyo – feudal lords – in the Edo Period). The name of the festival comes from the noise made by the bells (chagu chagu) on the horses’ harnesses (umakko) and the event is designated as a national intangible folklore cultural asset. At the end of the parade, prayers are offered for a bountiful rice harvest and thanks are given to the horses.

A poor family with a brown father, a white mother and five children ranging in colour from dark to light brown. I am the eldest and darkest, little Nana is the lightest. The dilution of the Indies: a profligate culture born of colonialism can be read in the skin of its children, you might say.

Colours displayed diversity of cultures.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can't be stilled.

All the art experts, all the big galleries, if not maybe quite all of the humble folk who look at them, agree Jackson Pollock’s splatter paintings do indeed count as great art. And JP intended it to be art too. But what’s curious about most of the most radical artists of the post-Second World War period is that they came from nowhere to prominence with the support of . . . the CIA! Yes, the American secret services actively promoted (through books, funding schemes, newspapers and of course galleries) radical art as part of a labyrinthine strategy to undermine the Soviet Union. This was all part of a special strategy to win over intellectuals – including philosophers – described as ‘the battle for Picasso’s mind’ by one former CIA agent, Thomas Braden, in a television interview in the 1970s. Tom Braden was responsible for dispensing money under the heading Congress for Cultural Freedom. Naturally, most of the people he gave money to had no idea that the funds, and hence the artistic direction, actually came from the CIA. Intellectuals and great artists, after all, hate being told what to think. And what was the communist empire doing meanwhile? They were promoting, through galleries, public funding and so on, a very different kind of art supposedly reflecting communist political values. ‘Soviet realism’ was a kind of reaction to ‘Western Impressionism’ (all those dotty – pointilliste the art-experts call them – landscapes and swirling, subjective shapes) and ensured that people in the paintings looked like people, decent, hard-working types too, and what’s more were doing worthy things – like making tractors or (at least) looking inspirationally at the viewer. When Soviet art wasn’t figurative (as this sort of stuff is called), it was very logical and mathematical, full of precise geometrical shapes and carefully weighted blocks of colour.

The challenge with hidden racism in the shape of discrimination is that although it exists in most countries and within humanity at large, it is not a normal state of being. Do you ever see young children and babies of various skin colours and cultures rejecting each other on the playground? If anything, they tend to get curious and come close to discover their differences, or they simply don’t notice any. If a child ever does discriminate or reject another child because of her or his colour or cultural origin, it is always due to a learned behaviour. Racism is an insidious cultural disease. We take it in, like air based on our environment. All types of racism are taught. None of us are born judging each other. Judgement is a taught behaviour.

There is a small worm in a dog’s tongue…: if this is removed from the animal while a pup, it will never become mad or lose its appetite. This worm, after being carried thrice round a fire, is given to persons who have been bitten by a mad dog, to prevent them from becoming mad. This madness, too, is prevented by eating a cock’s brains; but the virtue of these brains lasts for one year only, and no more. They say, too, that a cock’s comb, pounded, is highly efficacious as an application to the wound; as also, goose-grease, mixed with honey. The flesh also of a mad dog is sometimes salted, and taken with the food, as a remedy for this disease. In addition to this, young puppies of the same sex as the dog that has inflicted the injury, are drowned in water, and the person who has been bitten eats their liver raw. The dung of poultry, provided it is of a red colour, is very useful, applied with vinegar; the ashes, too, of the tail of a shrew-mouse, if the animal has survived and been set at liberty; a clod from a swallow’s nest, applied with vinegar; the young of a swallow, reduced to ashes; or the skin or old slough of a serpent that has been cast in spring, beaten up with a male crab in wine.

Political correctness exhorts us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can, to discriminate neither in thought, word nor deed against ethnic, sexual, religious or behavioural minorities. And in order to be inclusive we are encouraged to denigrate what is felt to be most especially ours. The Director-General of the BBC recently condemned his organization and its programmes as obnoxiously white and middle-class. Academics sneer at the curriculum established by ‘Dead White European Males’. A British race-relations charity has condemned the affirmation of a ‘British’ national identity as racist. All such abusive utterances express the code of political correctness. For although they involve the deliberate condemnation of people on grounds of class, race, sex or colour, the purpose is not to exclude the Other but to condemn Ourselves. The gentle advocacy of inclusion masks the far from gentle desire to exclude the old excluder: in other words, to repudiate the cultural inheritance that defines us.

Although it would be about the leper colony of Bababaghi, the film would also explore the fact that great trouble and suffering is caused when we reject certain parts of ourselves and bury our unwelcome feelings, rather than facing up to our problems and searching for a solution. The story of a community being rejected due to a lack of access to proper medical help would draw wider attention to how societies are willing to condemn anything that is different to themselves, rather than to confront their fears of the other.

But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled. I