from nigella to borneo to samoa

Haven’t blogged for ages. It took me a while to motivate myself to do this again. It’s weird how people so often find it so hard to do the things that are supposed to be good for them. The need for instant gratification wins over me every time. Nigella Lawson is on TV. I think she is one of the sexiest women alive! I love her accent. She is so elegant and womanly. I love her accent. She gives me this warm fuzzy feeling that I just want to lie on her bosoms and fall into a light afternoon nap. She is what I hope my mother to be. Even her name is cool – Nigella. Apparently her parents were expecting and hoping for a boy, so much so that when it turned out to be a ‘her”, they showed their disappointment by her name. Parents can be so cruel some times. That is precisely why I prefer not to have any children. Her cooking is as warm and full as her. She has no inhibitions. She cooks decadent chocolate cakes. She uses her hands to bite into pieces of pork crackling. The smile of satisfaction has none of the inhibitions of other women. I wish I was her! Anyway, I digress. There are so many things on my mind I want to write about. I haven’t even written about my “Survivor” holiday in Borneo! I will do that later. I went to watch the play “Where we once belonged” last night. It visited my favourite topic – culture and identity. It started off with the Samoan mythical explanations of how the world came into being, then Samoa, then Samoans. It zoomed down into the Samoan way of life, from the beginning to now. I thought it was somewhat cliché towards the end, where much of adolescence was centred on sex and infidelity. Nonetheless it very nicely reflected the loss of tradition as generations strive for what men call “progress”. It’s interesting how it echoed what I thought about on my Borneo trip. It seems universal that man always wants to “have more”, and “have it easier”. Some times we term it progress, and then at some stage, it becomes ambitions, until somewhere down the line, it becomes greed. It seems too easy to loose sight of the cost as we progress down this continuum of desire. So the play portrayed the daily life of a family through the ages. The invasion of western influences creeps into the lives of each generation. The casualties are the spirit of community, the uniqueness of being Samoan, grounded by myths and legends. The most memorable scene for me was at the school. The American teacher asked for the pupils to talk about what each saw on their way to school. The response was “what for” because they would all be saying the same thing! There is no “I”, “I” is always “we”. People might criticise the old ways, its inability to tolerate differences. I think the play is lamenting the loss of camaraderie and relationships in the pursuit of a “better life”. I think of the Iban people whom I stayed with in Borneo. There is no concept of bedrooms. Each family sleep together on the floor. Extended families live on the same longhouse. Each evening they sit in the communal veranda area, chatting and drinking tea. I wondered how “progress” would encroach on their way of life. Would progress mean that each family would want their own space and own house? Would it mean families would “give their children space” and build bedrooms? It seems so ironic to me, that communication is designed to connect people. Yet text messages eliminate the need to talk to people. The internet removes the need to go to the neighbourhood grocer. To be fair, it did occur to me, that the daily needs are so hard that it allows very little time for anything else. It is easy to just let one day merge into another. By the time the family had been fed, washing done, house cleaned, it’s time to sleep. I suppose that was how the desire for technology started, to free up time for leisure and art. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, only when needs are met for survival, would one “rise up” to the need to be spiritually fulfilled and content. I do wonder, however, how true it actually is. If the person had not thought about the reason to carry on living, there would not be a need to survive in the first place. Even in primitive times, there were legends, spiritual rituals developed to explain life. So “lack of progress” does not necessarily mean an absence of philosophical pursuits. So is “progress” truly that much of a necessity? Or may be I just need to loosen up and go to the comedy festival instead 