Things I am thinking about these days:
Product vs. Process
Treasure vs. Journey
حاصل اور سرگرم عمل
Other things that’d lead you to my mind are:
My Del.icio.us Bookmarks
My Flickr Favorites
My Manager - Konfabulator
September 2005
Monthly Archive
Tue 13 Sep 2005
Wed 7 Sep 2005
I recently watched Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful which won probably 3 Academy Awards or Oscars, as we know ‘em. It’s a beautiful movie, hilarious at various points mainly in the first part. The movie is inspired by Trotsky’s last testament and Roberto ’s father’s actual account of concentration camps during WWII. It’s a must-watch movie for everyone. The name of the movie was taken from a statement of Trotsky when he approached his death after bloodied revolutions of humanity lingered and his exile days only seemed cease after his death. Even in those trubulent days of dismay and grief, he remembered his wife’s compassion and endless love and he couldn’t help but be thankful that he and his wife could still remember the good ol’ happy days. And he proclaimed, “Life is beautiful”.
Trotsky wrote in Feb 1940:
Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.
In May 1940 Leon Trotsky wrote an article entitled Stalin Seeks My Death. It was an accurate forecast. Three months later, on 20 August, the Stalinist agent Ramon Mercador, drove an icepick into Trotsky’s brain in Coyoacan, Mexico.
The assassination was the last of the wholesale murders by which the Stalinist bureaucracy destroyed the Bolshevik old guard. Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, was shot. Zinoviev, President of the Communist International in Lenin’s day, was shot. Bukharin and Piatakov, “the most able of the younger members of the Central Committee”, according to Lenin’s Testament, were shot. Rakovsky and Radek both perished. Tens of thousands of old party members disappeared for ever in Arctic “labour camps”. The militants who made the October Revolution were practically annihilated.
کٹھن ضرور ہے یہ رہگزر، مگر پھر بھی۔۔۔۔
رواں دواں ہے محبتوں کا یہ کارواں
Tue 6 Sep 2005
Serenity at Karachi Beach
Category: Home
It’s a wonderful photo taken by Farzad Bagheri at Karachi Beach. I loved the fact such an ill-treated and ill-managed place like Karachi beach can be captured in such an interesting and contemplative mood. If you could look at the larger image, you won’t help falling in it’s calmness and beauty. It’s as if the whole world has come to stand still for a while. I expect alot more photography of Karachi and Pakistan by this fine Iranian graphic designer and photographer whose thesis work at Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture was something similar to renaissance of persian poets in the modern world. While you’re at Flickr, also check his Wet Door.
