“It seems to me that the politics – and drama – that you mention in relation to academia (generally, your adjunct position, your Bombay experience), has as much to do with ontology and (unspoken) investments, the latter obviously laying the grounds for ideological attachments.
The “ontology” comment was a reference to the unspoken assumptions about “the nature of reality” that structure our worldviews, commitments, interactions with others, ideological alignments, etc. It seems to be another running theme in your blog like, for example, your jab at bi-culturalism, bi-lingualism. Despite all the technological advances we’ve witnessed since graduating from high school, and the embrace of various “post” eras, we still seem to live in a Cartesian universe, for better and for worse. Your blog seems to be an attempt at subverting a number of the presuppositions and “securities” that come along with that world.”
-P.M., PhD Sociology
The Coromandal Coast is the south east coast of South India along which runs the Indian Railroad’s Coromandal Express from Visakhapatanam to Kodaikanal Road. It was the train I took as a child from my parent’s home on the sea to my boarding school in the hills of central Tamil Nadu.
Coromandal is about loss. People moving from places to other places, what the old places are like, what the new places are like, what the people and ideas in each are like – both on a physical and metaphysical level. And it’s about the stories we make up and the lies we tell ourselves and each other to help us to survive these transitions. Coromandal is about negotiating territories, virtual and empirical. Each entry is a gleaned from a source. It is divided into a category: brave new world, chronotopes, departure lounge, unseen world.
In brave new world we fervently seek the endlessly elusive promised land that is, more often than not and because of its necessary perfections, either nowhere or hell. In chronotopes the time between events is collapsed which forces new confrontations and realities. In the departure lounge we are aware of not being either where we just were, nor in the place we are going; the physicality of places in the past and future are lost and new intangibles take their place. Unseen world is the a record of people and ideas that have miraculously broken through to another alternate and consuming and delightful reality.
I write these posts quickly, as sketches, to remain immediate, in the conversation, to capture an idea or snapshot picture. Coromandal is notes for the advanced degree / book I haven’t yet written.
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Be well fed in all your houses!
Comment by cmac April 2, 2008 @ 12:23 am“Unseen world is the inner bnw”?
Comment by Billy Congo February 27, 2009 @ 11:19 pmbnw = brave new world. bnw is about a culture that is lying to itself – like in the novel. unseen world is a truer world where what we see and believe to be true on the surface is rejected and replaced with another reality.
Comment by peter rudd March 2, 2009 @ 9:42 amYou have a picture of the statue of liberty and the QE2 on your blog.Any chance of using this image on our website? It would be used to highlight transatlantyic publishing.
http://www.edwardrutherfurd.com/rutherfurd-translantic-publishing.html
We would credit you as the source.
Comment by edreynolds March 9, 2012 @ 9:02 amI find all images online. You are free to use what you find – providing there are no issues with the original artist.
Comment by Peter Rudd March 9, 2012 @ 9:16 amare yoiu saying there were no copyright issues with the image?
Comment by edreynolds March 9, 2012 @ 9:25 amGood to find you —
Comment by Mary LA February 23, 2015 @ 5:07 amThank you and thank you for reading.
Comment by Peter Rudd May 19, 2020 @ 6:00 amthank you for your sane voice of reasoning
Comment by Elwe May 11, 2020 @ 8:03 pmThank you and thanks for reading.
Comment by Peter Rudd May 19, 2020 @ 5:59 am