I’ve decided to use desktop blogging software, mainly for convenience as not everywhere in the world has internet. Especially not the places i’ll be visiting. For now I’ve choosen MarsEdit which seems simple enough to use.
Cheers to my virgin post on my new Macbook!
A little background about the photo. It was taken in the Spring of 2004 courtesy of Ms. Grace Deng on a “fest” filled saturday on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Va. While walking from the Sikh cultural show to Japan Day I saw these fallen cherry blossoms (jap. hana or sakura) and scurried up onto the hill and the rest is photostream history.
(edited with Ecto)
Some of you might be wondering about the title I’ve chosen for this blog: “Prisoner of Shangri-la”. Indeed it is not so subtley borrowed from a book by Donald Lopez of an almost identical name that aims to debunk many of the myths related to Tibet embedded in the Westerner psyche, exposing our romanticized notions of some place called “Tibet” that supposedly flourished in a golden age (dated any time before 1959) free from all Western imperialism, corruption, and materialism (Read Dreyfus’s critical response "Are we Prisoners of Shangrila?"). The title as I am using it refers not just an idea of Tibet but to a mode of engaging our experience that all of us share. You (dear reader) and I are individuals chained to a myth, a dream, a fantasy that we create, safe-guard, and perpetuate about our lives and about others’ lives.
This blog, then, is about the personal myth of self and the collective myth of reality. But it’s also about more than that. It’s about crossing cultures and making a difference in an endangered community by investing knowledge in its children. It’s about translating experience in multiple languages, seeing beauty through multiple lenses, and writing words upon words that create an image, a sense of time and space, a world of its own.