The beauty about traveling is that it can make you feel both supremely adequate and yet inordinately inadequate, and sometimes both at the exact same time. Meeting new people is refreshing and challenging but also arduous and demanding. On some levels you get to know yourself, intimate depths of yourself that are reassuring and comforting - dimensions u know you would NEVER compromise on - but on other levels you wonder if maybe the 'diamond' in you isn't actually as bright as you think or you'd like it to be, that in fact perhaps its chipped and you just haven't noticed it cause the reflective glare from all your projected expectations have blinded you to it thus far. It makes me wonder whether self doubt is a healthy, perhaps even emancipatory, process or is it in fact a devastatingly schizophrenic process that gnaws at your soul only to perpetuate inadequacy?
SA thus far has been great, frustrating, challenging but most of all awakening - both to myself and w/r/t people and the world around me. Am currently in the process of planning a huuuge trip around southern africa a.k.a a 4x4, three girls, tents on the roof of the car and driving through namibia, zambia,zimbabwe, malawi, tanzania and perhaps mozambique.Should be fascinating. But I can't help wonder where all this will take me eventually. What all these experiences will culminate into, if they will actually culminate into ANYTHING?
I had this mini existentialist conversation with a friend the other day and it got me thinking, perhaps some people are just naturally a whole lot more introspective (perhaps even sensitive) than other people are - not necessarily a fun thing! Perhaps some people are comfortable within their little bubbles and seeing the world from within hipster sunglass frames cause it's easier, more reassuring and whole lot less challenging. Or maybe that's a pretentious statement, maybe that's just who they are and it's people like us/me that aren't really the norm hence its me who should make the effort to buy me a pair of hipster glasses? And thats when the question of adequacy and inadequacy comes in - do you conform even at the expense of compromising your integrity - cause c'mmon after all I am 22 - or do you experiment with your integrity, stick by it, even if it's lonely in there sometimes, and wait it out to see where it'll end up taking you? Honestly, im better at doing the latter, often stubbornly so, but then i wonder DO the hipster glasses make for a prettier picture? or is life on the fringe REALLY a unique perspective that for some reason I've had/am having the opportunity to view?
In some ways, more than human rights issues and international relations jargon, these are the questions I hope to answer - or at least begin to ask - by the end of my stay here in SA.
On that note - OFF to Haloween in Jo'burg. :)

Just something I've been thinking about lately and also one of my all time favourite poems... (just a thought while I try and get my thoughts together and post something substantial soon:)

"You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.


Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.


Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow."

~ Khallil Gibran

Dont have a camera yet, left it in India but heres a few shots I took on a friends camera.

so this blogging thing is way harder than I had expected.

South Africa, Johannesburg. Week 3 now I think. Has most definitely been quite the challenge thus far. Its breathtakingly beautiful yet horrendously complex, the people are beyond just friendly; altruistically hospitable even, but then there's the incongruous subtext of racism and just ubiquitous fear that envelops the spirit of what I think can unanimously be referred to as 'Africa'. Its a hard place to reconcile with and yesterday was just one of those days when all it's raw and divergent complexities made themselves so shamelessly (yet in some sense beautifully!)apparent to me.
Just about a week ago two of my friends visited me in joburg. They were traveling from Lesotho and were on their way to Zimbabwe. They had what I love best about travelers - an instantaneous and unquestionable desire to trust whatever and whoever is thrust before you. I recognize it cause I've relied on that sense of trust through many a travel - attempting to put up a superwoman facade though I'm actually shitting bricks inside. There's something frighteningly refreshing about that look. So anyways they came to visit and while I was in class they planned on going out to the market to pick up some tickets for a bus ride to Zimbabwe. I figured its mid afternoon and its fine for them to walk, I mean they'd just pretty amazingly survived a 9 or so hour long 'taxi' ride from lesotho to joburg! ('Taxi' here means a VERY local, often VERY 'dodgy' bus!) We took all the precautionary steps - checked with locals who new about the area, made sure they weren't alone, gave them perfect directions etc. - and since two of my South African friends said it was fine for them to go we took their word for it. Long story short, one of them got socked in the face. hard. Not robbed, or mugged, or attempted robbery, just hit in the face and the man walked off. Obviously they were petrified and called me. Somehow I got a friend to drive me around to find them. That was by far my first most honest encounter with Johannesburg.
Kelly (my friend who drove me) says, in an almost habitual, though not apathetic in ANY way, tone "lock your door, put your cellphone away and hide your bag under your seat. Not many white people ever go to this part of town or Indians for that matter. Its just the way it is, you'll see when we get there." And yes, she was right. More right than I would have wished to acknowledge at the time and for no real reason other than the fact that there were no people of the same colour as me or my friend I felt an almost baseless fear and discomfort settle somewhere in the pit of my stomach. We drove around in circles trying to find my friends, who at this point were so understandably terrified by the sheer vulnerability of their positions that they refused to even step outside. That drive was an eyeopener. A whole other world, a whole other conception of life, color, race, even just body movements contorted together to somehow translate into fear. I've traveled a lot of places and have had all kinds of experiences but this was unique. Not a fear for my life but just a tension that felt so impenetrable. I think it was the undoubted acceptance of the existence of this fear that made it so powerful and frustrating.
We did eventually find them and some tears, a LOT of questions and a HUUGE much needed pizza later they were more or less ok. But Joburg had taken something away from them, and me I suppose. Something from the 'wide eyed trust' was missing. I dont think it was fear or terror, well at least for me, it was disappointment and maybe even a sense of helplessness. Here I am, studying human rights and what not and yet when 2 girls attempt to challenge the color bar, attempt to move out of segregated zones to truly embrace south african so called world cup fever of unity and anti-racism they get socked in the face for being 'out of place', to put it politely!
I guess it got me questioning how something that is so instinctual can ever really change?

On a far less traumatic note, I also did do an absolutely fantastic and of the charts wild random road trip to Swaziland details of which I will probably write at some point. But to say the least I met and got know two amazing South Africans. :)

More travel rants to come... soon. I hope.

Kabadi kabadi kabadi...

Thus begins my first attempt at techxplorative self discovery.. I'm gonna try and write down most of what I see smell and feel as I spend the next 6/7 months in South Africa (Joburg to be precise) but it might end up being stream of consciousness style rants at the world and its justifiable futility.. so bear with me a while - if nothing else the images will be worth it! :)