Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, Yesterday when I was driving his friend home, my son made a comment that he hasn't found a way to grow out of since first making it a few years back: "Why do we have to learn Shakespeare?  Like someone's gonna ask you question about him in a job interview?" I suggested maybe one day he will find truth from the mouth of "King Lear," truth that might make a difference of life and death to him.  Or maybe without Shakespeare there's no Eminem . The preeminent Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye suggested, "Nobody is capable of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to be learned and worked at," and that "wherever illiteracy is a problem, it’s as fundamental a problem as getting enough to eat or a place to sleep." So in a world where eating and sleeping and reading are no problems, we tend to be ignorant of how problematic lacking any of these could be if we a...

Dear Eugene, Anyone who thinks there's genuine hope in this world hasn't gotten oneself a teenager.  Or two. Is it really that bad, being a parent of teenagers? Worse than my parents had had it, I say, for sure.  I kinda regret not giving my parents a run for their money and now can't even claim solace on the basis of karma. But I feel for the teenagers. Here I have words to make sense of my share of suffering, words that I can call my own and have taken years and tears to claim.  How about them? They want to be themselves, but in doing so must be like everyone else.  I am sure a case can be made that many of us never really grow out of our adolescence, but still the intensity of such contradiction, self-betrayal, finds no healthy language during teen years to modulate itself, especially when the lexicon and syntax of the quest is gladly and generously supplied by adults who know how to exploit the unhealth.  Mobile phone is the worse invention s...

Dear Eugene, “If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”   Peter Handke , the latest Nobel Prize laureate in literature, said that. I asked Peter, What's worse, to lose your storytellers and childhood, or to be told your story isn't real or right and your childhood didn't exist ? I'd love to believe the Nobel Committee has committed a stroke of genius in choosing Mr Handke, a genocide denier , a way to smoke out the hypocrisy in all of us, to force on the world the question: Can we celebrate gunpowder for its pure dynamism?  (Can anything be good without being finally morally good or put into morally good use?) Words are the worst weapon: they create and re-create, fabricate and obliterate.  We are what we remember, in ink and blood, in zeros and ones. Yet after years of telling ourselves "What is good/right to you might likely be bad/wrong to me" and arguing this as our default moral position (which actually assumes itself to be...

Dear Eugene, Who is a "climate change denier"?  The name has been called so often that we tended to assume. I think there are two sorts. The first the obvious, those who are under-informed, mis-informed, stubborn or maybe stupid (a very big maybe, because many of them are very smart people).  No matter what, these people hold varying degrees of skepticism about the alleged change and/or its significance, and if they are to live according to their lack of conviction on the veracity of such "planetary emergency," they are not denying to themselves honesty or rectitude. The second would be those who allege to acknowledge the change, even at times joined a parade or jumped on a bandwagon, yet on a personal and daily level live as if the change is not significant enough after all to warrant the chest-thumping and siren-wailing.  The problem wouldn't be they might be just as under-informed, but that they are under-transformed by their alleged belief.  The...